Making Radio: Early Radio Production

and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture

Shawn Vancour
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Making Radio
Making Radio

E A R LY R A D I O P R O D U C T I O N A N D

T H E R I S E O F M O D E R N S O U N D C U LT U R E

Shawn VanCour

1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: VanCour, Shawn, author.
Title: Making radio : early radio production and the rise of modern sound culture, 1920–1930 / Shawn VanCour.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017035297 | ISBN 9780190497118 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190497149 (oxford scholarship online)
Subjects: LCSH: Radio broadcasting—United States—History—20th century. |
Radio broadcasting—Aesthetics. | Radio broadcasting—Social aspects—United States—History—
20th century. | Mass media—Technological innovations—United States—History—20th century. |
Popular culture—United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC PN1991.3.U6 V36 2018 | DDC 302.23/440973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035297

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Making Radio: ​A Production-​Oriented Approach

to Early Broadcasting 1

1. Making Radio Time: Managing Broadcasting’s Sonic Flows 15

2. Making Radio Genres: Radiogénie as a Force in Early Program Development 45

3. Making Radio Music: Creating the Radio Sound 69

4. Making Radio Drama: Creating Sound Fictions 97

5. Making Radio Talk: Taming Electric Speech 125

Conclusion: Mediamaking and the Making of Media Labor 157

Appendix: A Note on Sources 165

Abbreviations 169
Notes 173
Bibliography 213
Index 225

v
Acknowledgments

Intellectual labor, as with any form of creative labor, is the work of many hands—​a
proposition that holds as true for single-​authored monographs as for any other type
of scholarly production. The present work was wrought over the course of many
years, at multiple educational and archival institutions, and benefited from sugges-
tions and support from numerous individuals along the way.
Initial research for this project began with a doctoral dissertation at the University
of Wisconsin, benefiting from input from Michele Hilmes, Michael Curtin, Julie
D’Acci, Ben Singer, and Mary Beltrán, with financial support from the Jacob K.
Javits Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Graduate School and Department
of Communication Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for
the Study of Invention and Innovation. Subsequent research was supported through
awards from the Broadcast Education Association, the Dean’s Office at Carleton
College, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Carolina. Thanks
go to Kenneth Harwood for his generous support of BEA researchers; to my
Carleton colleagues Carol Donelan, John Schott, Rod Rodman, and the late Vern
Bailey; and, at South Carolina, to Mark Cooper, Susan Courtney, Laura Kissel,
Debra Rae Cohen, Julie Hubbert, Heidi Rae Cooley, and Jen and Simon Tarr for
their own help and support. A visiting position at New York University and course
release from the Department of Information Studies at UCLA made completion of
the final manuscript possible, with particular thanks owed to Lisa Gitelman, Mara
Mills, Martin Scherzinger, Susan Murray, Terry Moran, Radha Hegde, Dan Streible,
and Ron Sadoff at NYU, and to my current colleagues, chair, and dean at UCLA.
Historical research requires close collaboration between the scholar and archi-
vists who manage the raw materials that form the stuff of history. My own research
has repeatedly benefited from the expertise and enthusiasm of individuals at a
variety of archiving institutions and research centers. At the Smithsonian, Maggie

vii
viii Acknowledgments
Dennis and Art Molella in the Lemelson Center offered generous time and sup-
port, Elliot Sivowitch provided helpful guidance on collection materials, and
Kay Peterson helped secure needed illustrations. Chuck Howell, Tom Connors,
and especially Michael Henry provided helpful advice and suggestions on mate-
rials at the University of Maryland; Chris Hunter helped navigate materials at
Schenectady’s Museum of Innovation and Science and secured requested images;
and Greg Wilsbacher, Ben Singleton, Scott Allen, and Brittany Braddock at the
University of South Carolina provided invaluable assistance with the university’s
Moving Image Research Collections. At the Library of Congress, Karen Fishman,
Jan McKee, and especially Bryan Cornell helped with collections in the library’s
Recorded Sound Research Center, as did Alice Birney with collections from the
Manuscripts Division and Jennifer Harbster with materials from the Science
Library. Additional thanks to Susan Hamilton at Truman State University, Sherry
Byrne at the University of Chicago, and Jeanette Berard and Klaudia Englund at
Thousand Oaks Library for assistance with their collections, as well as to the many
hard-​working reference specialists at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Columbia
University Oral History Research Office, and New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts who made my research experiences at these institutions successful
and rewarding. Special thanks, in addition, to David Gleason and Bob Paquette
for access to materials from their personal collections; to Ed Gable at the Antique
Wireless Association for assistance securing materials from his organization; to
the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers for use of their materials;
to Larry Steckler for use of images from Hugo Gernsback’s radio publications; to
Cynthia Powell Barnett for use of materials from the Hennessy Radio Publication
Corporation; and to Byron Clark for use of materials from the collection of his
late wife, Eleanor Vallée.
Throughout its long germination and execution, this project has benefited from
insights, encouragement, and research exchanges from numerous scholars, includ-
ing Mike Adams, Tim Anderson, Noah Arceneaux, Kyle Barnett, Michael Biel,
David Bordwell, Michael Brown, Frank Chorba, Cliff Doerksen, David Goodman,
Douglas Gomery, David Hesmondhalgh, Lea Jacobs, Dave Jenemann, Michael
Keith, Bill Kirkpatrick, Kate Lacey, Jason Loviglio, Anne MacLennan, Alex Magoun,
Monteith McCollum, Allison McCracken, Ross Melnick, Cynthia Meyers, John
Peters, Elena Razlogova, Eric Rothenbuhler, Paddy Scannell, Michael Schiffer,
Philip Sewell, Michael Stamm, Jennifer Stoever, David Suisman, Emily Thompson,
Tim Wall, Jennifer Wang, and David Weinstein. Particular thanks, as well, go to
Kathy Fuller-​Seeley, Alex Russo, Josh Shepperd, Katherine Spring, Jonathan Sterne,
and Neil Verma, all of whom read early versions of various chapters and offered
helpful suggestions for shaping the larger book project. Portions of this work also
 Acknowledgments ix
benefited from comments by audiences at conferences for the Broadcast Education
Association, Cultural Studies Association, MeCCSA Radio Studies Network,
Popular Culture Association, and Society for Cinema and Media Studies, as well
as talks for various symposia, courses, and lecture series at the Hagley Museum and
Library, University of Maryland, University of Oregon, Catholic University of
America, Binghamton University, University of Wisconsin, Carleton College, and
NYU. It has been an additional privilege to work in recent years with the talented
researchers and member archives of the National Recording Preservation Board’s
Radio Preservation Task Force, whose preservation efforts and educational initia-
tives offer continued reminders of radio’s vital role in shaping sound history and
cultural memory.
At Oxford University Press, my editor, Norm Hirschy, has shown unflagging
patience and commitment to this project throughout its various iterations, while my
anonymous reviewers offered close readings and thoughtful suggestions for which
I am equally grateful. Final thanks go to my family, for nurturing my sound obses-
sions over the years, and for their unfailing confidence and support in helping me
see this project to fruition.
Making Radio
IN T RO D UC T I ON

Making Radio: A Production-​Oriented Approach to Early Broadcasting

In a 1923 article for the General Electric Company’s national publicity organ, GE
Review, studio director Kolin Hager, speaking for GE station WGY (Schenectady,
New York), expounded upon what he called a new art of “Staging the Unseen.”
In radio, Hager explained, “a new set of conditions. . . . must be considered in the
production of music, addresses, plays, operettas, and the many specialties that
find a place on broadcast programs.” While performances onstage and in concert
or lecture halls were “carried over with a score of [visual] aids that make [them]
convincing and delightful,” broadcasting demanded development of production
methods that catered exclusively to the ear.1 As the journal’s editors elaborated in
their introduction to the article, “The studio management’s problem has been to
work out such a technique of practice as will enable a variety of worthy programs to
be . . . broadcast with a realism which . . . makes one forget the sense of sight is not
being employed.” In the capable hands of this emerging class of professional sound
workers, they concluded, the presentational challenges of aural broadcasting were
well met, helping radio “evolve, from what might have been a passing fad, [into] a
real service as indispensable to the public as other standard methods of communica-
tion and entertainment.”2
Written by one of GE’s leading studio directors for the company’s main public
relations journal, Hager’s article is unquestionably spin-​driven and self-​serving.
However, such careerist bids by trade workers to legitimate themselves and their
medium played a crucial role in shaping early radio institutions and structuring
the modes of aesthetic practice pursued by early producers. These discourses point
toward an important but largely neglected domain of early twentieth-​century

1
2 Introduction
sound historiography: the development of a production culture for aural broad-
casting that established defining forms of content and techniques of practice for
this new medium of electric sound entertainment. While overlooked in most
existing sound histories, broadcasting aesthetics became the key site in which
battles for professionalization and cultural legitimation were waged, as produc-
ers struggled to define standards of practice and win public recognition for their
medium. As the following chapters demonstrate, the programming forms, pro-
duction practices, and performance styles these workers created established key
precedents for network-​era productions in the decades that followed. Equally
important, as the first successful medium of electric sound entertainment, radio
also staged sharp departures from aesthetic norms for the acoustic-​era produc-
tions that preceded it, establishing new sets of practices and sensibilities that set
the stage for subsequent developments in electric phonograph recording and film
sound. Perched on the cusp of a new era of electric sound reproduction, early
radio workers developed practices of media-making that not only shaped the
future of broadcasting, but also facilitated a series of much broader transforma-
tions in popular sound culture.
In mapping the institutionalization of programming and production practices
for aural broadcasting and their impact on the nation’s sound culture, this book
stages a strategic departure from previous radio scholarship and fills a persistent
gap in larger histories of modern sound media. Historical work on radio has been
defined by two main waves of scholarship, to which Making Radio remains deeply
indebted but which it also works to supplement and challenge. The first wave
of radio historiography, inaugurated by Erik Barnouw’s monumental History of
Broadcasting trilogy in the 1960s and early 1970s, privileged inventors, policy-
makers, and broadcasting executives, analyzing the technologies developed for the
medium, laws created to regulate it, and economics of what for decades consti-
tuted one of the country’s biggest and most profitable entertainment industries.3
The second wave emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, as part of a larger “cultural
turn” in media studies that shifted attention to the audiences served by broad-
casters and social debates surrounding the medium, mapping the complex inter-
play of macro-​level industrial forces and grassroots cultural forces.4 While they
have shed important light on broadcasting’s institutional structures and cultural
contexts, too often lost to both top-​down and bottom-​up approaches has been
an important middle ground inhabited by producers such as Hager. Occupying
a stratum of broadcasting history below that of entrepreneurial inventors, federal
regulators, and corporate executives, but above that of audiences and social pun-
dits, this new class of professional sound workers was responsible for producing
the day-​to-​day programming that filled the nation’s airwaves and made radio more
 Introduction 3
than just technologies, laws, and accounting figures, while giving its ever-​growing
publics something on which to project their competing interests and desires. To
these programmers, producers, and performers went the task of “making radio” in
the fullest sense, developing content and techniques of practice that secured their
medium’s larger cultural identity. In the wake of the cultural turn, Making Radio
thus proposes a new, aesthetic turn—​a third wave of scholarship that moves to
the spaces of the studio and writer’s room to explore the pioneering programming
forms, production practices, and performance styles through which an emerging
group of sound workers struggled to define their professional identities and that
of radio itself (see Table A).
While most sound historians have focused on the expansion of the commer-
cial network system in the 1930s as the formative moment in radio’s development,
I argue that the network era did not so much innovate as consolidate program-
ming and production practices that had already achieved institutional inertia in
the prenetwork period of the 1920s. New stations proliferated during this decade,
rising from only 20 to 30 in 1921 to nearly 570 by the end of 1922, peaking just
short of 700 in 1927, then stabilizing around 600 in 1928–​1929.5 Sales of receiving
equipment grew from $60 million to $136 million between 1922 and 1923 alone,
reaching $430 million by 1925, and topping $842 million by 1929, while the num-
ber of radio households grew with equal rapidity and by 1930 included almost
half of the homes in the country.6 Most important for present purposes, how-
ever, are the new forms of cultural labor to which this expanding industry gave
rise. The prenetwork period spawned new groups of programmers, writers, direc-
tors, engineers, and on-​air talent, all of whom worked to develop best practices

Table A

Mapping Radio Historiography

Chronology Areas of Emphasis Orientation
First wave Inventions/​inventors Top-​down
(traditional) Industry economics
Regulatory policy

