Re: 1939...

["'A. Joseph Ross'" <lawyer@world.std.com>]

On Fri, 9 Oct 1998, Dan Strassberg wrote:

> Now here's an obscure one: Does anybody else remember Wendy Warren and the
> News on CBS? WEEI would have carried it at noon M-F in the mid forties. 

I was beginning to think I was the only one who remembered Wendy Warren. 
It was still on by around 1954-55, when I heard it.  By that time I think
it was in the mid-afternoon, and as I remember it, the actual newscast
came at the end of the show by then.  After the end of the story for that
day, and a final commercial, the announcer would say, "And now, Wendy
Warren and the News!"  And "Wendy" would do the newscast. 

Actually, there were a surprising number of non-traditional women depicted
in 1950s radio and television.  Besides Wendy Warren, there was Lois Lane,
depicted by Phyllis Coates in the first season of the Superman TV show as
a feisty woman reporter (Noel Neill, in subsequent seasons, depicted Lois
more as the helpless woman who kept getting in trouble and needing
rescuing.).  

There was Dr. Joan Dale, on =Tom Corbett, Space Cadet=.  Dr. Dale was a
Solar Guard officer, an astrophysicist, and the inventor of hyper drive. 
While they never showed a female space cadet, it was made clear that Dr.
Dale and Captain Strong had been classmates at the Academy.

On =Space Patrol=, there were two female characters, Tonga, formerly a
villain but now Assistant United Planets Security Chief, and Carol
Carlyle, the daughter of the Secretary General.  While she was a more
traditional female character, she could pilot a spaceship, and there were
moments where she showed as much bravery as any of the male characters.

There were a number of nontraditional female characters in westerns,
including Annie Oakley, played by Gale Davis, depicted as an extremely
accurate markswoman.  And there were some nontraditional women on the Lone
Ranger, including, in one TV episode, a woman barber.  On several radio
episodes, the LR had a friend named Clarabelle Hornblow (apparently not
connected at all to a certain clown on the Howdy Doody show), who was a
tough frontierswoman, owned a ranch, and was boss to various male ranch
hands.

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 A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                                         617.367.0468
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