Edythe Meserand: Interview #1

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ingersoll: Edythe, we want to concentrate today on your work beginning the newsroom for WOR. But before that, let's talk just a little bit about your jobs before that and your family life before you began your broadcasting career. First, where did you live? Where did you grow up?

Meserand: We lived in Philadelphia, my mother [Gaetana], father [Albert Meserand], and sister [Mary], who is eight years older than I am. We had a very quiet life. As you know, Philadelphia is more southern than some southern cities, and we had a darling little house, row house, and it was a very happy childhood. I went to schools there, and then when I was about—well, I was graduated from what would be elementary school very young apparently, because I graduated from high school at age sixteen. That was in New York, because we moved to a house outside of Jamaica, New York, the old Frederick Estate.

We lived there for a number of years and then moved up to an area known as Morris Park. That was in the Bronx and it was right off the Pelham Parkway area. It was sort of country, and we had a house there. It was while I was there that I went into the job market because of certain reverses in our financial status. I could not attend college. I did not attend any formal college.

I did go to a business college so that I could enter the work market, and my first job was with a French organization known as Pathex. It was a subsidiary of Pathé News. Are you familiar with that?

Ingersoll: Pathé News.

Meserand: We had newsreels featured in the movie houses in those days. The vice president of Pathé was here in New York City to introduce and market a home movie camera and projector, and they had offices on Forty-Third Street in New York, right opposite Stern's Department Store. My job was to condense and write a résumé of the films that they had on eight-millimeter film for use in the home, like the "Our Gang" comedies and other films that they had purchased.

The man in charge of this was a Frenchman by the name of Jacques Borst. It was B-O-R-S-T, but it was pronounced like an E [Berst]. He was a charming gentleman, very rotund, and arrived in New York with his gold telephone and manicured hands. His hands really fascinated me because I had never known anybody who had manicured nails of the male sex. [Laughter.] He was very intrigued with my writing, apparently, because he always said to me, "Edeet, you are going to day-ve-lup." And it took me a little while to figure out what he was saying, but he thought that I would develop into something, apparently.

As far as family was concerned, we were a family-oriented family, if you know what I mean. It was the hub of all activity. My father loved music and, consequently, we were exposed to the opera, the concerts, and particularly the band concerts in Philadelphia, which he loved. I can remember Mother packing a picnic lunch and dinner, and we would start out very early on Sunday mornings by trolley car. We had no car. No one had cars in those days, except the very

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afraid was when my cousin Frank was called into the service. I was asleep when he arrived at the house, and they woke me up. I was just about eight at the time, I guess. That would be 1916, wouldn't it, or thereabouts?

Ingersoll: Yes.

Meserand: When did we enter the war? It was '16, wasn't it, World War I?*

Ingersoll: Yes.

Meserand: He was one of the first to go overseas, and I remember Mama picking me up and saying, "Kiss Cousin Frank goodbye." I didn't know why I was kissing him goodbye, but I just knew it was something dreadful. That was the first time I ever knew fear. Again, it was family oriented. What I'm trying to point out is that no matter what the emotion was, it seemed to stem from that hub.

Ingersoll: Of your family.

Meserand: Of the family, the family unit. It's always been very important to me throughout my life.

Ingersoll: Then in school experience, did you have any particular writing or speaking experiences in school, school newspapers?

Meserand: No.

Ingersoll: Debating societies or anything like that?

Meserand: No. The only thing that might be—yes, one thing. I was asked [to write a paper] in one of the classes. I went to a school called Drexel in Philadelphia. It was a small elementary school. One of the papers that we had to write was about the theater, where did the theater start, which was rather an ambitious thing for an eight- or nine-year-old, I thought.

Ingersoll: Yes.

Meserand: Anyway, I wrote about that and I said—it was really amazing. [Laughter.] I don't know why I did it this way, but I said the Catholic mass was the first indication I had of drama. I wrote the whole paper on the Catholic mass, which to me is still one of the most dramatic [presentations] today. Now I'm angry with them because they do it in English and I liked it better in Latin because it had a great mystique about it. But going back, thinking about it, that was the first time that I came across anything that belonged to me that had to do with drama or writing. I'm saying writing from the standpoint of something not in my little diary.

