RADIO GUIDE

March 5, 1938

Lucille Ball heard with Phil Baker on Sunday nights over the CBS Network

Radio Guide for the week ending March 5, 1938 (Volume 7, #20). Radio Guide published listings network radio programming schedules and programs with articles about the stars, stations and networks. 

Photographs by Gene Lester of Lucille Ball on “The Phil Baker Radio Show” during February 1938. Lucy worked with some wonderful comics and learned to rely on timing and tone of voice for comic effects. She had previously been featured on “The Wonder Show” hosted by Gale Gordon starring Jack Haley. 

Phil Baker (left) and British actor Harry McNaughton (right). 

Phil Baker (1896 – 1963) was an American comedian and emcee on radio. His solo act included him singing, playing the accordion, telling jokes and being heckled by a planted audience member called Jojo. With this act, Baker played the Palace Theatre in 1930 and 1931. Baker appeared with Carmen Miranda in the musical The Gang’s All Here (1943). On radio, he starred in his own series The Armour Jester on NBC. In the 1940s he appeared on Duffy’s Tavern on February 22, 1944, and was the host of the quiz show Take It or Leave It, which later changed its title to The $64 Question. Phil Baker appeared briefly on television but his show “Who’s Whose” was canceled after one episode. 

“’Radio Guide’ began in Chicago and New York in November 1931, as a venture of Moe Annenberg, a former hood and strong-arm man for the Hearst newspaper distribution interests in Chicago (his duties usually involved blackjack-and-brass-knuckle confrontations with distributors of rival publications), who went legit in the twenties as publisher of the ‘Daily Racing Form.’ For about its first year it was presented in a tabloid newspaper format, with most of its editorial content coming from press releases – although New York Journal radio critic Mike Porter and music critic Carleton Smith were regular contributors from very early on." 

"Beginning in 1933, ‘Radio Guide’ began to feature two-color art covers and was presented in a saddle-stitched large-magazine format. There was also a new emphasis on original editorial content, and Chicago Herald-Examiner radio editor Evans Plummer became a regular contributor with his ‘Plums and Prunes’ column.”

“Full color art covers were featured beginning in the spring of 1935, and continued until the magazine switched to black-and-white photo covers in early 1938. Many of these covers were elegant portraits of stars-of-the-moment painted by Charles Rubino, and these issues are perhaps the most collectible of the run. This period also marked the peak of Radio Guide’s editorial quality – it published substantial criticism and serious journalism about radio, such as its 1935 expose revealing that elements of ‘Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour’ were rigged.

”’Radio Guide’ changed both its title and focus in 1940, as a direct result of Moe Annenberg being sent to prison for tax evasion – the magazine was taken over by his son Walter (later publisher of ‘TV Guide’) and the change to a combination radio-movie format was an attempt to pump up the cash flow by merging ‘Radio Guide’ with ‘Screen Guide,’ another troubled Annenberg publication of the era. The transition to ‘Movie Radio Guide’ was unfortunately accompanied by a sharp drop in editorial quality – the publication became much more of a shallow celebrity-oriented fan rag.“ ~ Elizabeth McLeod, Radio Historian