Roy Rogers radio

["David W. Harris" <dwh@totalnetnh.net>]

It's happened again:  an American icon has died and the obits and
appreciations speak of the man's singing and his movies and his TV
series but ignore the role of radio in the man's life.  At least with
Roy Rogers we don't have to listen to stories about mob ties.  As a
modest corrective for the slighting of my favorite medium, here follows
a bit about Roy and radio.

As with Sinatra, Rogers' first major notice came from singing on a radio
amateur contest--"The Midnight Frolic" on KMCS Inglewood CA.  There
followed numerous professional engagements as a cowboy singer on LA
stations, including forming the Pioneer Trio (later the Sons of the
Pioneers) at KFWB on the early '30s.

Rogers made several network appearances after Republic Pictures made him
a nationally recognized star (and changed his name from Leonard Slye) in
the late '30s and got his own show in 1944.  Over the course of the next
decade the "Roy Rogers Show" bounced between Mutual and NBC.  These
times and stations come from spot checks of newspaper listings and do
not pretend to be exhaustive:

1944-45 Tuesday 8:30-9pm WNAC (1260/Mutual)...first show 11/21/44?
1946-47 Saturday 9-9:30pm WBZ(NBC)...Sinatra got this time slot the
following season with Your Hit Parade when it switched from CBS
1948-51 Sunday 6-6:30pm WNAC
1951-52 Friday 8-8:30pm WBZ...Sinatra had his own show in this slot
starting in '53
1952-55 Thursday 8-8:30pm WBZ...last show 8/4/55?

The programs were a mixture of western drama and music.  Except for the
Sunday evening slot it appears the show wasn't treated as children's
programming, judging by times and sponsors.   According to Current
Biography and Frank Buxton & Bill Owen's The Big Broadcast, the
first-year sponsor was Goodyear Tire & Rubber.  In 1948, Quaker Oats
signed up for the Sunday Mutual show; premiums included a Double-R Bar
branding iron ring.  Post Sugar Crisp was a later sponsor.  The final
two seasons on NBC were brought to us by Dodge.

She's still around, but allow me to mention that Dale Evans is no
stranger to radio, either.  Long before she met Roy in the pictures,
Dale was a staff singer at a number of stations including WMC Memphis,
WHAS Louisville (where the GM told Frances Smith she would henceforth be
known as Dale Evans), WBBM Chicago, and WFAA Dallas.  She also spent a
year as the "girl singer" on "The Chase & Sanborn Hour" (Edgar Bergen &
Charlie McCarthy).

Where not otherwise credited, info came from the joint autobiography
Happy Trails: Our Life Story (Simon & Schuster, 1994).

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End of boston-radio-interest-digest V2 #121
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