Midland Remembers: Part two of radio days — Our favorite programs

Radio was all things to all people. Soap operas, Tiger baseball, mystery programs, children's programs, operas from the Met. There was no end to the variety.

Some radio programs were strictly for laughs. Lum and Abner was an evening program with Chester Lauk and Norris Goff dressed up as elderly gentlemen running a grocery store in Pine Ridge, Arkansas. In real life, they were in their mid-30s. "Amos And Andy," another evening program, was extremely popular featuring two white men, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, pretended to be black. (We hadn't learned to be politically correct yet.)

Radio stations had numbers on the dial. The number 75 on the radio dial, for example, was WJR in Detroit. Tiger baseball was broadcast from there with Harry Heilmann doing the announcing. Dad lived to hear the ball games over the radio.

Mom preferred programs about "real life" which came no closer to real life than the reality shows on television today. There were "Bachelor's Children," "Helen Trent," "Our Gal Sunday," "Life Can Be Beautiful," "Aunt Jenny's True Life Stories," "Hill Top House" and "Myrt and Marge."

"The Lone Ranger," "Sky King," "The Shadow," and "Jack Armstrong, The All American Boy" kept 10 and 11-year-old boys glued to the radio. Detective stories had their own niche on the radio. There was "Ellery Queen," "Philip Marlowe," "Martin Kane, Private Eye," "The Thin Man," "Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons" and "Sam Spade, Detective." Howard Duff played Sam Spade on the radio and later became a leading man in motion pictures and ended up marrying Ida Lupino, another big movie star.

Leona (Clark) Seamster remembers hurrying home from school on her lunch hour so she could listen to Kate Smith on the radio. Kate's theme song was "When the Moon comes Over the Mountain" which she helped write. At night after the radio was turned off in the Clark home, her dad would get out his guitar and sing. Leona said, "I would lay in bed, listening to my dad singing. It was a wonderful way to fall asleep."

The 30s and 40s saw radio personalities and orchestras making the leap to the silver screen in Hollywood. Robert Taylor announced for the "Maxwell House Coffee Hour" and later became a matinee idol in the movies. Cecil B. DeMille went the other way. He was a famous director in Hollywood who then went on the radio to produce his "Lux Radio Theatre" which featured movie stars repeating their movie roles over the radio waves on Monday nights.

Pulp Heroes: The Shadow | Rogue Blades Entertainment

To modern audiences, The Shadow is either a one-shot movie that starred Alec Baldwin, or possibly a Bronze Age comic book drawn by Mike Kaluta, or, to the majority, a dusty old adventure hero from their grandparent’s generation.

But to think any of that is to do a disservice to a character that might possibly have been the first superhero, who was once considered by many as the greatest crime-fighter of all time, and who at the very least is a fascinating and mysterious adventure hero deserving of a second look.

Because The Shadow is so much more than a just dusty relic of the pulp age. He was a best-selling phenomenon of pulp adventure, a character that was popular for decades, made forays into every entertainment medium, and had sayings that became part of the national lexicon.

His beginnings, however, are humble enough. It all started, more or less, with Street and Smith, a pulp magazine publisher that had veritably created the detective story genre when they converted their old Nick Carter

No longer just a voice, now The Shadow starred in his own adventures. Once again, Street and Smith were caught off-guard by their character’s popularity. They originally planned on having the magazine come out quarterly, but after the first issue sold out, and then the second also sold out even after a double press run, they had to change their plans and by the third issue, The Shadow magazine ran from 1931 to 1949. It was so popular that the first of six two-reel films starring the character was released in the summer of 1931, just a few short months after the magazine’s debut.