Book Review of Jim Cox's Frank and Anne Hummert's Radio Factory: The Programs and Personalities of Broadcasting's Most Prolific Producers

Abstract

They weren’t household names like many of the characters they created, but Frank and Anne Hummert were to radio’s Golden Age what FDR was to the political milieu of that era. In Frank and Anne Hummert’s Radio Factory: The Programs and Personalities of Broadcasting’s Most Prolific Producers, author Jim Cox writes that without their “tactical influence throughout most of that period ... the resulting void would have been filled in mixed but irrefutably different ways. The couple’s impact on the medium was little short of gargantuan” (p. 9). A radio factory is an apt description of their production empire. According to Cox, the Hummerts had their hands in no fewer than 125 programs. And although they are largely credited with establishing the daytime soap opera genre, they also produced music and variety shows, juvenile adventure serials, crime detective mysteries, and even a game show. At their peak of power, they controlled between 25 and 30 hours of network time weekly. So, why, outside of the circle of media historians—a review of Gerald Nachman’s Raised on Radio called them “fascinating sideline characters”—are they largely forgotten today? Cox attributes it in part to “their preferred reclusive lifestyle” (p. 150) but also to their methodical, at times harsh, entrepreneurial approach to producing radio programming: “mass production, low costs, standardization, and specialization” (p. 36). The couple met in Chicago in 1927, where Frank was a vice president and head copywriter in a well-known advertising agency that would later add his name. A former newspaper reporter, Anne became his assistant and, despite an age difference of almost 20 years, they married in the mid-1930s. It is during this period that, according to Cox, Frank Hummert concludes that daytime radio could do better than “cooking tips, beauty secrets and personal advice” (p. 22). Although Irna Phillips is credited with airing the first soap opera, Painted Dreams, on a Chicago station on October 20, 1930, it is the Hummerts who infuse the genre “with a visibility that gave it instant recognition” (p. 125). Radio Factory is most effective when it offers the detail and anecdotes characteristic of the author’s previous books on radio’s Golden Age. Cox describes how the “Hummerts’ personal excesses and idiosyncrasies” (p. 110) many times ended up in their story lines. The protagonist of the long-running The Romance of Helen Trent, Cox writes, “remained utterly chaste. Yet housewives who themselves smoked three packs a day were probably convinced that any woman who smoked or drank on [the program] had low ethics and loose morals” (pp. 112–113). One writer was