e-Book It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography download

by Susan Ware

ISBN: 0814794017
ISBN13: 978-0814794012
Language: English
Publisher: NYU Press (February 7, 2005)
Pages: 304
Category: Arts and Literature
Subategory: Memoris

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ePub size: 1599 kb
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Rating: 4.5
Votes: 102
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It's One O'Clock Here is Mary Margaret McBride. com User, April 26, 2005. I loved this book it tells how things were in the 1920's-1950's for a driven young woman who became the first talk radio personality. Every chapter is fun and informative.

It's One O'Clock Here is Mary Margaret McBride. More interesting than you think. com User, April 21, 2005. I work in Radio so I bought it out of obligation to the subject matter and boy was I surprised.

Susan Ware explains how Mary Margaret McBride was one of the first to. .

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. 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. 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.

Tune in and treat yourself to Susan Ware's fascinating saga of the life and work of radio personality Mary Margaret McBride. Like McBride, Ware is at once probing and entertaining as she analyzes McBride’s success from the 1930s through the 1950s, restoring McBride to her rightful place as the mother of talk radio and television. Lizabeth Cohen,author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. Drawing on archives that include McBride’s radio interviews, as well as letters from former listeners, Ware begins with a description of McBride’s radio.

Book Description "This discerning biography of radio pioneer Mary Margaret McBride illuminates an entire cultural era and offers fascinating parallels to our own time. In Susan Ware's engaging narrative, McBride emerges as an icon of twentieth century popular culture and its romance with what we now describe as 'talk radio. McBride's story is a tale of power, freedom and connection boldly interpreted by a leading woman's historian.

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. Tune in and treat yourself to Susan Ware's fascinating saga of the life and work of radio personality Mary Margaret McBride.

Historian Susan Ware discussed her new book, It's One O'clock and Here is Mary . Ware is a noted expert on 20th century American women.

Historian Susan Ware discussed her new book, It's One O'clock and Here is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography (New York University Press, 2004), at the Library of Congress. She was the chair of the Library of Congress' Scholars Advisory Committee for "American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States," a 420-page resource guide, and wrote the introduction to the volume. 54 minutes, 37 seconds.

While it provides far more than a glimpse, the author concedes it does not give a complete portrait. Susan Ware bills her book, the first full-length study of McBride, as a "radio biography

While it provides far more than a glimpse, the author concedes it does not give a complete portrait. Susan Ware bills her book, the first full-length study of McBride, as a "radio biography.

It's One O'clock and Here is Mary Margaret Mcbride. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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.

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.

Comments:

Unde

While not presented in the conventional, chronological way, this is a good and long-overdue biography of the Oprah of her day, Mary Margaret McBride. McBride was a radio personality in the 30s and 40s, and very popular. Her interview program was listened to by millions and her public appearances were always major happenings. She was an amazing woman, but for some reason her talents did not translate well to TV when it came in, and owing mainly to the ill health and death of her longtime companion and manager, she gave up her radio show and retired. After her friend's death, she returned to doing an interview program on a local station and was quite popular in the region it was broadcast, but she faded away into obscurity after her own death in the late 70s. The author has done a good job of relaying McBride's life story and helps us understand the broadcasting milieu of those years and McBride's place in it. It's a good, informative read about a highly interesting pioneer of broadcasting and, to some extent, feminism.

Orevise

I couldn't put the book down and took it with me on a flight to Seattle, then finished it on another flight to San Diego. What a ride! Susan Ware, one of the editors of NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN, has gone back way in the past for this one. McBride was the premiere radio interviewer in the US in the 1940s and 1950s; as Ware astutely observes, she was yesteryear's equivalent of Oprah Winfrey, but plus . . . Plus what? Through the privileged relation then of radio to home, McBride created an intimacy with her listeners--seventy percent of them women--which even Oprah can't approximate, though she's certainly tops at what she does. Even Oprah's struggles with her weight, which have endeared her to millions of us, had their original rehearsal in McBride's huge girth, and in one famous incident in 1948 she got caught in a zipper and had to delay coming on to her own show--with complete honesty and charm she told the studio audience what had happened, and people loved her even more.

