Book: WYXIE Wonderland
Anyone who has enjoyed listening or watching The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet or The Challenge of the Yukon (Sergeant Preston) will find this book, WYXIE Wonderland interesting. WXYZ was the originating station and the driving force behind WXYZ was George W. Trendle. But there were a large number of people who actually did the work of creating, selling, acting and engineering the sounds from WXYZ. The author, Dick Osgood, was one of these people.
I've only read maybe 1/3 of this large book (although there are lots of pictures) - it's very readable, an examination of the personal interplay between the people behing WXYZ (in other words: the gossip ;). One kinda unusual thing is the 3rd person telling of Dick Osgood's time at the station, it's unusual to read about how his marriage dissolved during that time or the jobs he did. But I suppose that was the style of a professional author then.
One thing I didn't know was that Fran Striker, the author behind many of the shows, actually lived in Buffalo NY at the start, mailing in his scripts and paying an occasional visit to Detroit. Later he moved his family to Michigan but I betcha these days a similar author would have stayed in NY (although these internet days authors are being replaced by AI :( Striker worked like a demon. He devised a system to generate plots by having cards with characters and the trouble they could get into - he'd shuffle and deal the cards to generate "new" situations :)
WXYZ was one of the original Mutual Network stations along with WGN in Chicago and WOR in New York. WXYZ also sold programs to other stations and networks including the Yankee Network in New England and in which Edwin Armstrong was involved. I had always thought that The Yankee Network was about music and high fidelity (Armstrong was the FM guy as well as being the Superhet guy and the Regen guy :). But apparently the Yankee Network also had drama and news.
It's also interesting that the way we can still listen to the WXYZ shows is due to the transcription discs used to provide shows to many other stations rather than using telephone lines. All of those early shows with the efforts of the writer/director/actors and sound me just evaporated after being broadcast. Then they had to jump back on the treadmill and do the next show, the yearly output is amazing, at 3 Lone Rangers a week that's 156 shows a year !
The book is available online here:
https://archive.org/details/wyxiewonderlandu0000osgo/mode/2up
and here:
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Station-Books/WXYZ-Wonderland-50-Year-History.pdf
Now to get back to reading the book !
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
update: maybe if I add the Google search, Google will actually search this blog ? I doubt it, would make too much sense !