Ingersoll: Yes. Was speaking at all important to your early life?

Meserand: Yes. In high school we had a wonderful elocution teacher, Catherine Hayden Jones, who later became a movie star. Not a star, but she had bit parts in Hollywood. I lost track of her after that, but we stayed friends for many, many years after I was in radio, as a matter of fact. Catherine had a drama club in high school, and I was very active in that, in all phases of it, because she felt that you could not act unless you knew how to produce and how to do scenery and do makeup, etc. So that everyone who belonged to the drama club had different phases of drama to participate in, and I was very active in all they did. I remember I was—what's the

______________________ * April 6, 1917.

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Ingersoll: This, I understand, was condensations of home movies that were being put out by Pathé.

Meserand: Yes. What they did was they made up a folder with a picture of the star, the length of the movie, and the content of the movie. A little marketing angle,too, I guess, was put in, to make people want to buy it. But it was a very pleasant job.

Ingersoll: Then it was in 1926, wasn't it, that you began with NBC?

Meserand: That's right.

Ingersoll: Was that at the time that WJZ and WEAF combined and it was really the beginning of NBC, also?

Meserand: That is right.

Ingersoll: How did you get that job?

Meserand: I was at a cocktail party, and a man there by the name of George Engel was there. He was vice president in charge of NBC's Artist Bureau. I was introduced to him. You know, you talk generally. "What do you do? How do you do it?" and so forth. He asked me and I said that I was miserable because Pathé had moved to Jersey City, and it took me two hours to go from home to Jersey City, because I had to take the Boston Westchester, then the subway, then the Hudson tubes, then a bus to the old Pathé studios. As a matter of fact, the offices were in Pearl White's dressing room and it was a cold, dank, horrible building in the middle of nowhere. Two hours in the morning and two hours at night was a dreadful thing, plus the fact there wasn't a place to eat. You had to live on milk and crackers or a sandwich that you brought from home. That wasn't very pleasant.

So I happened to mention all this to Mr. Engel, and he said, "Why don't you come and work for us at NBC?"

I said, "I wouldn't work there for anything! I hate biscuits," thinking it was the National Biscuit Company. I didn't know what the National Broadcasting Company was. I don't think anybody knew very much about it.

So he gave me his card and he asked me to go see the personnel director at NBC, and it was a gal by the name of Ruth Keeler, a great big gal. Scared me to death when I walked into her office. She took a liking to me, apparently, and when she saw that I did some writing at Pathé, she said, "Gee, you'd be perfect for the job that's open," and sent me to Johnny Johnstone in the press department.

Now, the press department at NBC at that time had three desks. Johnny was the manager, or director, of the department. There was a WEAF desk, and the young man there was Herb Devins. There was a WJZ desk, and the young man there was Walter Stone; his father had a newspaper upstate in New York. Then the feature desk was handled by William Burke Miller, better known as "Skeets" Miller. Johnny had a secretary, and each of the desks had a girl who did the answering of the telephone and some writing if the man wasn't available.

So the job that was available was the WEAF desk. That was the Red Network. The WJZ desk was the Blue Network. My job was merely to answer the telephone, get the information that I was supposed to get from whomever Mr. Devins told me to talk to for whatever program he was going to write about. Well, Herb was an ardent fencer. He loved to fence. After fencing, he and his friends would, I guess, go out for refreshments. Consequently, he very seldom got in on time. I found myself writing the story, using his format, so that Johnny, I thought, would not

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desperately and did not want to print our programs and so forth. It was a long period before they came around to seeing that this was no different than the theater.

Ingersoll: Did newspaper people—newspaper women, let's say—have this same kind of feeling toward radio women that was held more generally between the newspaper and the radio?

Meserand: No. Absolutely not. No. There were a lot of women who reviewed and who had columns in the newspapers that had to do with radio. I will cite two of them whom I enjoyed very, very much. One was Harriet Mencken and the other one was Kay Trenholm, whom I had great admiration for. She wrote for the New York Sun, and her columns were really marvelous. