Radio
Radio was the exciting new medium, and Rogers became a star there as well, recycling his newspaper pieces. From 1930 to 1935, he made radio broadcasts for the Gulf Oil Company. This weekly Sunday evening show, The Gulf Headliners, ranked among the top radio programs in the country. Since he easily rambled from one subject to another, reacting to his studio audience, he often lost track of the half-hour time limit in his earliest broadcasts, and was cut off in mid-sentence. To correct this, he brought in a wind-up alarm clock, and its on-air buzzing alerted him to begin wrapping up his comments. By 1935, his show was being announced as "Will Rogers and his famous Alarm Clock."
In January 1934, Rogers used a racial slur in a radio skit, referring to a song as a "nigger spiritual," which resulted in a protest by the NAACP. Rogers had used the word in print in his syndicated newspaper columns on a few occasions, but this was evidently the first time he had used it on the radio.
Read more about this topic: Will Rogers
Famous quotes containing the word radio:
“A bibulation of sports writers, a yammer of radio announcers, a guilt of umpires, an indigence of writers.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)
“England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“from above, thin squeaks of radio static,
The captured fume of space foams in our ears—”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)