Title
It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride : A Radio Biography / Susan Ware.
ISBN
9780814795040
Published
New York, NY : : New York University Press, [2005]
Copyright
©2005
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource
Other Standard Identifiers
10.18574/nyu/9780814795040.001.0001 doi
Call Number
PN1991.4.M37 W37 2005
Dewey Decimal Classification
791.4402/8/092
Summary
One of the most beloved radio show hosts of the 1940s and 1950s, Mary Margaret McBride (1899-1976) regularly attracted between six and eight million listeners to her daily one o'clock broadcast. During her twenty years on the air she interviewed tens of thousands of people, from President Harry Truman and Frank Lloyd Wright to Rachel Carson and Zora Neale Hurston. This is her story.Five decades after their broadcast, her shows remain remarkably fresh and interesting. And yet McBride-the Oprah Winfrey of her day-has been practically forgotten, both in radio history and in the history of twentieth-century popular culture, primarily because she was a woman and because she was on daytime radio.Susan Ware explains how Mary Margaret McBride was one of the first to exploit the cultural and political importance of talk radio, pioneering the magazine-style format that many talk shows still use. This radio biography recreates the world of daytime radio from the 1930s through the 1950s, confirming the enormous significance of radio to everyday life, especially for women.In the first in-depth treatment of McBride, Ware starts with a description of how widely McBride was revered in the mid-1940s-the fifteenth anniversary party for her show in 1949 filled Yankee Stadium. Once the readers have gotten to know Mary Margaret (as everyone called her), Ware backtracks to tell the story of McBride's upbringing, her early career, and how she got her start in radio. The latter part of the book picks up McBride's story after World War II and through her death in 1976. An epilogue discusses the contemporary talk show phenomenon with a look back to Mary Margaret McBride's early influence on the format.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 18. Sep 2023)
Available in Other Form
print 9780814794012
Frontmatter
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Prologue: Voice of America
PART I THE HEIGHT OF THE PROGRAM
1 "Here Comes McBride"
2 Mary Margaret's Radio Technique
3 "Under Cover of Daytime"
4 Mary Margaret's Bond with Listeners
5 "The Appetite as Voice"
6 Doing the Products
PART II BECOMING MARY MARGARET MCBRIDE
7 Listening to Lives
8 A Missouri Childhood
9 Stella
10 The Journalist and the Writer
11 Men, Marriage, and Sex
12 Affluence and Depression
13 "I Murdered Grandma"
14 Citrus Follies
15 The War Years
PART III TRANSITIONS
16 Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Margaret McBride, and Postwar Politics
17 Television
18 The Last Show: May 14, 1954
19 Cookbooks, Columns, and Commentary
20 "Good-bye,Y'all"
Epilogue Talk Shows,Then and Now
Notes
Index
About the Author