She came from a rocky girlhood in Missouri, and Ware is at her best showing us how she survived all kinds of grim childhood tragedies with a poignant determination to escape poverty. She never looked back; well, except to pen a series of best-selling memoirs of her youth a la Maya Angelou; and she brought her family with her, making sure all were well taken care of. Her mother was a frequent guest on her program, and when the mother died all America cried with her.

Mary Margaret never accepted advertising from any sponsors whose products she had not personally tried and approved. Every episode of her show had her, interrupting herself constantly, to talk about up to 14 different ad campaigns. She called this "doing the products," and she believed in sponsorship religiously.

Ware is very good showing how McBride helped to bolster, indeed create, middlebrow culture, but her distinctions are problematic. McBride, like Oprah, specialized in book promotion, and Ware says that she shunned highbrow culture and never had Hemingway, Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, or Eugene O'Neill on the program. And yet as Ware allows, McBride welcomed William Carlos Williams, James Thurber, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Erskine Caldwell. Not to mention the cultural figures like Orson Welles, Martha Graham, etc. Like it or not, these authors are just as much a part of "modernist culture" as Faulkner and Company. There's a strange diffusion to some of Ware's arguments in this direction; if she wants to argue one thing, she reads Evidence Item X to prove it, but she then turns around and uses the same item to argue something completely different. In this case, it's arguing for McBride's disdain of modernism and yet her sympathy for writers of color; of course the paths intersect more than Ware wants to admit.

The same diffusion is present also during her discussion of whether or not Mary Margaret McBride might have been a Lesbian, or were she and Stella Karn (her producer) just "girlfriends" of a different sort. Ware's conclusions on this topic vary from chapter to chpater.

I love her story about Langston Hughes, present during a taping during which McBride was advertising Dromedary Gingerbread Mix, and she urged him to help her out, and he responded with a perfect ad lib poem (that does not appear in his Collected Poems you may be sure):

"Dromedary, help me carry

News of chocolate cake;

Also, news of gingerbread

For all the folks who bake."

Ware's research (she listened to hundreds of hours of the program to transcribe wonderful tidbits like this) is fantastic. It is a book well done and so provcative in today's radio climate.

Leceri

When I was in my grandmother's care in 1950's New York, Mary Margaret McBride was on her radio. Even as a five year old, I knew she was important. So, when Oprah landed a generation later, I understood the link. When women broadcasters leave the scene they are gone for good. And that's bad. Barbara Walters doesn't dare retire. Mary Margaret McBride deserves better in the ethereal world of broadcast history. That's what Susan Ware does in this book.

Mardin

I work in Radio so I bought it out of obligation to the subject matter and boy was I surprised. I'VE READ IT FOUR TIMES. It is a fascinating story of how great radio is made and what makes a radio star. And she was a true star. Everything she did is true of every radio star I know working today--the news is, she did it first. I would give this to everyone thinking of working in radio and every young person (it will be inspiring to women in particular) who wonder what it takes to be a success in media. It takes every cell in your body. Bravo!!!!

Fato

Although I enjoyed this book I was surprised to find an antecdote describing a time when Miss McBride was supposed to have Eleanor Roosevelt as a guest. When Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt failed to show, she substituted Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt who happened to be a studio guest that day. Unfortunately,in the book,author Susan Ware states that Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt's name was also Eleanor. It was not. It was Edith. Even if Miss McBride got this wrong, I was disappointed that Ms. Ware didn't inform the readers - especially those that care about history - of her mistake.

Winawel

I loved this book it tells how things were in the 1920's-1950's for a driven young woman who became the first talk radio personality. Every chapter is fun and informative.