Second wave Audiences + critics Bottom-​up

(cultural turn) Cultural context
Politics of representation

Production approach Programming forms Midlevel

(aesthetic turn) Production practices
Performance styles
4 Introduction
for broadcasting and win cultural recognition for themselves and their medium.
As Making Radio shows, the programming forms, production practices, and per-
formance styles they innovated were often highly contested, developing through a
process of extensive experimentation and debate. However, by the mid to late 1920s
this process had achieved provisional closure, resulting in standards of practice that
continued to inform subsequent network-​era productions.7 These included influ-
ential structures of broadcast flow developed in response to demands for live, con-
tinuous programming streams and techniques for managing listener attention that
shaped dominant modes of engagement with that programming. As producers and
critics pushed for more conscious cultivation of the medium’s aesthetic properties,
ideas of radiogénie helped to legitimate emerging sound genres and instill a sound-​
mindedness in mediamakers and audiences alike. In addition, this decade spawned
foundational studio techniques for radio broadcasting, including standard micro-
phone setups and mixing methods for musical presentations; narrational strate-
gies for radio drama; and performance styles for radio music, drama, and talk, all
carefully tailored to the perceived demands of radio’s aural mode of address and
new instruments of electric sound reproduction.
The aesthetic norms that emerged during the prenetwork era not only shaped
the future of network broadcasting but also established important precedents for
neighboring record and film industries. Recent work in the interdisciplinary field of
sound studies has encouraged attention to such intermedial affinities and influences
yet has often failed to recognize radio’s formative role in shaping these broader trans-
formations in early twentieth-​century sound culture.8 While structures of broad-
cast flow were developed in response to economic and regulatory pressures within
the broadcasting industry itself, programmers’ treatment of radio’s sound streams as
manipulable objects that could be segmented and rearranged for commercial pur-
poses facilitated a much broader commodification of sound that was equally vital to
the success of other sound industries. These programming strategies also negotiated
larger cultural tensions between immersive and distracted regimes of aural attention
at a time of expanding competition between different sound media across a wide
range of listening contexts. Popular radio genres, for their part, although developed
in response to the perceived demands and possibilities of radio presentation, also
increased broader cultural investments in aural artmaking, while creating new forms
of shared sonic experience that shaped expectations for neighboring sound media.
Perhaps most important, however, were the studio techniques and presentational
styles pioneered by radio workers during this period.
As the nation’s first successful medium of electric sound entertainment, radio
predated the widespread deployment of electric phonograph and film sound by at
least half a decade and played a central role in defining production and performance
 Introduction 5
strategies for this new era of electric sound. While technologies of film sound and
electric phonograph recording were developed in the same labs and in many cases by
the same engineers responsible for radio, electrical transcription was not employed
in commercial phonograph recording until 1925, and the film industry’s first suc-
cessful feature-​length sound film was not released until the following year, with
most major studios refusing to commit to sound production until 1928.9 Radio,
I argue, established important precedents that primed this emergent culture of elec-
tric sound entertainment, popularizing aesthetic strategies that would be echoed
and consolidated in the practices of neighboring film and music media during the
second half of the decade. In mapping these contributions, the following chapters
isolate principles of sonic parsimony in both music and drama, which privileged a
reduction in the number of performers and inputs to ensure clarity of reproduction;
simulation of real-​world environments through strategic manipulation of reverbera-
tion characteristics; an emphasis on intelligibility over strict fidelity to performers’
relative volume or spatial position; and a shift to new, “natural” styles of singing,
acting, and speech that fetishized qualities of vocal performance inaudible in earlier
acoustic-​era productions. From radio, these sonic strategies quickly spread across
neighboring sound industries, undergoing a swift process of cultural generalization.
The programming forms, production practices, and performance styles that radio
workers developed during this period had both centripetal and centrifugal effects.
Programmers, producers, and performers negotiated a series of industry-​specific
pressures, including top-​down pressures from federal regulators, corporate station
owners, and early sponsors, as well as bottom-​up pressures from expanding audi-
ences and professional critics. Within this context, radio workers strove to shore up
the boundaries of their fledgling industry, define their professional identities, and
win public acceptance for their medium. However, the standards they adopted also
had much broader ramifications for an evolving twentieth-​century sound culture.
Radio workers developed novel solutions to the technical and aesthetic challenges
of electric sound production that were soon echoed in techniques pursued by film
and music producers, while retooling public listening sensibilities for a new type
of sound that quickly spread across a series of related sound media. As the follow-
ing chapters show, radio was not merely a symptom but rather a key contributor to
these larger transformations in the nation’s sound culture, forming a vital but often
neglected link in the twentieth century’s transition from acoustic-​era production to
a new culture of electric sound.
While many of the norms and practices addressed in this book achieved
broader extension, Making Radio does not propose to offer an exhaustive account
that encompasses all types of broadcasting and broadcasters. Instead, it conducts
a “history of the dominant,” tracing the emergence of industry norms that would
6 Introduction
define the future of mainstream broadcasting and have the most direct impact on
or affinities with practices adopted for adjacent sound media. It therefore focuses
on practices at larger commercial stations that maintained full staffs, courted
larger audiences, and enjoyed higher transmitting power that gave them broader
geographical reach.10 While not all of these stations pursued commercial spon-
sorship, the majority were owned by commercial corporations that used their
stations to promote their companies and generate public goodwill.11 Several,
though not all, participated in experiments with “chain” broadcasting during the
first half of the decade and formed some of the earliest network stations upon
the creation of the National Broadcasting Company at the end of 1926 and the
Columbia Broadcasting System in 1927.12 The larger audiences and broader reach
of these stations gave their content and stylistic norms greater cultural influence
than alternative programming and production models pursued at smaller, local
stations or noncommercial religious and educational stations. While recent years
have seen growing work on these alternative broadcasting traditions, to ade-
quately grasp the nature and extent of their deviations from mainstream praxis
first demands an understanding of the norms from which they departed.13 The
chapters that follow are thus committed to illuminating the emergence of dom-
inant industry practices that provided the baseline for radio production in its
US context, formed the unacknowledged foundation for subsequent network-​
era broadcasts, and established key precedents for the film and music industries
upon their own adoption of electric sound technologies in the second half of the
decade.

A Production-​O riented Approach to Sound Aesthetics

While aesthetic analysis has long been a core concern of related fields of media study,
it remained largely absent from the economic and policy-​driven work of first-​wave
historians, and in second-​wave historiography was limited mainly to studies of cul-
turally contested representations of gender, race, and class. As Christopher Anderson
and Michael Curtin note in their work on the cultural turn, these second-​wave con-
cerns with politics of representation have encouraged serious analysis of entertain-
ment programming that was once dismissed as unworthy of attention, revealing
“complicated narrative and rhetorical strategies [that] express a surprising range
of meanings in response to their historical contexts.”14 Neil Verma, however, has
rightly observed in his work on network-​era drama that cultural approaches often
ignore basic questions of style, illuminating social tensions and debates refracted in
broadcast texts but lacking any “standard argot with which to perform routine inter-
pretive tasks like describing scenes, explaining segues, or grappling with patterns in
 Introduction 7
dialogue.”15 Making Radio affirms the need for closer attention to stylistic norms,
though emphasizing techniques developed during the prenetwork period and draw-
ing connections with parallel tendencies in neighboring sound media. In addition,
while Verma privileges analysis of the texts themselves, this book places equal weight
on their institutional contexts and the work routines developed within them; rather
than reverse engineering production practices from their resulting radio texts, it
takes these practices as themselves primary objects of analysis and seeks to under-
stand the institutional pressures and logics behind them. Combining new work
in industry studies and creativity studies with long-​standing traditions in film and
music studies, this production-​oriented approach offers a better understanding of
why certain aesthetic choices were pursued over others, while circumventing other-
wise insurmountable problems of access to early program recordings.
Production studies have gained considerable traction in recent industry studies
work and offer a valuable means of recuperating the aesthetic agenda. Most promi-
nent in this vein is John Caldwell’s work on “production culture,” which employs
sociological methods to achieve a more fine-​grained analysis of industrial practices
than traditional political economy approaches. “While film and television are influ-
enced by macroscopic economic processes,” Caldwell explains, “they also very much
function on a microsocial level as local cultures and social communities in their own
right,” with internal value systems and sense-​making strategies that determine what
texts get made and how those are produced.16 Understanding these communities, as
Timothy Havens, Amanda Lotz, and Serra Tinic explain in their own account of this
approach, demands attention to the ways that “knowledge about texts, audiences,
and the industry form, circulate, and change” to in turn influence dominant sets of
production practices.17 Production practices must be understood within their larger
institutional contexts and connected to the types of textual forms they authorize
or foreclose. As David Hesmondhalgh notes, industry studies “at its best . . . links
dynamics of power in the cultural industries with . . . questions regarding the kinds
of texts that are produced by cultural industry organisations,” integrating macro-​
level structural analysis with micro-​level analysis of production practices and media
texts.18 In its lesser forms, production studies may become fixated on internal power
struggles within the industries in question, losing sight of their structuring institu-
tional constraints or aesthetic outcomes. At its best, however, such work can offer
valuable insights into the creative processes that shape popular cultural texts and
help us understand the role that larger institutional contexts play in structuring
these processes of cultural production.
This attention to production processes in industry studies closely parallels cor-
responding tendencies in the neighboring field of creativity studies. As R. Keith
Sawyer observes, recent years have witnessed a decisive “shift in creativity research
8 Introduction
from a focus on creative products to a focus on the creative processes that generate
them,” as part of a sociocultural turn that privileges attention to internal dynamics of
production communities and the contextual forces that shape their creative labor.19
Seeking to bridge the gap between creativity studies and industry studies, Phillip
McIntyre summarizes this new approach to creativity as a shift from the “older,
Ptolemaic, or person-​centered view” that emphasizes Romantic notions of genius
and personal inspiration, to “a more Copernican conception, where the individual
agent is still seen to engage in creative activity but is now constituted as part of a
much larger structured system in operation.” Understanding these systemic struc-
tures, he argues, requires close study of external forces impacting “the production,
dissemination and reception of creative products,” as well as the internal “formal and
aesthetic structures . . . embedded in bodies of knowledge” that producers employ
“when they undertake creative actions.”20 Here, McIntyre echoes the views of soci-
ologist Pierre Bourdieu, who sought to demonstrate the role that larger produc-
tion and distribution systems play in structuring an artist’s professional values and
sensibilities and shaping his or her aesthetic choices.21 However, as Sawyer notes,
more recent sociological conceptions of creativity have encouraged not only new
understandings of forces shaping the activities of individual artists but also atten-
tion to practices of “group creativity” and the complex forms of communication and
collaboration these entail.22 The following chapters treat modes of sonic production
developed by early radio workers as forms of group creativity, mapping the systems
used to coordinate group actions within early broadcast stations and privileging
shared structures of knowledge over individual innovation.
While new to radio historiography, this production-​oriented approach has deep
roots in film studies and has been recently embraced by music scholars, as well.
Within the field of film studies, David Bordwell has demonstrated the value of
historical poetics, which analyzes the “principles according to which the work is
composed,” as well as “how and why . . . these principles [have] arisen and changed
in particular historical circumstances.”23 This determination of “how and why”
Bordwell construes in his later work as an analysis of “problems and solutions,” where
problems include everything from challenges of new technologies to basic stylistic
or storytelling goals, and solutions are driven in part by personal initiative but also
by larger institutional norms and schemas.24 While offering ready-​made solutions to
common problems, established schemas are often contested during periods of tech-
nological transition, with the “coming of sound” in the late 1920s through early 1930s
offering one of Hollywood cinema’s most prominent examples. Rick Altman, James
Lastra, and Helen Hanson, for instance, richly document debates over preferred
miking and mixing strategies during and immediately following this period, while
work by Donald Crafton, Allison McCracken, and Jennifer Fleeger has illuminated
 Introduction 9
debates over preferred acting and singing styles—​in both cases emphasizing produc-
tion practices and qualities of vocal performance whose radio precursors are elabo-
rated in subsequent chapters.25 Attention to the institutionalization or disruption
of dominant production norms has similarly swept the field of music studies, from
Paul Théberge’s analysis of electronic musicmaking, to Mark Katz’s work on hip-​hop
production, to Susan Horning’s study of recording engineers.26 As Horning notes,
“Through surviving recordings, we can listen to how music changed, but we have
little understanding of the process” through which that music was produced, or the
“different concepts of sound recording and different ideas about how the studio
should be used” that guided production practices during moments of technological
transition.27 A full understanding of dominant production styles, in short, requires
attention not only to the content of sonic texts but also to the professional knowl-
edges and practices that authorize and sustain these productions.
The chapters that follow argue that attention to production processes and the
rationales behind them is every bit as important for radio history as for other areas
of sound historiography. Indeed, the proliferation of production studies for radio’s
companion sound media makes it increasingly pressing to perform a similar study
for radio itself. While developed by members of early broadcasting institutions in
response to the perceived challenges and goals of radio production, production pro-
cesses for aural broadcasting also provided the foundation for many parallel practices
in film and music production highlighted by scholars in these areas. A production-​
oriented approach to broadcasting aesthetics not only enables better understand-
ing of the sonic forms and stylistic strategies pursued for radio itself but is also an
essential tool for mapping the medium’s affinities with related spheres of sound prac-
tice, thus offering important insights into much broader transformations in early
twentieth-​century sound culture.

