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.
Back when a radio was a piece of furniture, not something you tune into on your computer or iPod.
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I collect California brand radios from the mid-late '30s with the radio stations printed on the dial, but my one console is a '36 Montgomery Wards 'Airline' because it's small enough to to fit into our 680 sq ft of living space (approx 36" tall by 20" wide). It has a huge 9 inch circular dial with the principal stations of US/Canada separated by three zones: East-Central-West.
ReplyDeleteDaniel Nauman
Cherokee CA
That sounds very cool! Does it have KFI on it? KFRC?
DeleteOf course! KFI is always very prominent on these radios, since it was known as "An American Tradition" and could be heard over most of the US after nightfall. Now I've read that they've resurrected an old top of the hour identification recording that says something like 'This is KFI, Earl C Anthony radio in Los Angeles'---he owned the station and sold Packards. (Don Lee owned KHJ and KFRC and sold Cadillacs). At the top of the dial in '36 would be W6AXI out of Bakersfield, an experimental high fidelity station that would become in a year or two KPMC (Pioneer Mercantile Company). Back in '33, they conducted the first regularly scheduled mechanical television broadcasts on the West Coast---a high school boy sweating under a bank of lights, reading the news from the evening paper.
DeleteDaniel
Fascinating! My father has often spoken about how as an aviator flying in across the Pacific they would use KFI for tracking.
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