Princess Pet, Pt. 3

Originally published in the March, 2009, Old Radio Times.(http://www.otrr.org/pg07_times.htm)

Princess Pet on Radio Was Memorable Program During Early 50s
Box Cox

Volume 2 concluded in a “they lived happily ever after” fashion: “From high up in the sky over the castle, the Ice Cream Star looked down and smiled a special smile, for it was plain to see, Goodness would live forever in the Kingdom of Princess Pet.”

Storylines from the series include “A Dragon Has Been Slain,” “Ice Cream Star Seeks Yellow Forest,” “Evil Duke Plans to Get the Golden Thread,” “Pet Brown Mule and Pet Brown Bear are Hiding” and “The Princess Dreams of Prince Gallant.” The plot for Volume 2 entails Brown Bear and Brown Mule helping Princess Pet when some evil characters try to harm her. On one page, her majesty bestows membership in her Regal Court upon a little boy.

Youngsters like me eagerly tuned their Bakelite radios to the next broadcast each Saturday morning, at the sound of the clanging bottles, to follow the antics of Ms. Pet and her fantasized court. Situations always seemed to turn out right for the good guys and wrong for the evil ones, a condition all children fervently demanded.

If you have even a hint of memory of this long-ago radio program, please drop me a note and share it with me. boblcox@bcyesteryear.com

- This article first appeared in the Johnson City Press, Tennessee on January 1, 2008 and is reprinted by permission of the author.

Princess Pet, Pt. 2

Originally published in the March, 2009, Old Radio Times.(http://www.otrr.org/pg07_times.htm)

Princess Pet on Radio Was Memorable Program During Early 50s
Box Cox

In addition to the weekly radio programs, the company published two 36-page, eight-chapter, color/b&w booklets titled “The Adventures of Princess Pet,” Volumes 1 and 2. Each volume contained a list of the “Royal Commands of Princess Pet” to her youthful listening audience, offering one per month such as always tell the truth, bring home a good report card, keep your room neat, look both ways before crossing a street; and regularly attend Sunday School.

An introductory page presented a short synopsis of the plot: “This is the story of some of the strange and wonderful things that happen in the beautiful Kingdom of Prince Pet in the Land of the Ice Cream Star. Nearby lies the Black Forest, a wicked, wicked place. The ruler of the forest is the Wicked Duke, who many years ago placed a curse upon the forest because Princess Pet’s mother, the Queen, refused to become his bride. If even the tiniest shadow of Black Forest falls upon you, you become enchanted.”

The most dazzling sketch in Volume 1 was a full color page offering a panoramic view of Ice Cream Star. The text contained a colorful description of the frozen fantasyland: “Layers of soft, filmy clouds floated and sparkled in the warm sunlight. Everywhere around them were lakes of rich, fresh cream, rivers of bubbling chocolate and mound after mound of cherries, nuts, pineapples, peaches, coconuts and strawberries.” The tiny elf-like workers, dressed in bright jackets, were “hustling and working everywhere – churning and turning, hopping and chopping, icing and slicing – making delicious Pet Ice Cream.”

- This article first appeared in the Johnson City Press, Tennessee on January 1, 2008 and is reprinted by permission of the author.

Princess Pet, Pt. 1

Originally published in the March, 2009, Old Radio Times.(http://www.otrr.org/pg07_times.htm)

Princess Pet on Radio Was Memorable Program During Early 50s
Box Cox

I recall a delightful Saturday morning children’s program over WJHL radio from about 1951 to 1953 titled The Adventures of Princess Pet. The sponsor was Pet Dairy Products, a Johnson City-based business that began operation in 1929 at 106 S. Boone Street. The company produced 111 delightful 15-minute episodes.

I attribute my attraction for the radio series to my fondness for Brown Mules, vanilla ice cream bars coated with chocolate, and Brown Bears, solid chocolate ice milk bars. Both were produced on a splinterless wooden stick. I favored the stubborn hybrid work animal over the shaggy carnivorous mammal but eagerly wolfed down both. The frozen delights each cost a nickel - half of my weekly allowance.

In addition to the weekly radio programs, the company published two 36-page, eight-chapter, color/b&w booklets titled “The Adventures of Princess Pet,” Volumes 1 and 2. Each volume contained a list of the “Royal Commands of Princess Pet” to her youthful listening audience, offering one per month such as always tell the truth, bring home a good report card, keep your room neat, look both ways before crossing a street; and regularly attend Sunday School.

- This article first appeared in the Johnson City Press, Tennessee on January 1, 2008 and is reprinted by permission of the author.

Remember Crystal Sets? Pt. 3

Originally published in the March, 2009, Old Radio Times.(http://www.otrr.org/pg07_times.htm)

Anyone Remember Crystal Radio Sets?
Ned Norris

Now I understand I needed to pay much more attention to installing a good antenna –– a 50-foot piece of wire outside the house and as high as possible –– and that I needed a good ground. But as a 13-year-old, I simply wanted to listen under the bed covers in the dark to my favorite old time radio radio thriller.

It almost didn't matter what the program was. Each had the compelling signature music, sometimes just single musical notes, the voices with their sense of urgency, the suspense, the climax, the scripting formula. I also remember the screech of car tires in chase scenes. It was pretty gripping stuff for a small boy.