Radio’s “No-​S ound” Archive

The general neglect of prenetwork-​era radio programming in prior histories may

stem in part from its apparent scarcity within the historical record. In preparing his
study of golden age network radio, for instance, Verma points toward a wealth of
surviving program recordings from later decades, basing his reconstruction of aes-
thetic practices on a sample consisting of several thousand episodes.28 Prenetwork-​
era recordings, by contrast, are limited to only a handful of air checks and
recreations made days or sometimes years after the original broadcast.29 Such pro-
gramming possesses what historian Amanda Keeler has called a “no-​sound” status
that demands reconstruction by means other than direct listening.30 Fortunately,
there remains an abundance of alternative sources to aid in this task, many of which
10 Introduction
in fact prove of even greater value for a production-​oriented approach than the
programs themselves.
In his work on early television broadcasting, Jason Jacobs shows the value of writ-
ten documentation for research not only on the content of early programming but
also for studies of aesthetic norms, with “scripts, studio plans, policy memos, com-
mittee minutes, and so on” enabling reconstruction of the “ghost text” of the miss-
ing program and its salient stylistic features.31 For a production-​oriented approach,
such documents serve not only as important proxies for original programming but
also as key sources in their own right. As Josephine Dolan observes, while broadcast-
ing’s “written or visual archives are [often] positioned as secondary at best . . . merely
stand[ing] in for the absent record of radio/​broadcasting,” the documents they
contain in many cases helped to shape underlying production processes.32 Scripts,
production notes, and policy documents provided the raw materials and established
guiding principles for the final broadcast, while also shaping more intangible ele-
ments such as the aesthetic sensibilities of production workers. Close analysis of these
documents enables reconstruction of stylistic norms for prenetwork-​era broadcast-
ing while illuminating the production processes and institutional pressures behind
that programming in ways that the recorded sounds alone never could. Period trade
presses shed additional light on the larger industrial rationales and constraints guid-
ing early production strategies, with popular radio magazines in turn offering a space
in which those strategies could be rendered legible to audiences, and critics’ col-
umns in period newspapers working to either legitimate or challenge them. These
sources are used throughout the following chapters to provide a detailed analysis of
programming practices and production strategies, the institutional factors shaping
them, and producers’ ongoing struggles for professional recognition and cultural
validation of their creative choices.

Making Radio

Making Radio’s investigations are divided into five chapters, moving from macro-​
level analysis of early programming strategies and genres (the “what” of broadcast-
ing) to micro-​level analysis of production techniques and performance styles (the
“how”). At both levels, I argue, radio workers developed creative strategies that laid
the foundation for subsequent network-​era practices and facilitated parallel shifts in
filmmaking and music production. Chapter 1 addresses the programming strategies
developed by station directors during the 1920s, arguing their importance for defin-
ing enduring principles of broadcast flow and facilitating broader shifts in ways of
thinking about sound and managing listening attention. Chapter 2 continues this
macro-​level analysis of programming forms by considering early writers’ efforts to
 Introduction 11
develop radiogenic sound genres, showing how these workers helped to legitimate
radio as a medium that could make unique and valued contributions to the nation’s
sound culture. Chapters 3 through 4 move from macro-​level analysis of program-
ming forms and strategies to micro-​level analysis of production techniques and
performance styles pursued for broadcast music, drama, and talk. Studio directors
and control room engineers, these chapters argue, developed specialized miking and
mixing strategies in response to the perceived demands of their medium’s instru-
ments of electric sound reproduction, popularizing techniques that would be rein-
forced by the music and film industries during the second half of the decade. Radio
singing, acting, and speaking underwent a similar process of professionalization dur-
ing this period, with on-​air talent cultivating new styles of vocal performance whose
impact ultimately extended well beyond radio itself.
Chapter 1’s analysis of programming strategies treats these as products of a live,
continuous streaming model distinctive to a broadcasting system in which private
license holders vied for preferred frequency assignments and fought to win audi-
ence shares in the face of competition from other, surrounding stations. Regulatory
demands for live entertainment created a forced separation between radio and neigh-
boring recording media, transforming radio into a new studio art, while the need
to attract and hold listener attention pushed programmers to develop orderly and
predictable programming patterns that included regular weekly programs, stripping
of daily features, and stacking of similarly themed features into larger programming
blocks. Successful implementation of these strategies, the chapter argues, required
complex systems of temporal accounting managed through the bureaucratic tool
of the programming log, which helped broadcasters plan, track, and evaluate their
daily output. Announcer’s continuity and program listings in daily newspapers in
turn helped guide period listening practices and naturalize these emerging rhythms
of radio time. While developed as solutions to institutionally specific challenges,
programmers’ strategic segmentation and concatenation of radio’s temporal streams
also facilitated a broader commodification of sound that was central to the success of
all commercial sound industries, while their efforts to adjust public listening habits
responded to larger struggles to manage listener attention across an expanding range
of different sound media and listening contexts.
Adopting a cultural/​pragmatic approach to genre, ­chapter 2 argues that the
formal qualities of the genres that filled early program schedules were subjects of
extensive debate within the burgeoning broadcasting industry and represented stra-
tegic responses to both top-​down institutional pressures and bottom-​up cultural
pressures. To illustrate these debates and the aesthetic strategies they yielded, the
chapter offers a detailed case study of the musical variety genre, which dominated
early program schedules and underwent a series of calculated transformations that
12 Introduction
highlighted the importance of emerging concepts of medium appropriateness
embedded in the idea of radiogénie. Faced with growing competition from other
stations and discouraged from pursuing more specialized forms of content by regu-
latory mandates to serve the general public interest, early stations embraced musical
variety as a privileged genre with broad appeal. In response to criticisms that such
programming lacked unity and distinction, producers pursued several noteworthy
changes to the genre, from inclusion of a program host as central unifying figure, to
experiments with themed programs, to the soon-​dominant “continuity program,”
which used dramatic frame stories to bind together an otherwise diverse array of
musical offerings. Embraced by industry pundits and cultural critics alike, continu-
ity programs were celebrated as one of the nation’s first distinctly radiogenic pro-
gramming forms. This concept of radiogénie was of critical importance, facilitating
radio’s professionalization and legitimation as a distinctive sphere of cultural pro-
duction that could make meaningful and valued contributions to an expanding field
of early twentieth-​century sound art.
Moving from macro-​level considerations of programming strategies and genres
to more fine-​grained analysis of studio operations, c­ hapter 3 picks up where c­ hapter
2 left off by exploring efforts to define production techniques and performance
styles for musical broadcasts. Producers and performers during this decade grappled
with a wide array of new sound technologies, from microphones to mixing boards.
Working to institutionalize preferred skills and knowledges for their industry and
win public acceptance for their medium, these radio workers developed techniques
of practice for a new studio art and new type of electric sound defined by five basic
principles. A principle of acoustic plasticity, or pliability of acoustic space, encour-
aged manipulation of sound through addition or reduction of reverb to simulate
different sonic environments, while efforts to maintain satisfactory signal-​to-​noise
ratios yielded a new “close-​up sound” whose compressed dynamic range eliminated
a key source of structural tension on which many traditional musical forms relied
and encouraged greater valuation of formerly inaudible sonic details. A principle
of sonic parsimony stressed the reduction of sonic inputs to avoid muddying the
final mix, while a principle of aural intelligibility favored a consistently clean and
evenly balanced foreground sound over strict fidelity to real-​world spatial relation-
ships. Finally, an aesthetic of sonic restraint gained ascendancy during this period,
with forceful concert hall performance styles displaced by more subdued, micro-
phone-​friendly alternatives. These same principles would be embraced by members
of the music recording industry during the second half of the decade, representing
a much broader shift in production practices and listening sensibilities that would
ultimately extend well beyond radio.
 Introduction 13
Turning to dramatic programming, ­chapter 4 argues that similar principles
informed production techniques and performance styles for early experiments with
sound drama, which bore striking affinities with methods pursued for sound film
productions of the late 1920s and 1930s. While radio historians have traditionally
viewed dramatic series as an innovation of the network era, this chapter argues
that sound dramas were highly valued and actively pursued throughout the prenet-
work period, with producers and critics casting the ability to construct compelling
aural fictions as the ultimate test of radio’s aesthetic legitimacy. By the middle of
the decade, clear rules had emerged governing narrative structure, use of music and
sound effects, and preferred acting styles, rooted in four key principles with direct
parallels in early sound cinema. These included privileging a “natural” delivery style
that echoed the aesthetic of restraint discussed in ­chapter 3, an emphasis on thinning
the mix that reinforced music productions’ principle of sonic parsimony, and fore-
grounding dialogue to privilege intelligibility of speech over strict fidelity to real-​
world acoustical experience. At the same time, drama producers also established a
principle of dialogue reduction that stressed the minimization of cumbersome
verbal exposition through systems of musical cues and sound effects tailored to the
electric microphone. While film scholars have observed the use of similar strategies
in sound cinema productions, this chapter emphasizes their pursuit in radio from a
remarkably early date, as well as their affinities with principles of radio music pro-
duction discussed in ­chapter 3.
Turning from drama to talk, ­chapter 5 considers emerging forms of radio speech
in formats ranging from scheduled talks to professional announcing. As a medium
for electric voice amplification, radio played a pivotal role in facilitating broader
shifts in early twentieth-​century oratorical style but also provoked severe cultural
anxieties surrounding those changes. Severing voices from their bodily referents
and bringing distant, unknown others into the intimate space of the home, radio
sparked significant debate over preferred modes of vocal comportment and estab-
lished powerful new disciplinary regimes to regulate on-​air speaking styles. As the
public faces of radio, members of a new class of professional announcers were cel-
ebrated as exemplars of preferred forms of radio speech but also formed the focus
for debates surrounding the radio voice’s potentially threatening powers and abuses.
The regimes of vocal discipline pursued by these figures emphasized special care in
enunciation, controlled rate of speech, and proper modulation that were justified as
responses to perceived demands of the radio microphone. In addition, these radio
voices were required to strike a delicate balance between formality and informality
for a medium whose one-​to-​many mode of address and intimate reception contexts
unsettled traditional boundaries between the public and private spheres. While
14 Introduction
mastery of these rules was upheld as a sign of professional distinction, the chapter
argues that these new regimes of electric speech quickly spread across neighboring
sound media and informed broader transformations in preferred styles of public
speaking. Privileging direct and “natural” performances over a more traditional style
of grand oratory, radio facilitated much larger shifts in the nation’s voice culture that
were thinkable only within the context of the broadcasting era and its associated
technologies of electric sound reproduction.
 1
MA K I NG RA D I O T IME

Managing Broadcasting’s Sonic Flows

Radio’s development during the 1920s as a medium of electric sound enter-

tainment proceeded along two fronts: crafting carefully orchestrated sonic flows and
radiogenic programming genres (the “what” of broadcasting), and developing produc-
tion techniques and performance styles tailored to the perceived needs of emerging
technologies of electric sound reproduction (the “how” of broadcasting). Pursuing a
broader, macro-​level analysis, this chapter and the next take up the first line of devel-
opment, exploring strategies of program arrangement and genre construction used to
manage radio’s cultural output and structure listener engagement with early broad-
cast content. As not merely a sound art but also a time-​based medium, radio under-
went a rapid rise to prominence in the 1920s dependent in large part on techniques
for sequencing of programming units and stabilization of daily and weekly program
schedules. Through this emergent art of program arrangement, broadcasters created
standardized products that could be placed in competition with those of other sta-
tions to attract and hold listener attention, while helping audiences navigate radio’s
otherwise unbroken streams of live entertainment and integrate them into their every-
day lives. However, these frenzied bids for attention were grounded in a countervail-
ing threat of distraction that they continually affirmed and renewed, contributing
to what Jonathan Crary has called early twentieth-​century modernity’s constitutive
“crisis of attentiveness,” while their associated programming flows produced a new

15
16 Making Radio
temporal order abstracted from the rhythms of everyday experience onto which they
were grafted.1 Radio’s development as an art of sound entertainment thus demanded
techniques of time management to order its sonic flows, as well as mechanisms to help
naturalize its resulting programming structures.
As a means of entry into this emerging landscape of radio programming, I offer
two examples of popular representations of broadcast listening from the early 1920s.
The first, a 1922 Columbia phonograph recording titled Cohen at the Wireless, fea-
tured vaudevillian Joe Hayman as his stock character Sam Cohen, trying to navigate
the controls of a wireless set and tune in the broadcast of a popular music program
from a station operated by the fictive Daily Dispatch newspaper. After a few seconds,
the station’s signal is overlaid with a second transmission of an opera singer from
a competing station, causing Cohen to cry out in exasperation, then, hitting upon
an expedient solution, declare, “Alright. . . . With one ear I’ll listen to you, with the
other ear I’ll listen to the band.” When a third station adds its own musical selec-
tion to the mix, he appeals to the set’s manufacturer, exclaiming, “Mr. Macaroni!
Mr. Macaroni [sic]! I only got two ears! How can I listen to three things?. . . . By
golly what a noise!” As a fourth transmission of a wireless telephone call between
ships at sea interrupts the other three signals, Cohen switches off his set to close the
scene, proclaiming, “I don’t care anyhow—​because if this is listening in, I’m listen-
ing out!”2 The second example, a 1924 Bell Syndicate cartoon titled “The Radio Fan
Commuter,” depicts a businessman rushing home after work to catch a scheduled
radio feature. Showing the train and station in the distance, it places the business-
man in the foreground, the radio pages from his newspaper clutched tightly in hand
and the rest of the paper fluttering away behind him. His knees raised in full sprint,
he declares, “I don’t see why they start broadcasting a feature like that so early.” A cap-
tion explains, “Commuters always did run to the trains,” but “Now lots of them are
running from the trains.”3
These examples speak to what Paddy Scannell, drawing on the philosophy of
Martin Heidegger, calls broadcasting’s “care structure,” or “the human thought,
effort and intention that has gone into producing the thing as that which it is.”4
Normally taken for granted and invisible to its users, the care structure of radio and
television, Scannell explains, is defined by their everydayness, as media designed for
availability whenever and wherever they are wanted, that can be seamlessly inte-
grated into users’ lives. This care structure, he continues, requires both a high degree
of usability at the level of the technical apparatus and a reliability of content at the
level of programming: “I turn on the . . . set with faith in the technology . . . as a reli-
able utility” and expectation that broadcasters will in turn “fill time on the air with
something for radio owners to listen to,” sequenced in a manner that is predictable
and easily navigable.5
 Making Radio Time 17

