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

by Susan Ware

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814794012
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	02/07/2005
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Susan Ware is the editor of Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She is the author of Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism and Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and Hopkinton, NH.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Prologue: Voice of America
PART I The Height of the Program
1 “Here Comes McBride”
2 Mary Margaret’s Radio Technique
3 “Under Cover of Daytime”
4 Mary Margaret’s Bond with Listeners
5 “The Appetite as Voice”
6 Doing the Products
PART II Becoming Mary Margaret McBride
7 Listening to Lives
8 A Missouri Childhood
9 Stella
10 The Journalist and the Writer
11 Men, Marriage, and Sex
12 Affluence and Depression
13 “I Murdered Grandma”
14 Citrus Follies
15 The War Years
PART III Transitions
16 Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Margaret McBride, and Postwar Politics
17 Television
18 The Last Show: May 14, 1954
19 Cookbooks, Columns, and Commentary
20 “Good-bye, Y’all”
Epilogue: Talk Shows, Then and Now
Notes
Index
About the Author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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

,

“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

,

“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

,

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

,

“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

Editorial Reviews

"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 McBrides success from the 1930s through the 1950s, restoring McBride to her rightful place as the mother of talk radio and television."

Lizabeth Cohen

"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 Its One OClock and Here is Mary Margaret McBride continues this current focus in radio scholarship."

Journal of American History

"Ware has restored McBride to a rightful place in broadcasting history."

Columbia Journalism Review

"Drawing on archives that include McBrides radio interviews, as well as letters from former listeners, Ware begins with a description of McBrides radio show when it was at its height."

Booklist

"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

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

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

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

“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

“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

From the Publisher