It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography [Hardcover]

Susan Ware (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0814794017 | ISBN-13: 978-0814794012

One of the most beloved radio show hosts of the 1940s and 1950s, Mary Margaret McBride (1899—1976) regularly attracted between six and eight million listeners to her daily one o'clock broadcast. During her twenty years on the air she interviewed tens of thousands of people, from President Harry Truman and Frank Lloyd Wright to Rachel Carson and Zora Neale Hurston. This is her story.

Five decades after their broadcast, her shows remain remarkably fresh and interesting. And yet McBride—the Oprah Winfrey of her day—has been practically forgotten, both in radio history and in the history of twentieth-century popular culture, primarily because she was a woman and because she was on daytime radio.

Susan Ware explains how Mary Margaret McBride was one of the first to exploit the cultural and political importance of talk radio, pioneering the magazine-style format that many talk shows still use. This radio biography recreates the world of daytime radio from the 1930s through the 1950s, confirming the enormous significance of radio to everyday life, especially for women.

In the first in-depth treatment of McBride, Ware starts with a description of how widely McBride was revered in the mid-1940s—the fifteenth anniversary party for her show in 1949 filled Yankee Stadium. Once the readers have gotten to know Mary Margaret (as everyone called her), Ware backtracks to tell the story of McBride’s upbringing, her early career, and how she got her start in radio. The latter part of the book picks up McBride's story after World War II and through her death in 1976. An epilogue discusses the contemporary talk show phenomenon with a look back to Mary Margaret McBride’s early influence on the format.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In the 1940s and 1950s, McBride was a prominent voice on radio, interviewing major public figures, but was mocked for her close emotional ties with her eight million listeners, all at a time when women's career prospects were very limited. Drawing on archives that include McBride's radio interviews, as well as letters from former listeners, Ware begins with a description of McBride's radio show when it was at its height. Ware then backs up to tell how a woman from a small town in Missouri came to such an exalted career in radio that her tenth anniversary was celebrated in Madison Square Garden, where she was greeted by Eleanor Roosevelt, a favorite guest and longtime friend. The event was dedicated to recruiting women volunteers for the armed forces. At McBride's fifteenth anniversary celebration, she raised eyebrows when she publicly embraced Walter White, head of the NAACP. The third part of the book explores McBride's career after World War II until her death in 1976. An epilogue examines how McBride's show compares to contemporary talk shows. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“Drawing on archives that include McBride’s radio interviews, as well as letters from former listeners, Ware begins with a description of McBride’s radio show when it was at its height.”
-Booklist

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“While there have been more than a few fine radio histories written by professional and nonprofessional historians in the last forty years, the last decade must be the golden age of radio scholarship...and Susan Ware's It’s One O’Clock and Here is Mary Margaret McBride continues this current focus in radio scholarship."
-Journal of American History

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“Sincere and sometimes self-effacing, Mary Margaret was the Oprah of her day- her name a household word that might be forgotten if not for Susan Ware's carefully researched and charmingly likeable biography.”
-American Journalism

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“Ware has restored McBride to a rightful place in broadcasting history.”
-Columbia Journalism Review

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“Tune in and treat yourself to Susan Ware's fascinating saga of the life and work of radio personality Mary Margaret McBride. Like McBride, Ware is at once probing and entertaining as she analyzes McBride’s success from the 1930s through the 1950s, restoring McBride to her rightful place as the mother of talk radio and television.”
-Lizabeth Cohen,author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 319 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (February 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814794017
• ISBN-13: 978-0814794012
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,181,697 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More interesting than you think, April 21, 2005

By 

Walter Sabo - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography (Hardcover)

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

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Doing The Products, November 6, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography (Hardcover)

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dromedary, help me carry
News of chocolate cake;
Also, news of gingerbread
For all the folks who bake."

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

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The first in-depth examination of McBride's popularity, June 10, 2005

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography (Hardcover)

If you don't recognize the name of radio personality Mary Marget McBride, don't worry: she was one of the major radio show hosts of the 1940s and 1950s and had her own popular daily one o'clock broadcast where she interested presidents and famous personalities alike. Five decades after their broadcast her shows still hold relevance today: Susan Ware explores how Mary McBride influenced formats many talk shows still use, capturing the world of 1930s to 1950s radio broadcasting in all its social and political importance. It's One O'clock is the first in-depth examination of McBride's popularity and radio show, following both her life and upbringing and her impact on media as a whole. Susan Ware edits the biographical dictionary Notable American Women and is in the perfect position to lend depth and authority to McBride's achievements.