Figure 1.1 Radio programmers worked to integrate program schedules into existing rhythms and
routines of everyday life. “The Radio Fan Commuter” (1924), George H. Clark Radioana Collection,
Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Cohen’s hapless struggle with his wireless set speaks to initial problems of usabil-
ity, or challenges of basic functionality at the level of the device itself, though equally
the problem of a steady supply of regularly sequenced content; radio listening as
depicted here teeters between delight in the unexpected and wanton chaos but in
either case lacks the regularity and predictability seen two years later with the radio
commuter. The latter suggests usability as now a nonissue, no longer worthy of
comment, and an evolution of programming from random offerings to preplanned
sequences around which listener expectations may be organized, though also dem-
onstrating continued struggles in successfully arranging those programs to facilitate
their easy integration into users’ lives. In both examples, Scannell’s care structure of
broadcasting is affirmed but has not yet achieved its desired invisibility and taken-​
for-​grantedness, remaining a matter of explicit cultural commentary and debate.
18 Making Radio
As Heidegger notes, technologies whose function has been firmly established and
operate reliably possess a “handiness” that permits usage without conscious reflec-
tion. While radio’s intended function as a medium of everyday sound entertainment
was clear by 1924, it retained what Heidegger would describe as a “conspicuousness
[that] presents the thing at hand in a certain unhandiness,” as a technology that has
yet to reliably fulfill its expected use and recede into the background as a taken-​
for-​granted part of everyday experience.6
Hayman’s record, as Michael Biel observes in his work on the early radio and
recording industries, was one of several to take aim at the phonograph’s new com-
petitor during a period of rapid expansion for broadcasting that early radio historian
Gleason Archer has labeled “one of the most extraordinary booms in the history
of the American people.”7 As Susan Douglas explains, radio listening during the
opening years of this boom period was an “exploratory listening,” pursued by “dis-
tance fishers” or “DXers,” who built their own sets and reveled in pulling in sig-
nals of faraway stations, but by the middle years of the decade had shifted to a new
culture of program appreciation catering to general audiences whose interest lay
less in the technology itself than in the entertainment content it provided.8 This
effort to cultivate a less technically minded listening demographic stemmed in part
from economic interests of equipment manufacturers, which trade magazine Radio
Broadcast revealed in a 1923 survey also controlled more than 40 percent of licensed
stations (more than three times that of any other class of license holder).9 Already
in 1922, editors of Electrical Merchandising warned that long-​term growth required
catering not to the technically minded “radio nut” but instead to the “radio fan” who
“is interested in radio . . . solely for the entertainment it will bring him in enabling
him to pick up music, lectures, weather reports and time signals from the air.”10 By
1923, more than half of set sales were prefabricated units with simplified controls
designed to appeal to this burgeoning “fan” demographic, with stations following
suit to develop more rationally planned programming schedules that could better
attract and hold their growing audience of lay listeners.11
As the first half of this chapter shows, the push for regularization of program
schedules was not just the product of economic considerations but was also shaped
by three key policy provisions in federal radio regulation: (1) a licensing system that
privileged broadcasts of live entertainment over recorded content, (2) authoriza-
tion of private licensees operating in direct competition for listeners, and (3) preju-
dice against niche broadcasting in favor of a “well-​rounded,” balanced program. As
Carolyn Marvin notes, “media are not fixed natural objects” and “have no natural
edges,” with the boundaries between them often blurry or unclear.12 The first policy
provision sought to harden these edges by creating a forcible separation between
broadcasting and phonography; radio would not be a mere relaying device to extend
 Making Radio Time 19
the reach of existing media but was instead positioned as a new studio art charged
with developing its own programming content and production techniques. While
other national broadcasting systems also privileged live programming during this
period, the second policy provision remained unique to US broadcasting for most
of the decade and placed the need for techniques of program planning at a premium.
As Scannell notes in his coauthored history with David Cardiff, whereas state-​run
broadcasting in countries like the United Kingdom “deliberately shunned” practices
of “fixed scheduling” until the 1930s, with radio instead “thought of as an occasional
resource, like the theatre, cinema or concert hall,” US broadcasting’s emphasis on
private enterprise and free-​market competition created a more immediate need for
product standardization and rationalized methods of program construction.13 The
mandate for balanced programming has, for its part, been addressed at length by
Robert McChesney, who critiques its bias against specialized content for political
and cultural minorities as harmful to democratic expression and informed debate.14
However, this final regulatory provision not only affected whose voices were heard
but also produced a crisis in program planning, demanding programs and sched-
uling strategies sufficiently unified to hold listener attention while simultaneously
conforming to requirements for varied content with broad appeal.
Executing this emerging art of program planning, as the second half of the chap-
ter shows, demanded the development of a series of both internal and external con-
trols. The key internal control mechanism for program development, I argue, was
the program log. As Lisa Gitelman observes, the burgeoning industrial economy
of late nineteenth-​century and early twentieth-​century capitalism relied heavily on
a corresponding “scriptural economy” of paper documents, which shaped ways of
thinking and knowing across a wide range of institutions.15 Program logs were used
for external evidentiary purposes (documenting broadcasting activities for reports
to federal licensing officials) but also for internal tracking and schedule planning, in
ways that facilitated the rationalization of programming output and yielded strate-
gies for managing broadcast flow that remain in use today. Program logs commodi-
fied radio time, dividing the broadcast day into regularly spaced, interchangeable
units abstracted from their immediate use value and freed from the particularities
of content or listening context. Contrary to the received view that regularization of
program schedules was a product of network radio’s practices of time sales during
the second half of the decade, I argue that network practices depended on the prior
rationalization and standardization of broadcast time in the early to mid-​1920s; put
another way, time sales did not commodify broadcast time so much as the com-
modification of broadcast time enabled time sales. In this sense, radio contributed
not only to later network-​era practices but also to much broader shifts in temporal
experience addressed by scholars of turn-​of-​the-​century visual culture. As Mary Ann
20 Making Radio
Doane argues in her work on “cinematic time,” “in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, time became increasingly reified, standardized, and rational-
ized,” with “new technologies of representation, such as photography, phonography,
and the cinema” proving “crucial to modernity’s reconceptualization of time and its
representability.”16 While rarely mentioned in work on modernity’s shifting struc-
tures of temporality, the emergence of radio time converged with that of cinematic
time to effect much larger transformations in experiences of modern life.17
However, the integration of radio time into structures of everyday experience
depended not only on internal controls used by broadcasters and federal regulators
to sustain and monitor industry operations; equally important were external con-
trols designed to help listeners understand and engage with broadcasting’s emerg-
ing temporal flows. As Scannell notes, “In discovering who they were broadcasting
to . . . broadcasters had to reflect on the circumstances of listening and viewing and
the conditions in which these activities took place,” building their programming
schedules on existing daily routines of their intended audiences.18 At the same time,
radio time as a time abstracted from any particular place of production or recep-
tion was also foreign to and often at odds with the existing temporal rhythms onto
which it was grafted, leading to inevitable conflicts and confusion such as those
dramatized in the example of the radio commuter; radio time, in other words, did
not simply build on but also redefined existing structures of experience. To help
listeners navigate these new temporalities and integrate them into their daily lives,
I argue, broadcasters relied on both the broadcast text itself and external media such
as newspaper listings. For the former, announcer’s continuity helped listeners deter-
mine their place in time within the current schedule, facilitate transitions between
programs, and establish horizons of expectations for upcoming features later in the
day or week. As “paratexts” or “secondary texts,” newspaper listings in turn shaped
engagement with the primary broadcast text by converting the program schedule
into a form listeners could easily navigate and permitting comparisons of compet-
ing offerings by different stations across standardized time slots.19 Together, these
in-​text and paratextual controls helped to naturalize otherwise foreign structures
of broadcast time and translate them from an industrial modality of administra-
tive usage into something meaningful and useful for audiences within the period’s
emerging culture of program appreciation.
Cutting across the methods of program development addressed in this chapter
was a concern not simply with strategies of time management but also with a cor-
responding management of listener attention. Program production and scheduling
decisions were cast throughout this decade as matters of capturing and holding lis-
tener attention—​goals that became ever more elusive the more earnestly they were
sought. In his discussion of distracted radio listening, David Goodman argues that
 Making Radio Time 21
problems of attention rose to the fore in the 1930s and were closely tied to discourses
of citizenship; inattentive listening, he explains, was seen as a danger to rational
decision-​making and informed debate, with listeners exhorted to cultivate respon-
sible listening habits as a matter of public duty.20 However, as Kate Lacey notes in
a corrective to Goodman’s account, this problem of inattentive listening was a per-
vasive one for broadcasters from the start: the constant availability of broadcasting
that defined radio’s care structure also posed a continual threat to listener attention,
while radio’s privatized modes of reception made listening habits seemingly impos-
sible to police.21 Jonathan Crary has argued that this crisis of attentiveness was a
defining feature of modernity writ large, where “changing configurations of capital-
ism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds, with an
endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of informa-
tion, and then respond with new methods of managing and regulating perception.”
However, these efforts to discipline perception and train attention continually fell
short of their goals, revealing “a subject incapable of conforming to such disciplinary
imperatives” and intensifying the very crisis they were meant to resolve.22 If program
planning worked to tame the wandering ear, pulling in audiences that grazed across
the dial and holding their attention across time, these strategies were premised on
the construction of a distracted subject whose fundamental state of inattentiveness
they continually affirmed and reproduced. Methods of program planning developed
during the 1920s thus simultaneously responded to and intensified radio’s crisis of
attentiveness, which would loom equally large in debates over the production of
broadcast music, drama, and talk addressed in subsequent chapters.

Industrial Exigencies: Conditions and

Strategies of Program Making

The Marxist maxim that people make history but in conditions not of their own
making holds as true for media workers as it does for other regions of cultural pro-
duction: mediamakers create the products of popular culture, but under circum-
stances not of their own design.23 Regulatory controls are a vital factor in structuring
these conditions of media production and remain a privileged node of analysis for
top-​down modes of media historiography oriented toward macro-​level critiques of
policymaking and media ownership. In his explanation of this approach, McChesney
explains that content analysis is of little concern for such studies, as content is deter-
mined predominantly by ownership, with ownership structures in turn controlled
by regulatory policies.24 The mid-​level approach I have advocated in the introduc-
tory chapter recognizes the importance of these macro-​level industrial and regula-
tory structures, but it challenges the proposition that the “what” of broadcasting
22 Making Radio
proceeds in so straightforward a manner from the “who” and inquires equally into
the “how,” or means by which that content is created. Simply put, if regulatory provi-
sions structure conditions of mediamaking, the task is to understand not simply the
nature of those structural conditions but also how they impact concrete practices of
media production pursued by media workers in the course of their everyday labors.
While I focus, to begin with, more on structural constraints and their impact on
practices of program planning, the programming methods I discuss did not follow
in any necessary manner from these structural conditions. An ecological analogy
might be appropriate here: while regulatory provisions created a certain environ-
ment within which producers could operate, the strategies they developed were no
more preordained than the behavior of a given species can be read in advance off
of the environment it inhabits; to explain the activities that occur within a given
environment, one cannot merely map the environment itself but must also examine
the activities one aims to explain. The point here is not to revive the tired debate of
structure versus agency (a false dichotomy from the start) but rather to understand
how a group of social agents with its own vested interests and concerns navigated the
structural constraints imposed on them. If in this section of the chapter, then, I place
greater emphasis on structural factors, in subsequent sections I shift to a closer con-
sideration of the programming strategies developed by the producers on whom those
structural factors were brought to bear and the means by which those strategies were
made intelligible to period audiences. Specifically, the present section aims to eluci-
date historical ramifications of three key policy provisions: (1) an emphasis on “live”
programming, (2) a system rooted in open competition between private licensees,
and (3) privileging of varied and balanced programming over countervailing strate-
gies of station specialization. Although by no means exhaustive of salient regulatory
measures adopted during this period, these three factors, I argue, played a founda-
tional role in spurring programming’s swift development during the early and middle
years of the decade while simultaneously limiting the forms it could take. Defining
the parameters within which broadcast workers could operate and the larger institu-
tional imperatives to which they responded, mandates for liveness, private competi-
tion, and variety both enabled and constrained the decade’s emergent practices of
program construction, structuring radio’s emerging patterns of sonic flows.

