Showing posts with label radio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label radio. Show all posts

2/4/13

The voice of PHILCO RADIO


These days we're used to loud mouths spouting what is supposed to be news. Most often it isn't news because they're just speculating on what might happen or what they'd like to see happen. Real news is harder to find. Too much hot air filling the atmosphere from the current crop of media clowns. Think it's something new?


Click on image to see it larger. 

I give you Boake Carter for Philco radios. It will all feel rather familiar.
Harold Thomas Henry Carter (15/28 September 1903, Baku – 16 November 1944, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California), aka Boake Carter, was an American national news commentator in the 1930s and early 1940s. He was born in Baku, Russian Empire (now the capital of Azerbaijan), where his father, Thomas Carter, worked for a British oil company. Carter would later claim his father had been in the British Consular Service. Carter grew up in the United Kingdom, and enlisted in the Royal Air Force at the age of fifteen, serving with the RAF's Coast Patrol for eighteen months. He attended Tonbridge School from 1918 to 1921, and would later claim to have attended Christ's College in Cambridge. He arrived in the United States on September 25, 1921, after his father was assigned to Mexico.

Carter worked at the Philadelphia Daily News as a journalist of no particular acclaim.He entered broadcasting as a news commentator with WCAU in Philadelphia in 1930, initially as the announcer for a rugby game, getting the job by default as he was the only person WCAU's director knew who was familiar with the sport. In 1931, he became the narrator for Hearst-Metrotone newsreels. He rose to fame as a broadcast journalist when he covered the Lindbergh kidnapping trial, beginning in 1932. He continued to work for WCAU, with his broadcasts distributed through the CBS network.

After achieving fame, he was a familiar radio voice, but his commentaries were controversial, notably his criticisms of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations. Carter was an accomplished salesman for the sponsor of his program from 1933-1938, Philco Radios, blending his reporting and commentary with plugs for the company's sets. In 1936, he had more listeners than any other radio commentator. He published several books in the 1930s, and began writing a widely syndicated column in 1937. But by 1937, the Roosevelt White House already had three federal agencies investigating him. In 1938, under pressure from Roosevelt's allies, he lost his WCAU job, was barred from CBS, and lost his General Foods sponsorship that had replaced Philco. With his removal, there was no longer any popular radio commentator who opposed Roosevelt's foreign policy.

That year, Carter went on a speaking tour through the States. He subsequently continued to work in broadcasting where he could.

In the early 1940s, Carter was drawn into a 'British Israelite' cult led by a Moses Guibbory.

He was almost a forgotten figure when he died of a heart attack in 1944. A messy fight between his three former wives followed over his estate. Stewart Robb's "The Strange Death of Boake Carter," published in 1946, suggested Boake was murdered, perhaps by Guibbory. In 1949, his final years were documented in a book, "Thirty-three candles," by fellow cult adherent David Horowitz. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

2/3/13

Zenith TRANS-OCEANIC


Yesterday and today I've done posts at Tattered and Lost Photographs (here and here) showing old Zenith Trans-Oceanic radios. How fortuitous that today I found an old ad in a August, 1947, National Geographic.


Click on image to see it larger. (SOURCE: National Geographic, August 1947)

1/15/13

SHIRLEY TEMPLE hawking a radio


It was 1936 and the Shirley Temple movie "Poor Little Rich Girl" was coming out. So here we have Shirley doing a little promo work to get some buzz going for the movie. I imagine this image ended up in a lot of scrapbooks. I'm guessing a lot of little kids, and even women, were keeping scrapbooks about Shirley.

Click on image to see it larger. (SOURCE: The American Magazine, October, 1936)

Back when a radio was a piece of furniture, not something you tune into on your computer or iPod.