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Lively Tales Crackle In Radio History

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 19, 2008

"Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio," by Anthony Rudel (Harcourt, $26)

Sex sells, they say. Selling sex also sells, or so would seem to be one lesson of Anthony Rudel's entertaining and informative history of "The Dawn of American Radio."

Three or four people stand out among the scores who were prominent in the growth of radio from a hobby and fad in the second decade of the 20th century to a big business by the mid-1930s, but none more so than "Dr."- the quotation marks are advisable - John Romulus Brinkley, whose exotic, lucrative career is a leitmotif of Rudel's book.

A snake-oil salesman, in essence if not in fact, Brinkley bought his "medical degree" from something called the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas. He fetched up in Milford, Kan., in 1917, Rudel says, after "years of learning, traveling, and avoiding arrest."

There he stumbled across the dubious medical procedure that would make his name and fortune: helping men complaining of "flat tires," or - to update the euphemism - "erectile dysfunction," by implanting goat glands into them.

He was immediately successful. The success skyrocketed when he began to sell his sexual-rejuvenation procedure over the airwaves from KFKB, the radio station he built in Milford.

Rudel, a novelist as well as a classical music and broadcasting specialist, gives a sometimes lively, always discursive account of his subject. After many years of haphazard transmissions and indifferent regulation as entrepreneurs and government struggled with what to do with this new medium and how to pay for it, Herbert Hoover, with his gift for organization as President Harding's secretary of commerce, was instrumental in regularizing radio.

The author arranges his book partly by subject, and religion is one of the biggest sections. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and reactionary "radio priest" Father Charles Coughlin have starring roles. He shows that for the most part, radio personalities then skewed the way they do today on television and cable - hard right and often bigoted.

Radio's popularity, like film's, was built on vaudeville; "anyone who could make an interesting sound" was pulled in to feed the maw. Rudel efficiently covers the usual suspects, such as "Amos 'n' Andy," the A&P Gypsies, opera, dance bands.

But the man "who really changed radio," he says, was Rudy Vallee, "the first pop-singing idol." After Vallee's initial exposure to radio audiences in 1928, he was rapidly all over the air - and every other form of entertainment. Rudel credits him with bringing about the variety show.

Like Vallee and other innovative broadcasters of the early years, Rudel writes, Brinkley understood that "radio enabled them to bond with the masses by speaking to the individual." But the bonding ended in 1942, when, after filing for bankruptcy, he died, pursued by litigation and shorn of much of his fortune.

Roger K. Miller, a former newspaperman, is a novelist and freelance writer.

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