Inventing Liveness: Broadcasting as Studio Art

“Liveness,” once taken for granted as a defining characteristic of radio and of broad-
casting in general, has in recent decades been reinterpreted as not a medium-​specific
essence but rather a social construct used to shape understandings of and engage-
ment with broadcasting. As Jane Feuer puts it, liveness is not an “ontology” but an
 Making Radio Time 23
“ideology,” with John Caldwell similarly debunking what he calls “the liveness myth”
as a fiction sustained both by industry discourse and by scholarly naiveté.25 However,
ideologies and mythologies do not merely distort reality but also produce and sup-
port it, authorizing real sets of material practices pursued within concrete institu-
tional contexts. Analyzing the ideology of liveness thus demands asking not simply
what it disguised and submerged but also what practices and realities it created and
sustained. Prenetwork-​era policy discourse proved central to the production and
naturalization of this ideology, which in turn authorized a series of formative eco-
nomic practices and production methods that became synonymous with radio itself.
Economically, the ideology of liveness facilitated the emergence of a commer-
cial network system whose space-​binding potential abetted larger projects of mod-
ern nation building, positioning radio, as Michele Hilmes puts it, as the “voice of
a nation” whose far-​flung corners it drew together to partake in shared national
events.26 Aesthetically, liveness defined what Scannell calls a “communicative ethos”
of broadcasting that shaped dominant performance styles, favoring an “intimate style”
that Neil Verma notes was one of several options for producers but by the height of
the network era was “so widespread as a tactic that critics have tended to confuse
its effects with those of the medium itself.”27 While recognizing the importance of
“liveness” for sustaining economic models and aesthetic practices that would come
to define network-​era broadcasting, I wish to go one step further and argue that this
ideology during the prenetwork era also created the very possibility for “radio” as
an autonomous industry and art form. While no medium emerges fully formed or
possesses a single point of origin, at the level of policy discourse, it is possible to pin-
point a specific date at which the centrality of liveness to radio’s identity was consoli-
dated, with the issuance of licensing guidelines for a newly created category of Class B
broadcasting stations by the Department of Commerce in September 1922.
Isolated experiments with broadcasting may be traced as far back as 1906, and the
beginnings of more regular service to the years immediately leading up to World
War I, but a government ban halted all private use of radio frequencies during the war,
delaying concerted expansion of broadcasting activity until after 1919.28 Initial post-
war broadcasts were pursued by low-​power amateur stations in the shortwave region
of the radio spectrum (above 200 meters/​below 1,500 kHz).29 However, in response
to growing interest from commercial concerns, regulators in the Department of
Commerce’s Bureau of Navigation created a “limited commercial service” license
in September 1921 for broadcasting at 360 meters (833 kHz) and in December 1921
added a second channel at 485 meters (619 kHz) “for broadcasting crop reports and
weather forecasts,” reserving the 360-​meter channel for “broadcasting news, concerts,
lectures, and such matter.”30 Responding to concerns about the quality and reliabil-
ity of amateur broadcasts, in January 1922 the bureau imposed a permanent ban on
24 Making Radio
transmissions of “weather reports, market reports, music, concerts, speeches, news
or similar information or entertainment” by amateur stations, limiting broadcasting
exclusively to commercial license holders.31 Immediately deluged by applications for
commercial licenses, regulators created a new channel at 400 meters, designating
license holders operating at 360 meters as Class A stations and those licensed for 400
meters as Class B stations, which it warned would be held to higher standards.32
Class B licensing standards included seven technical criteria, plus three criteria
governing the type of service these stations would provide. Technical criteria focused
mainly on the station’s transmitting apparatus, including (1) ability to maintain a
wavelength “reasonably free of harmonics,” (2) a “dependable and nonfluctuating
power supply” capable of maintaining a minimum transmission level of 500 watts,
(3) transmitting equipment that accurately modulated the carrier wave “according to
the sound impressed upon the microphone system,” (4) ample supply of “tubes and
other material” to “ensure continuity and reliability of the announced schedule of ser-
vice,” and (5) a stably mounted antenna constructed so “as to prevent swinging.” The
final two technical criteria focused on studio construction, requiring (6) a “depend-
able system . . . for communication between the operating room and the studio” and
(7) a studio “so arranged as to avoid sound reverberation and to exclude external and
unnecessary noise.” Requirements for programming service, for their part, focused less
on particulars of programming content than on the nature of the reproducing medium
and scheduling matters, stipulating that (1) “programs must be carefully supervised
and maintained to insure satisfactory service to the public,” (2) “mechanically operated
musical instruments may be used only in an emergency and during intermission peri-
ods in regular programs,” and (3) “where two or more stations of class B are licensed in
the same city or locality,” time would be divided between them.33
In his revisionist history of broadcast policy, Thomas Streeter argues that the
technology-​driven emphasis of early radio regulations worked to support an ide-
ology of corporate liberalism that affirmed technological progress as a necessary
precondition for improvements in social welfare and positioned commercial corpo-
rations as best equipped to bring these technologies and improvements to fruition.34
Explicit discussion of programming in the preceding guidelines is admittedly thin,
save for the general requirement that programs provide a “public service” (itself bor-
rowed from the language of public utility regulation).35 However, embedded in the
otherwise technical language of these guidelines is an entire definition of the radio
medium that would have a profound impact on early program development:

• First, as suggested by the provisions governing studio design, radio is treated

as fundamentally a studio art, rooted in performances of musicians delivered
via studio microphones.
 Making Radio Time 25
• Second, this studio art is one based on live performances, distancing radio
from its phonographic cousin while also precluding transcription of perfor-
mances in the studio or off-​site to be aired at a later date.
• Third, these performances are aired not as random offerings but as part of
a preplanned and preannounced schedule that is “carefully supervised and
maintained” by the station responsible.

As the opening example of Cohen’s travails with his wireless set suggests, this defini-
tion did not necessarily reflect the reality of broadcasting in 1922 but instead worked
to call into being a new reality. Policy discourse, as a form of legal speech, is performa-
tive by nature, functioning not as a neutral description but instead creating the thing
it describes, imbued with the power and authority to call into existence something
that does not yet exist.36 Policy discourse in this case did not simply identify and
describe radio and its differences from neighboring recording media; rather, it cre-
ated those differences, through them working to constitute radio as a new medium.
Representing what Rick Altman calls “jurisdictional conflicts” whose resolutions
are vital to the social construction of new technologies, this division between radio
and recording media was by no means given, demanding repeated and explicit elab-
oration over the course of the decade.37 Strengthening the language of the initial
September 1922 regulations that had permitted continued use of recordings dur-
ing intermissions and emergencies, the Department of Commerce’s commissioner
of navigation issued a revised statement in October 1922 stipulating that “the use
of mechanically operated instruments is prohibited” without exception, explain-
ing to fellow regulators that such usage of the medium “interfere[s]‌with the higher
classes of service” of which it was capable.38 During the second half of the decade,
the newly created Federal Radio Commission (established by the 1927 Radio Act as
the nation’s new radio regulatory authority) eased restrictions to permit transcrip-
tions prepared exclusively for broadcast purposes but affirmed earlier biases against
playing commercial records, arguing that “such programs are not original programs”
and “can be obtained by the public for reproduction upon their own instruments,”
therefore constituting an inherently lower class of service.39 In his discussion of what
he calls the “specificity thesis,” whose importance for shaping development of early
programming genres is elaborated in subsequent chapters, Noël Carroll notes that
arguments invoking ideals of medium specificity commonly conflate best uses of a
medium with uses that exploit capabilities purportedly unique to it.40 Policy dis-
course in the 1920s exemplified this tendency, positioning live broadcasts as inher-
ently superior uses of the medium that offered original content obtainable solely
through radio and exploited seemingly unique qualities that set this medium apart
from its phonographic cousin.
26 Making Radio
As with any ideology, the ideology of liveness never fully matched the reality of
the practices it described. As Alexander Russo notes, transcription services were
used by stations throughout the initial recording ban period, and networks them-
selves quietly entered the transcription market while continuing to publicly promote
radio as an essentially live medium.41 Nor were theoretical equations of liveness with
superior quality always borne out in actual experience. Walter L. Vanaman, manager
of Baltimore station WEAR, responded to a “lack of good orchestras” in the area
from 1922 to 1924 by announcing phonograph recordings as live renditions from
a fictitious house band called the “Orioles” and received few complaints; in fact,
Vanaman recalled some years later, “local musicians were puzzled at the quality of
our studio orchestra,” whose performances proved the envy of other broadcasters.42
Recorded content could produce superior results even when audiences were aware
of its recorded status. Audiences for Chicago station WENR’s popular Sunshine
Hour program, for instance, objected vigorously to the station’s decision in 1928 to
replace commercial recordings of musicians with inferior studio talent. Receiving
seven hundred complaints during the first week of the show’s new run, WENR offi-
cials explained to listeners that the decision to “[employ] one of Chicago’s finest
seven-​piece string ensembles and one of the City’s most accomplished organists to
replace the [phonograph] reproductions” was necessary for compliance with federal
mandates for live programming, expressing their regrets “that the change was not
a[t]‌all satisfactory” to Sunshine audiences.43
But if discourses of liveness did not necessarily match actual experiences and prac-
tices, that mismatch was only possible within the context of a studio art that the
ideology of liveness had already served to authorize and normalize. Broadcasters’
production activities were predicated on a prior act of policymaking, with radio-
making possible only insofar as radio was itself already made in and through policy
discourse that called this medium into being and established its boundaries with
other, neighboring sound media. Radio, from 1922 onward, would exist as a new stu-
dio art rooted in live performances organized into preplanned schedules. However,
the content of those performances and schedules were as yet uncertain, awaiting
determination by an emerging class of broadcasting professionals.

Sound Competition: The Battle for Listener Attention

Past scholarship on broadcast policy in the 1920s has sought to highlight an

emerging regulatory bias favoring commercial stations that was justified through a
rationale of spectrum scarcity. Class B licenses were in particularly high demand
at the start of the broadcasting boom, as the precursor to what the Federal Radio
Commission (FRC) in the late 1920s reclassified as “cleared channel” stations that
 Making Radio Time 27
enjoyed exclusive use of their frequencies and higher wattage that gave them greater
geographical coverage, larger audiences, and corresponding gains in cultural influ-
ence. As Hilmes argues, early licensing criteria, while not overtly discriminatory,
produced a de facto corporate preferment by requiring a higher grade of equipment
beyond the reach of most applicants, favoring “owners with deep pockets and almost
always related commercial interests.”44 This corporate bias was further consolidated
in the frequency reallocation plan adopted by FRC officials in 1928, which granted
cleared-​channel licenses to “general public service” stations that cultivated a broader
listenership over “propaganda” stations targeting narrower audiences—​a distinction
that in practice, McChesney has argued, discriminated against specialized nonprofit
religious, labor, and educational institutions and “rewarded commercial broadcast-
ers far in excess of other radio users.”45 To justify these policy measures, regulators
invoked a rationale of spectrum scarcity, explaining, “There is not room in the broad-
cast band for every school of thought, religious, political, social, and economic, each
to have its separate broadcasting station, its mouthpiece in the ether.”46 Bandwidth,
in other words, was a finite resource for which demand outstripped supply, justifying
prioritization of some stations and broadcast services over others.
This corporate bias was no mere ideological fiction, with Department of
Commerce reports in 1923 listing 70 percent of stations on the air licensed to com-
mercial concerns, in a trend that persisted through the end of the decade and into
the network era that followed.47 However, highlighting discriminatory licensing
practices and the limited range of voices dominating the airwaves during this decade
can also create a distorted picture, masking the concurrent explosion in numbers
of broadcast licensees and rapid expansion of broadcasting channels that together
shaped a broadcasting landscape unique for its time and directly impacted early pro-
gramming strategies. Following its addition of the 400-​meter channel in fall 1922,
the Department of Commerce continued an aggressive policy of spectrum realloca-
tion over the course of the next year, opening a large cluster of frequencies formerly
reserved for ship-​to-​ship wireless telegraphy to create an expanded broadcasting
band that by 1924 encompassed all wavelengths from 545 to 200 meters (550 to 1,500
kHz).48 Although reassigning some licensees to different channels to reduce inter-
ference, the FRC’s reallocation scheme in the closing years of the decade preserved
this broadcasting band (now from 550 to 200 meters) and fixed the total number of
channels at ninety-​six.49 While the corporate preferment critique reveals important
regulatory biases that would pave the way for a network-​dominated broadcasting
system in subsequent decades, its portrait of a broadcasting environment dominated
by a small number of commercial stations and corresponding paucity of listening
options occludes what, from another perspective, might be viewed as an astound-
ing surfeit of broadcasting activity during the prenetwork period, as competing
28 Making Radio
stations took to the air and locked horns in a frenzied struggle to attract and hold
their audiences.
Program development became the primary weapon in this battle for listener atten-
tion. As Scannell notes, regularly scheduled programming, now the norm for broad-
casting worldwide, initially bore strong associations with an “American system” that
was actively resisted by other countries.50 This system, Hilmes explains, favoring pri-
vate licensees operating in direct competition with one another, appeared from with-
out as “chaotic” and a cautionary tale compared with the more limited and contained
state-​run systems adopted by other countries.51 At base, however, the challenge of
the American system was only secondarily one of controlling its vast numbers of pri-
vately licensed broadcasters and foremost a matter of controlling listener attention.
British program building, explain Scannell and Cardiff, “was designed to encourage
attentive listening and to discourage the lazy listener” by rejecting regularly sched-
uled programming in favor of specially scheduled features, with pauses inserted
between them to deter inattentive “tap listening” and “let people . . . recompose
themselves after a particularly stirring drama or concert.”52 American broadcasters,
by contrast, forever fearful of listener attrition, favored always-​on, continuous pro-
gramming streams designed to hold their audiences across multiple features, eschew-
ing breaks both within and between programs lest, as one station representative put
it, the radio fan grow disinterested or “thinks the fault is with his set and changes
tuning.”53 To corral the attention of the fickle radio audience, continually lured by
the promise of something better, demanded back-​to-​back programming that offered
a constant stream of successive stimuli.
However, broadcasters during the first part of the decade also came under increas-
ing fire by critics for their failure to organize these program offerings into sufficiently
regularized schedules and arrange them into coherent units that followed a logical
progression. In spring 1924, Raymond Francis Yates, critic for the New York Herald-​
Tribune, sympathetically reported the plight of one letter writer who regularly
“hurr[ied] home from the office to tune in WJZ and try to get the baseball scores”
but found the station failed to read them at the announced time and some nights
even dropped them altogether.54 In a separate column that spring, Yates affirmed
that this was equally a problem for radio critics, lamenting that “the hebdomadal
reviewer of advance radio programs cannot always feel that the features he com-
ments upon will actually be broadcast.”55 Even when programs aired as scheduled,
he complained, their arrangement suffered from poor planning, with “each broad-
caster [having] grabbed off a time allotment [that] must be filled at all costs, with
little or no thought given to the matter of finding the proper kind of talent, and,
having found it, arranging it in presentable fashion.”56 Revoicing his grievance in a
1925 book with popular radio host Samuel Rothafel, Yates lamented that there was
 Making Radio Time 29
currently “no science, no system, and little judgment used in the assembly of a list
of events that may reach the ears of hundreds of thousands of people,” warning that
greater attention to “the architecture of program construction” was needed if radio
was to survive and prosper. “The rankest kind of a ten-​twenty-​thirty melodrama,” he
added, “always manages to dispose of its villain in the last act . . . but radio programs
can boast of no set construction. They are aimless and wandering.”57
If station competition had on one hand spurred the development of programming
sequenced in an uninterrupted stream of on-​air entertainment, it also threatened to
devolve that programming into a formless miscellany lacking internal unity or coher-
ence. “Unity is a quality inseparable from anything that is well constructed,” argued
Radio Broadcast critic John Wallace, “whether it is a watch or play or a sermon or a
railway station,” and “the inconsistent program” that lacked any clear progression or
unifying force was “very annoying” to its listener, who grew quickly disaffected and
tuned out in search of more compelling listening options.58 New York World critic
Paul Sifton similarly inveighed against “hodge-​podge nights” at stations whose pro-
grams were lacking in coherence, featuring a poorly wrought mishmash of the latest
musical hits.59 Station competition, though serving as an initial impetus for program
development, thus at the same time produced a growing crisis of program planning.
Efforts to resolve this crisis would yield techniques for managing broadcast flow
addressed in the second half of this chapter. However, these techniques were further
complicated by one final regulatory factor, with policymakers demanding varied
and balanced program schedules that stood in seemingly stark opposition to grow-
ing demands by critics for greater unity and coherence in program construction.