Remember how shoes were always soled in hard leather? Rubber didn't make enough noise. Doors always squeaked; silent ones would not have been much use on radio. And do I remember correctly that detectives were always men and that secretaries were always women?Today, when I recall those days long ago, I remember the crystal radio set with its finicky connection that would fade to almost nothing at the crucial point in the story. Then it would come back just as the announcer was saying something like: "So long! See you next week."

- Ned Norris is the webmaster of www.rusc.com

Remember Crystal Sets? Pt. 2

Originally published in the March, 2009, Old Radio Times.(http://www.otrr.org/pg07_times.htm)

Anyone Remember Crystal Radio Sets?
Ned Norris

Radio Shack sells starter kits too. Describing a project for "beginning experimenters" at http://www.thebest.net/wuggy/rs99fun.htm one reviewer said "the Radio Shack crystal radio kit Cat. No. 28-178 is a pretty fair starter set. It does work, and some simple modifications will enhance its performance." When he wrote four years ago, the price was $9.99. After some modifications, which he describes, he was able to listento New York, Netherlands Antilles, Cuba, Charlotte NC, Chicago, "and a few others". What a difference acoil of wire for an antenna makes!

For some fascinating photographs, you might want to take a look at http://www.schmarder.com/radios/crystal With their knobs and dials for tuning in a favorite station they make me positively envious!

There was no simple method for tuning my set. I remember there was a contact of some sort, and that by moving this minuscule distances across the crystal you could, with much patience, tune in a radio station. Usually, it was faint. Fiddle with the contact and the signal would be lost and found again many timesbefore a signal strong enough to enjoy came in. And it would often disappear in the middle of a show for no obvious reason.

"He aims and fires, but he misses……and that was his last bullet. The killer reaches for him, the axe raised in his other hand, and ……" fizzle, crackle, silence. Mutter, mutter (the latter being me)!

- Ned Norris is the webmaster of www.rusc.com

Remember Crystal Sets? Pt. 1

Originally published in the March, 2009, Old Radio Times.(http://www.otrr.org/pg07_times.htm)

Anyone Remember Crystal Radio Sets?
Ned Norris

Like many people of my generation I was brought up under strict conditions. Bedtime was at a certain rigid time every night. Lights out meant no reading; it meant sleep. It certainly did not include listening to radio broadcasts.

But as a child of thirteen, I discovered the delights of the crystal set. It was probably what started my love affair with old time radio. But it was a frustrating affair. The workings of my crystal radio set have remained a complete mystery. How, I wondered then, could a lump of gray mineral possibly capture radio waves and do so without a battery?

Now, several decades later, the answers are easy to find on the Internet –– here I quickly discover that crystal sets, and the parts to make them, are readily available today –– even though they look vastly different from the crude thing I had. In comparison, today's look . . . well …positively modern.

To my amazement, according to Google there are 245,000 pages that contain the phrase "crystal set". There is even The Xtal Set Society http://www.midnightscience.com which says it is "dedicated to once again building and experimenting with radio electronics." It advertises books, parts and kits. One kit is called the Quaker Oat Box Radio Pack. It contains one roll of 24-gauge hook-up wire (100 feet), one germanium diode, one 47,000-ohm resistor, one alligator clip, and one crystal earplug. Sounds just about as basic as my old set……but I don't remember the otherinstructions that come with this kit: "You will need to provide your own antenna wire and oatmeal box. "The advertised price is $8.95. Do some reverse inflation calculations and you will know better than I now remember roughly how much I paid for my set back in 1947. Any money I had in those days was 'earned' by not spending my lunch money at school, so I know the set I had was dirt-cheap.

Curious George, Pt. 2

Originally published in the March, 2009, Old Radio Times.(http://www.otrr.org/pg07_times.htm)

Curious George

In researching Invisible Stars, Halper learned that women were welcome in radio in the 1920s, when the amateur ethic prevailed and there wasn’t much money to be made. But as the decade drew to a close and the medium became more commercial, women were cast aside, or ghettoized on women’s shows.

Yet Halper argues that, in a sense, things are actually worse today. The women’s shows may have emphasized domestic bliss, she says, but they also served as “an electronic community” where topics such as feminism (before it was even a word), birth control, and greater involvement in public life could be discussed. “It wasn’t all recipes,” she says.

Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, though, most of the country’s 10,000 radio stations have fallen into the hands of just a few giant media conglomerates, resulting in the loss of scores of jobs. These days, Halper notes, smaller markets may not have a single locally based radio station; programming frequently pipes in by satellite from a distant headquarters. “Before, you were channeled into the women’s shows,” she says. “Today you’re just not hired. And that worries me.”

As Halper notes in Invisible Stars, there is one bright spot for women in radio: National Public Radio, whose most popular and respected news personalities are women such as Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg, and Susan Stamberg. NPR even has its own female hack purveyor of conventional wisdom (my characterization, not Halper’s), Cokie Roberts, showing that women can equal men in mediocrity as well as excellence.

And though Halper laments the devolution of commercial radio into “shock and vulgarity,” she retains a nostalgic affection for the medium. “I was a very lonely kid, and radio was my companion,” she says. “Those DJs were my friends. And while other girls might have dreamed about marrying them, I dreamed about being one of them.”

- Donna Halper is a lecturer and broadcast consultant based in Quincy, MA. Her love of radio history is evident in the way she captures the essence of her subjects.