Producing the “Well-​Rounded” Program

The final regulatory requirement with which early program producers contended
was a mandate for balanced programming. A number of station representatives con-
tinued to promote the merits of station “specialization” well into the middle years of
the 1920s, cultivating niche audiences through narrowcast programming. From the
start, however, these practices proved controversial for an industry bent on growing
its consumer base as large and fast as possible. Federal mandates during the second
half of the decade for “well-​rounded” programming spelled the final demise of spe-
cialization, demanding alternative strategies for reconciling conflicting demands of
unity and variety in period programming schedules.
As one answer to the dangers of the “hodge-​podge” program that attempted to
appeal to all constituencies in the course of a single evening, a number of broad-
casters throughout the 1920s pursued countervailing strategies of station special-
ization. As Rothafel and Yates explained in their 1925 volume, “a school-​boy can
30 Making Radio
see that it is impossible to make up a universally interesting program,” with “spe-
cialization . . . [offering] a needed departure that would snatch broadcasting from
the humdrum path and place it on an equal footing with the theater and the maga-
zine in range of appeal and breadth of entertainment.” Instead of furnishing a pro-
gramming stream with something for everyone, “Stations devoted to the interest of
women, jazz, chamber music, or science would soon build up a clientele of listeners
who would find the things that they were most interested in.”60 A number of sta-
tions pursued such practices from an early date. Stations dedicated to religious or
educational broadcasting accounted for approximately one third of licensees dur-
ing the first half of the decade, and a number of commercially owned stations also
pursued more specialized programming.61 Chicago Edison Company station KYW,
for instance, devoted its initial 1921–​1922 season exclusively to opera performances,
while the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company similarly launched WBAL in 1925 as
“The Station of Good Music,” being in the words of its director, Frederick R. Huber,
“one of the first broadcasters in the country to assume definitely an attitude against
jazz.”62 As late as fall 1927, the director of Chicago’s WLS, Edgar L. Bill, affirmed
the Sears and Roebuck station’s commitment to programming for rural audiences
and insisted to other broadcasters at the industry’s annual National Association of
Broadcasters Convention, “There is opportunity and hope in specializing. If you
can do one thing better than any other station you will get an audience and you will
cash in on it.”63
However, countervailing pressures for more balanced programming were equally
evident from early on, becoming further codified in federal regulations during the
second half of the decade. Equipment manufacturers who owned the majority of
stations during the early 1920s promoted varied programming output as a means
of cultivating a broader listenership and aiding sales of radio receivers. For this rea-
son, The Radio Dealer lauded program director Jessie E. Koewing at Bamberger’s
WOR, who explained that “our aim today [is] offering . . . entertainment of varied
character” for broad appeal, while a review of the Shepard Store’s WNAC in Boston
published in Radio Merchandising likewise advised that “The varied program [is]
essential to best results,” explaining that if patrons in the store disliked the current
program selection, they had only to wait a minute for something different to take
its place.64 RCA’s David Sarnoff similarly touted the virtues of “the ‘balanced pro-
gram’ ” in a speech to retailers and station executives at the 1925 Radio Exposition in
New York, contending that “variety is truly the ‘spice’ of broadcast programs” and
was essential for continued industry growth.65 The FRC affirmed and codified this
emphasis on varied programming in its 1928 licensing guidelines, explaining that
“the entire listening public within the service area of a station . . . is entitled to service
from that station,” such that “if . . . all the programs transmitted are intended for, and
 Making Radio Time 31
interesting or valuable to, only a small portion of that public, the rest of the listeners
are being discriminated against.” While assuring licensees that it did “not propose to
erect a rigid schedule specifying the hours or minutes that may be devoted to one
kind of program or another,” it warned that it would favor stations offering “a well-​
rounded program, in which entertainment, consisting of music of both classical and
lighter grades, religion, education and instruction, important public events, discus-
sions of public questions, weather, market reports, and news, and matters of inter-
est to all members of the family find a place.”66 For broadcasters seeking preferred
cleared-​channel frequency assignments, strategies of station specialization were no
longer a viable option.
Together, mandates for live, studio-​originated programming, a licensing system
that encouraged direct competition between stations, and privileging of well-​rounded
programming over practices of station specialization shaped the environment in
which strategies of early program planning would develop. Negotiating these strate-
gies and solidifying early schedules would require producers to develop a series of
internal control mechanisms to coordinate their station operations, as well as external
controls to communicate those scheduling decisions to the period’s growing radio
audiences and make them an accepted part of listeners’ everyday experience.

Creating Radio Time: The Program Log

In his work on the “control revolution,” James Beniger argues that increasingly
complex modes of socioeconomic organization ushered in by industrial society
demanded a series of supporting “control technologies” such as radio, which helped
disseminate information throughout large populations and coordinate private con-
sumption patterns.67 However, radio’s successful deployment in turn depended on
additional, second-​order control technologies developed within its emerging insti-
tutions to help organize and monitor daily programming output. Foremost among
these control mechanisms was the program log, which laid out daily schedules on a
neatly ordered grid. As Gitelman notes in her work on “paper knowledge,” “By divid-
ing mental labor, blanks make bureaucracy, directing and delimiting fill-​in entries”
in ways that structure forms of thought and expression for the social agents who
inhabit those bureaucratic systems.68 Viewed from this perspective, program logs did
not merely reflect emerging programming strategies but also shaped them, facilitat-
ing the production of standardized schedules. This standardization process effected
a larger commodification of broadcast time, reducing programming features to com-
mon, interchangeable units of measurement (standardized time slots), while also
allowing for grouping of programs into larger programming blocks that imposed a
32 Making Radio
logic of identity on otherwise discrete programming elements. The program log, in
short, enabled the production of what Raymond Williams famously called broadcast
“flow”: “the defining characteristic of broadcasting” resulting from the segmentation
and sequencing of programming units, which are both divided and strung together
in a manner designed to carry listeners along from one to the next.69 The program
log helped to order and regularize broadcast flow, permitting rational management
of radio time down to the last second and facilitating both the production of clearly
demarcated programming features and their organization into larger programming
blocks.
Seasonal programming has enjoyed a prominent place in radio from the start
and played an important role in development of early scheduling practices, ori-
ented around macro-​level structures of broadcast flow that followed larger seasonal
rhythms and changes. Derek Johnston and Paddy Scannell, for instance, have argued
that early broadcasting built its programming flows on existing social rituals and
cycles such as religious or state holidays and seasonal sports.70 Programming at this
seasonal level in the US included features organized around major holidays and reli-
gious events, from Halloween to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, as well
as seasonal coverage of baseball or football games during summer and fall.71 Broader
distinctions between winter and summer programming also developed from an early
date, with industry representatives arguing that listener attention varied with the
seasons and demanded corresponding shifts in programming strategies. Whereas
in the winter, reasoned one commentator in the February 1923 issue of The Radio
Dealer, “Radio’s greatest selling-​point is that it is ‘the center of the cozy fireside,’ ‘the
magnet that draws the family circle together’ or that ‘it brings the achievements of
the world to your living room,’ ” during the summer months “these points are not so
appealing.”72 “Programs of a light, airy nature” were needed for summer, explained
the sales manager from a Cleveland firm two months later, with “lectures, operas, and
‘heavy’ programs” best saved for winter when listeners were less distracted and able
to exert more concentration.73 Broadcasters, the journal’s editors affirmed that sum-
mer, would need to adjust their programming with the seasons, reserving “the more
solid addresses, courses, and talks” for winter and “[emphasizing] the lighter end of
program building, such as bands, humorous talks . . . and the like” for summertime.74
Beyond these larger seasonal shifts in programming, daily and weekly schedules
were also consolidated from a relatively early date. A review of the program logs of
two of the leading and better-​documented East Coast stations, WJZ and WEAF,
provides valuable insights into broader programming models pursued during this
period. Opening 1923 with a broadcast day that began in the middle of the after-
noon, WJZ featured light music by various soloists from 3:30 to 5:00, interspersed
with the occasional regularly scheduled talk such as Harper’s Bazaars Fashion Talk,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Dat de hertog een speler was, die zijn vrouw had genomen om haar
geld en dat geld met handen vol het venster uit had gesmeten,
zoodra hij het onder zijn bereik had gekregen.

Dat de hertogin eensklaps van de onderste rangen der samenleving

tot invloed en rang was geklommen en dat haar snelle stijging eerst
tot rijkdom en later tot den hoogsten stand in den lande haar hoofd
waarschijnlijk op hol en haarzelve in den waan gebracht had, dat ze
alles straffeloos mocht en kon doen.

Rijkdom en titel hadden haar denkvermogen van streek gebracht.

Zij, de hertogin, had te laat ontdekt, dat ze een dwaasheid had

gedaan, toen zij den hertog trouwde, die haar niet liefhad en niet
achtte.

Ze waren nog geen jaar getrouwd geweest en toch had hij reeds een
belangrijk gedeelte van haar onmetelijk fortuin verdobbeld en
verkwist.

Iedereen wist nu te vertellen, dat de hertogin begonnen was als

dagmeisje in een kommensalenhuis en tot rijkdom gekomen door
haar broeder, een gewoon Londensch werkman, die zijn vak geleerd
had als smidsjongen en later als gasfitter.

Velen wisten het met volkomen zekerheid te zeggen, dat de hertogin

lezen noch schrijven kon; terwijl anderen in bedekte termen te
verstaan gaven, dat haar verandering van naam, bij het verhuizen
naar New-York, haar grond vond in dingen, die in fatsoenlijk
gezelschap niet met name genoemd konden worden.

Maar als vaststaande wist een ieder, zoowel in de salons van West-
End als aan de bars in de burgerwijken te vertellen, dat de hertogin
haar man vergiftigd had, omdat zijn dobbelen en zijn losbandigheid
haar ergerden en omdat hij haar al te duidelijk en te gauw had laten
gevoelen, dat hij niet haarzelf, maar haar geld had getrouwd.

De eenige vraag, die de menschen overwogen en bespraken was:

„Waarom heeft ze hem vergiftigd?”

Niemand echter kwam op de gedachte om de vraag te stellen, die

toch allereerst had behooren te worden gedaan:

„Heeft ze hem wel vergiftigd?”

De nieuwsbladen rakelden alle mogelijke voorvallen op van eigen en

vreemden bodem, waarin hooggeplaatste giftmengers of
moordenaressen van aanzien een rol hadden gespeeld.

Zij liepen de zaak vooruit door de vermoedelijke toedracht [18]en het

vermoedelijke vonnis te fingeeren en bewerkten de openbare
meening, door verhalen van gelijksoortige gevallen in den breede op
te disschen, blijkbaar overtuigd, dat iedereen de strekking wel zou
begrijpen en het verband weten te vinden.

Voor Lily zelf waren deze dagen van angstig wachten onuitsprekelijk
droevig.

Maar zij hield zich goed; zoo goed als zij kon.

Èn toch!

De aanklacht was van dien aard, dat zij wel in staat moest zijn om
elke vrouw, de sterkste niet uitgezonderd, van schrik en ontsteltenis
te doen verstommen.

Toen Lily het gedetailleerd verslag van de lijkschouwing hoorde

voorlezen, hoe ongelooflijk schenen toen alle omstandigheden in
elkander te vatten; hoe gemakkelijk te verklaren dacht het haar toen,
dat een ieder aan haar schuld geloofde.

De geneesheeren—de gerechtelijke scheikundigen—de

verpleegsters—de detectives—de dienstboden—allen hadden
onderdeelen te vertellen van dezelfde geschiedenis; onderdeelen, die
elkander aanvulden en versterkten en die onveranderlijk hierop
neerkwamen:

De hertogin heeft haar echtgenoot vergiftigd!

Bertie was vergiftigd! Dat stond vast! Ook bij haar!

Maar wie ter wereld kon dat gedaan hebben?

En waarom?

Niet voordat zijzelve dit raadsel had vermogen op te lossen zou zij
zich schoon gewasschen achten in de oogen der menschen,—ook al
mocht het haar gelukken, door de rechters te worden vrijgesproken
bij gebrek aan voldoende bewijzen.

De arme vrouw begreep wel, dat de schijn fel tegen haar was, maar
dat iemand in volle ernst haar kon verdenken van Bertie te hebben
vergiftigd, dat wilde haar maar niet klaar worden.

De gedachte alleen was zoo monsterachtig slecht en wreed.

Wat haar echter het meest van alles deed ontstellen, was niet de
ontdekking, dat de buitenwereld haar wel degelijk verdacht, maar dat
haar eigen rechtsgeleerde raadslieden, de mannen, die haar zaken
zouden behartigen en verdedigen, klaarblijkelijk geen geloof sloegen
aan de betuigingen van onschuld van hun cliënt.

Lily zelve verdacht niemand.

Maar toch begreep ook zij, dat iemand het gedaan moest hebben—
hetzij dan de verpleegster of de dokter of een van de dienstboden of
wie dan ook,—maar één van allen moest de morphine hebben
gemengd in Berties voedsel.

Lily’s gedachten dwaalden terug naar de tijden, toen ze als de

eenvoudige miss Baker in deze zelfde stad, waarin ze thans zoo
nameloos, zoo onduldbaar veel te lijden had, kamers verhuurde.

Toen kwelden haar wel eens geldelijke zorgen; toen moest ze niet
zelden rekenen en nog eens rekenen om de maand uit te komen
zonder schulden te hebben gemaakt bij bakker, slager of kruidenier.

Wat leken die kleine, peuterige zorgen haar nu belachelijk.

Hoe had ze toch ooit kunnen tobben over zulke nietige, onbelangrijke
dingen!

Hoe had ze er toch ooit een zwaar hoofd in kunnen hebben, dat al die
kleinigheden niet terecht kwamen, in orde werden gebracht.

En ze dacht aan de leveranciers, die haar destijds hunne waren

leverden; ze haalde zich hun gelaatstrekken weer voor den geest.

En ook dacht ze aan de personen, die ze had bediend, en toen

verrees daar in haar verbeelding de nobele figuur van den
donkeroogigen student John Williams, den sympathieken jongeman,
die haar in haar huis in Onslow Gardens kwam bezoeken, omdat hij,
„als oude kennis” het zoo onaangenaam had gevonden, haar te
moeten begroeten op den soirée van lady Simpson te midden van het
banale gebabbel der gasten.

Lily herinnerde zich, hoe onhebbelijk Bertie haar dien middag had
bejegend in het bijzijn van den bezoeker, en hoe hij dien bijna
vijandig tegemoet was getreden.
Haar gedachten gingen terug naar al die andere keeren, dat de
hertog haar onhebbelijk had behandeld, onrechtvaardig ruw had
bejegend.

En ten slotte bleef zij zich in haar geest wederom bezighouden met
lord Aberdeen. Ze dacht terug aan dien slanken jongeman met de
doordringende en toch zoo trouwe oogen en het was haar als een
geruststelling, waarvan ze zich geen verklaring kon geven, dat ze
wist, dat lord Aberdeen haar niet had vergeten.

In zijn wijde „dievenjas” gehuld, zooals Charly Brand het kleedingstuk

van John C. Raffles betitelde, had lord Lister zich op weg begeven.
Nadat hij ongeveer een kwartier had voortgeloopen, nam hij een cab
en in die cab reed hij nog een groot half uur.

Daarna stapte hij uit, betaalde den koetsier met [19]een goede fooi en
liep nog vijf minuten door. Toen was hij, waar hij moest zijn.

Het huis in de dwarsstraat, dat het einddoel van zijn tocht was, was
laag van verdieping.

Lord Lister drukte drie keer op de electrische bel en toen uit een raam
van de eerste en eenige verdieping een hoofd werd gestoken, riep
hij: „Varken en koe!”

„All right,” klonk de stem terug en geen twee minuten later werd de
deur geopend, juist zoover als noodig was om den slanken bezoeker
door te laten.

„Bonjour, Hoper,” zei de nieuw aangekomene.

„Goeden middag, sir,” antwoordde de stem van den man uit het lage
huisje, „ik hoorde al aan de manier, waarop u het wachtwoord riept,
dat u het waart, graaf Harrison. Ik heb u in geen tijden gezien. Komt u
zaken doen?”

„Ja, Arthur, er moet worden ingebroken.”

„En dan komt u bij den chef van het vak, nietwaar sir?”

De „chef van het vak” zag er volstrekt niet uit, zooals onze lezers zich
hem misschien zullen voorstellen: een boeventronie met platten
neus, breeden mond, laag voorhoofd en dikke wenkbrauwen. De
„chef” was een goed gekleed man, met het voorkomen van een heer,
die beleefd boog en onmiskenbaar goede manieren had. Maar de
goede opmerker—en Arthur Hopers bezoeker was een uitnemend
observator—zag ook de weinig goeds beduidende uitdrukking in de
loerende, groene oogen van den „chef” en het leelijke lachje, dat
speelde in de hoeken van zijn dikke lippen, een lachje, dat sprak van
de grootste onbeschaamdheid.

„Kom binnen, graaf,” noodde Hoper, „ik was juist aan m’n brandy-
soda. Is er veel te verdienen?”

„Ja.”

De oogen van den inbreker glinsterden.

„En is ’t werk gevaarlijk?”

„Neen. Niet voor jou. Je hebt er enkel maar zorg voor te dragen, dat
de pakken, die ik je misschien zal aanreiken, zoo gauw mogelijk in
veiligheid worden gebracht.”

Het gelaat van den „chef” betrok desondanks.

„Loopt ’t erg in den kijker?” vroeg hij. „Heel Scotland Yard weet, dat ik
een van de gevaarlijksten van ons vak ben. Alle detectives hebben
me in hun boekje en weten op een prikje te vertellen, dat Arthur
Hoper „meneer de inbreker” is.”

Hij richtte zich in zijn volle lengte op en keek zijn bezoeker ernstig
aan.

„Als de politie me in handen krijgt, graaf, dan laat ze mij niet weer los,
en dan kon het wel eens wezen, dat ze u ook in de kladden kreeg.
Wat zou dan ’t eind van ’t liedje zijn, graaf?”

„Je waagt niets, Hoper, dat kan ik je verzekeren en ik zou in dezen je

hulp niet hebben ingeroepen, als ik die niet inderdaad noodig had.
Hoe ben je eensklaps zoo bang geworden?”

De „chef van het vak” keek den ander verbaasd aan.

„Heb je van den dood van hertog Silverton gelezen?” vroeg de

„graaf.”

„Alle duivels uit de hel! Die arme Bertie! Och graaf, u weet, dat al de
Silvertons vroeg aan hun eindje komen en als zijn vrouw het niet hem
gedaan had, dan zou—die.…..”

„Hou je mond!” viel de „graaf” in.

„’t Is anders jammer van de hertogin!

„Ik heb haar eens gezien bij de Derby-rennen. Ze zag er allemachtig

goed uit. Die zal nou heel wat jaartjes te brommen krijgen. Al neemt
ze nòg zoo’n knap advocaat, vrij krijgen doet-ie ’r toch niet! Ik
verzeker je graaf, dat ik, stevig vermomd, de rechtszitting zal
bijwonen.”

„Ken je het huis, waar de hertog is gestorven?”

„Asjeblieft graaf! Arthur kent alle voorname huizen in Londen!”

„Onze onderneming is van een beetje griezeligen aard.”

De bezoeker keek om zich heen en sprak toen op fluisterenden toon:

„We zijn hier toch onbespied?”

„We zijn hier zoo veilig als in de Bank, meneer!”

Hij nam wederom een grooten slok uit het grocglas en sprak toen met
een aanmoedigend gebaar tot zijn bezoeker:

„Heeft het zaakje wat te maken met hertogin Silverton? Hebt u die
flauwe kletspraatjes in de kranten gelezen over de hertogin? Wat
maken ze weer een kabaal, die dagbladen. Wie het meeste kabaal
maakt, heet de knapste en best ingelichte. Ze hebben al heel wat
over ’r geschreven, graaf. Eerst toen ze uit Amerika naar hier kwam!
Toen was ’t niets dan goeds en moois, wat ze van haar te vertellen
hadden en nou ze haar hoogvereerden heer gemaal zoo’n kool heeft
gestoofd, laten ze geen haar goed an d’r. En als de zaak eerst voor
de rechtbank komt, dan begint het [20]ware pas, dan wordt alles
haarfijn uitgeplozen.”

En Arthur Hoper sloot één oog om des te beter de opstijgende

koolzuurbelletjes in zijn glas te kunnen waarnemen, trok de lippen
samen en floot zachtjes een deuntje.

„Je bekendheid met de hertogelijke woning komt me uitstekend van

pas,” vervolgde nu de graaf. „Is ze van de achterzijde te bereiken?”

„Ja, dat is ze.

„De „chef” weet alles, graaf.

„Luister!
„Aan de achterzijde van de prachtige huizen in Onslow Gardens vindt
men een doorloopend zinken plat, een soort terras of platform.

„Dit plat verbindt de huizen onderling en wordt gevormd door de

daken der uitgebouwde tuinkamers, die maar één verdieping hoog
zijn, zoodat men, door uit een der vensters van de eerste verdieping
te klimmen, gemakkelijk op het terras kan komen.

„En dat tref je nou bijzonder prachtig, graaf, want twee huizen
verwijderd van Silvertons woning, dient een vriendin van me als
kamenier. Ze woont op nummer twintig en ze zal me natuurlijk helpen
bij mijn uitstapje.”

Hier daalde het gesprek tot den fluistertoon en nadat „de graaf” nog
eenigen tijd met den „chef van het vak” had gesproken en hem ten
slotte een banknoot van twintig pond in de hand had gedrukt, na
welke geste de „chef” hoffelijk boog, verliet Raffles het lage huis in de
dwarsstraat, waar hij met Arthur Hoper zulke eigenaardige „zaken”
had gedaan.

Een uur later trad lord Lister zijn woning in Regent Park weer binnen.
Hij was van de onaanzienlijke zijstraat naar huis teruggewandeld,
want hij voelde behoefte om de koele voorjaarslucht langs zijn
voorhoofd te voelen strijken.

De oude James vertelde hem, dat mister Brand was uitgegaan en

eerst tegen het diner thuis zou komen.

Ook lord Lister verliet reeds een kwartier later weer het „Vossenhol”,
zooals hij en Charly de veilige villa bij voorkeur noemden.

Hij was nu gekleed in een zwarte winterjas en droeg daarbij weer den
gladden cylinder.
De rechterhand met fijne castoorleeren handschoen omklemde den
gouden knop van een ebbenhouten wandelstok.

Lord Lister begaf zich naar het gebouw van de „Club of Lords.”

Hij wist, dat hier op dezen tijd van den dag, het gewone bitteruur der
heeren, druk bezoek zou zijn en dit was het juist, wat hij noodig had.

Daar, te midden der praatgrage jonge en oudere heeren, wenschte hij

eenigen tijd te vertoeven.

Toen hij binnentrad was reeds het gesprek der clubleden in vollen
gang.

Raffles zag eenige kennissen, die met hoogroode kleur en druk

gesticuleerend zaten te betoogen en weer anderen, die schenen op
te komen tegen de meening van hen, met wie zij een twistgesprek
voerden.

En aldra vernam hij nu, dat zijn vermoeden was bewaarheid.

Men sprak slechts over één ding; over den vreemden, plotselingen
dood van Bertie Silverton.

Basil Malwood zat omringd door een aantal oudere heeren.

„Wat mij betreft,” hoorde Raffles den hooggeplaatsten ambtenaar van

het handels-ministerie zeggen, „ik heb dien grootvader van Silverton
nog heel even gekend. Die man heeft zich indertijd allerellendigst
gedragen.

„Hij heeft zich zelf van het leven beroofd, maar als hij dat noodig
oordeelde, dan had hij toch minstens de moeite kunnen nemen om
een stukje papier na te laten, waarom hij het gedaan had, al was het
maar alleen om anderen voor verdenking te vrijwaren.
„Iemand, die zichzelf te kort doet, begaat onrecht tegenover zichzelf!”

„Volkomen waar, mr. Berton,” sprak nu graaf Simkins, „en bovendien

vind ik, dat iemand, die zelfmoord pleegt en den schijn laat bestaan,
dat hij vermoord werd, zeer onrechtvaardig is jegens anderen!”

„Wel,” sprak nu Basil Malwood, „ik ben het volstrekt niet met de
heeren eens. Ik vind het al erg genoeg, als iemand zich van kant
moet maken. Waarom zou hij dan bovendien nog schande moeten
brengen over zijn familie?

„Toen ik eens, jaren terug, het zal nu vijf of zes jaar geleden zijn, met
Bertie Silverton in de „Kaart en de Dobbelsteen” over een dergelijk
onderwerp sprak, was hij het volkomen met mij eens.”

„Wat beweerde hij dan?” klonk plotseling de sonore stem van lord
Aberdeen, die zoojuist de clubzaal was binnengekomen en
stilzwijgend gedurende de laatste vijf minuten het gesprek der heeren
had aangehoord.

„Wat beweerde Silverton destijds, mr. Malwood?”

Basil kreeg een kleur. [21]

Hij hield niet van de doordringende oogen en het strenge

ondervragen van den ernstigen lord.

Maar juist in de oogen van dien man, dien hij onwillekeurig als zijn
meerdere erkende, trachtte hij steeds een zoo goed mogelijk figuur te
slaan en daarom antwoordde hij op gewichtigen toon:

„Hertog Silverton beweerde destijds, dat hij, àls hij eens er toe zou
moeten overgaan, zichzelven van kant te maken, waartoe hij
misschien door geldgebrek nog wel eens zou kunnen komen, hij
evenmin een briefje na zou laten om zichzelf aan te klagen en de
nieuwsgierigheid van anderen te bevredigen.”

„Volkomen juist!” viel lord Crofton bij, „men moet ieder laten raden,
hoe en waarom het gebeurd is en als de menschen het niet kunnen
gissen, dan moeten ze het maar blauw-blauw laten.”

„De Silvertons,” sprak Basil, „zagen er ook niet tegenop, als hun de
wind wat al te vinnig tegen was.

„En dat wist de heele wereld. Bertie maakte er nooit een geheim van,
dat spel en zelfmoord in zijn geslacht inheemsch waren.

„Ze verkwistten hun vermogen en dan sneden ze zich den hals af.
Dat is bij hen de gewone loop van zaken.

„Zoodra het hoofd van het geslacht „op” is, trouwt zijn opvolger een
rijke erfgename, speelt en drinkt tot alles weg is en dan … hetzelfde
programma weer opnieuw. Zoodra zoo iemand zijn laatste bezitting
verdobbeld heeft of genoeg heeft van zijn vrouw of zijn jaloezie voelt
opgewekt—volgt hij het doorluchtig voorbeeld van zijn voorgangers,
snijdt zich den hals af en—’t is uit!”

De tachtigjarige graaf Mortby boog zich voorover en wendde zich tot

den vraagbaak van het gezelschap, tot Basil, die alle
schandaalnieuwtjes in voorraad scheen te hebben.

„Is het waar,” informeerde hij en zijn spitse neus stak puntig naar
voren, „is het waar, dat de hertog zijn gemalin haatte, hoewel zij een
engel van goedheid en liefde was?”

Basil haalde de schouders op.

„Rechtstreeks heb ik dit nooit vernomen,” sprak hij met een gewichtig
air, „maar het tegendeel is me toch ook nooit ter oore gekomen.
„Wel weet ik, dat hij de laatste tijden weer ontzettend grof heeft
gepeeld.”

„En gelukkig?”

„Integendeel, voortdurend verloren.”

„Maar dat kon hem met de onmetelijke rijkdommen, die zijn vrouw
hem heeft meegebracht, toch niet deeren,” beweerde graaf Mortby
weer.

Basil lachte geheimzinnig.

Hij wachtte eenige oogenblikken, voordat hij antwoordde, toen sprak

hij langzaam:

„Och, ook aan de grootste rijkdommen komt eenmaal een einde, en

zeer zeker als ze in handen vervallen van iemand als Silverton was.”

Lord Aberdeen mengde zich niet meer in het gesprek, maar van
alles, wat in dit bitteruur werd gesproken over den plotselingen dood
van den hertog, ontging hem geen woord en vooral schonk hij
bijzondere aandacht aan alles, wat de gladde tong van Malwood met
blijkbaar welgevallen er uit flapte.

Toen hij ongeveer een uur in den leeren fauteuil had zitten luisteren
en een groot aantal sigaretten in rook had doen opgaan, stond hij
langzaam op, dronk zijn portglas leeg en riep den kellner, die ijlings
toeschoot met de jas en den cylinder van zijn lordschap.

Toen reed Edward Lister terug naar Regent Park waar hij om zes uur
met Charly het middagmaal gebruikte. [22]
[Inhoud]
ZESDE HOOFDSTUK.
 De vermomming.

„Edward, ik heb voor vanavond twee plaatsen genomen in het

Empire-theater.

„Het feëen-ballet gaat voor ’t eerst en je zult me toch moeten

toegeven, met al de liefde, die je voor het kikkerlandje koestert, dat
zóó iets ons in Nederland niet wordt geboden.

„De onkosten van zoo’n ballet beloopen zooveel duizenden, dat zelfs
het Circus aan den Amstel die kosten er nooit zou kunnen uithalen.

„Met veel moeite heb ik nog twee logeplaatsen voor jou en mij
kunnen machtig worden.”

Glimlachend keek de Groote Onbekende zijn opgewonden vriend

aan.

Toen sprak hij:

„Het spijt mij, Charly, maar ik zal er vanavond geen gebruik van
kunnen maken. Neem een van je Clubvrienden mee, mijn jongen.”

Een uitdrukking van groote teleurstelling verscheen op het blozende

gelaat van den jongen secretaris.

„Om het jou naar den zin te maken, Edward, gaat boven mijn
krachten. Nu verheugde ik er mij reeds den geheelen middag op, jou
eens een prettige verrassing te bezorgen en het loopt weer op niets
uit. Waarom ga je niet mee?”

„Ik heb mijn avond bezet,—dringende bezigheden!” was alles wat

Raffles antwoordde.
Toen zweeg Charly.

Met een zucht nam hij een Havanna van het rooktafeltje en nadat hij
dezen had opgerookt, onder het genot van een kopje koffie, stond hij
op om zich te gaan kleeden.

Vóórdat hij de deur der kamer achter zich sloot, bleef hij nog even
staan, keek zijn vriend met vragenden blik aan en sprak:

„Denk je alweer thuis te zijn als ik terugkom uit het empire-theater?”

„Waarschijnlijk ben ik dan pas vertrokken.

„Haast je dus mijnentwege niet. En nu veel genoegen, mijn jongen!”

Edward Lister bleef alleen achter in het rustige vertrek, waar

boekenrijen de wanden bedekten en het electrische licht getemperd
werd door zachtgroene kappen.

Hij strekte de beenen languit, leunde behaaglijk achterover in den

wijden clubfauteuil en opende de portefeuille, gevuld met kostbare
reproducties, welke zooeven voor hem was aangekomen.

Zoozeer was hij verdiept in het beschouwen van de zeldzaam mooie

kunstwerken, dat hij verbaasd opkeek, toen de Westminster klok op
den schoorsteen met zilveren tonen tien sloeg.

Voorzichtig borg hij de platen weer in de groote portefeuille, wierp het

overblijfsel van zijn sigaret in den brandenden haard en verliet de
studeerkamer.

De deur, door welke lord Lister was verdwenen, gaf toegang tot een
eigenaardig vertrek.

Deze kamer was rechthoekig van vorm en ingericht als een

eenvoudige kleedkamer.
Een wit porseleinen waschbak met warm- en koudwaterkranen was
aangebracht in het midden van een der lange wanden.

Bovenaan in dienzelfden muur bevonden zich twee niet al te groote

vensters, zóó hoog, dat men er onmogelijk van buitenaf door zou
kunnen kijken. Nu, terwijl het licht brandde in de kamer, waren deze
vensters bedekt door dikke donkergroene gordijnen.

Links van het waschbekken aan denzelfden muur stond een breede
toilettafel, waarboven een groote spiegel hing, terwijl de korte wand,
die daaraan grensde en die zich tegenover de toegangsdeur naar de
studeerkamer bevond, door één bijzonder grooten [23]spiegel in zeer
smalle zwarte lijst in beslag werd genomen.

De lange wand tegenover de ramen scheen bij den eersten

oogopslag ongebruikt te zijn gebleven.

Bij nadere beschouwing echter ontdekte men de smalle kieren van

deuren en wanneer deze geopend waren, zag men één
doorloopende, reusachtige kast.

Lord Lister had de eenige deur, die toegang gaf tot deze kleedkamer,
zorgvuldig achter zich gesloten en begaf zich naar de, door twee, aan
weerszijden aangebrachte lampen uitstekend verlichte toilettafel.

Het was een vreemde verzameling, die men daarop zag, als bestemd
om gebruikt te worden door een acteur.

Potjes schmink, stiften Oost-Indische inkt, handen-wit, rouge en

poeder in verschillende tinten, potjes cosmetiek en vaseline,
haarkleurmiddelen en lippen-rood stonden daar in keurige orde
bijeen.

Penseelen van velerlei dikte, om de wenkbrauwen en wimpers bij te

werken of rimpels aan te brengen en een glazen stopflesch vol
sneeuwwitte watten bedekten het marmeren blad van de tafel.

Nadat Raffles zich van zijn bovenkleeren had ontdaan, ging hij op
den stoel vóór de toilettafel zitten en keek een oogenblik peinzend in
den spiegel.

Plotseling scheen hij een besluit te hebben genomen. Hij schoof zijn
stoel achteruit, trok de lade van de toilettafel open en haalde er zijn
scheergereedschap uit te voorschijn.

En geen tien minuten later was het intelligente gelaat van den
Grooten Onbekende, waarop zooeven het donkere snorretje de
bovenlip nog had bedekt, geheel kaalgeschoren.

„Het moet maar, over een paar weken is het wel weer aangegroeid,”
glimlachte hij tegen zijn spiegelbeeld.

Toen haalde hij uit een lade van de reusachtige kleerkast een
rossigen baard met snor te voorschijn en bovendien een pruik van
vlasblonde krullen.

Nadat hij deze toiletartikelen op het marmeren blad van de tafel had
neergelegd, begaf hij zich nogmaals naar de kleedkast en thans
kwam hij terug met een zeer klein en zeer zwart pakje kleeren in de
rechterhand.

Een half uur later trad een zonderlinge gedaante, lang en smal van
lijn, met een boosaardige uitdrukking om de lippen, het vertrek
binnen, waar oude James zijn avondkrant zat te lezen, terwijl de
echtgenoote van den trouwen bediende ijverig piekerde op een paar
huispantoffels, die zij bezig was te borduren voor haar man.

Een diepe stem vroeg:

„Woont hier de Groote Onbekende Raffles?”

Oude Mary wilde juist verschrikt opspringen en luidkeels om hulp
schreeuwen, toen James met een guitig trekje om zijn ingevallen
mond opstond en een stoel bij de tafel zette.

„Ja,” zei hij en even trilden zijn neusvleugels. „Die woont hier, maar of
hij voor u te spreken is, zou ik niet durven zeggen. U bent zeker
inspecteur Baxter van Scotland Yard?

„Ik heb mijn meester al dikwijls over u hooren spreken en altijd met
den grootsten eerbied. Als hij u van dienst kan zijn, zal hij zeker niet
in gebreke blijven.”

De oude wilde nog voortgaan, maar door een handbeweging van den
roodharige, wiens zwarte oogen glinsterden van ingehouden pret,
zweeg hij.

Terzelfder tijd verdwenen pruik, baard en snor van het gelaat van den
vermeenden indringer en kwam het gladde, jolige gezicht van lord
Edward Lister van onder de vermomming te voorschijn.

„Wel, heb ik van mijn leven!” zuchtte oude Mary en haar angstig
gelaat klaarde heelemaal op. „Al zou het mij mijn leven gekost
hebben, ik had den lord niet herkend! Wat ziet mijnheer er uit! De lord
is in dat pakje zoo glad als een aal!”

„Meneer is altijd een gladekker,” lachte oude James. „Maar,” voegde

hij er bij en zijn gelaat teekende misnoegen, toen hij naar het
nauwsluitende zwart-tricot pak keek, dat zoo glad de slanke leden
van den lord omspande, „had meneer geen mooier pakje kunnen
uitzoeken? U hebt er wel honderd in de kast hangen en nou kiest u
dat leelijke zwarte doodgraverspak.”

„Meneer gaat zeker naar een bal-masqué,” voegde oude Mary erbij.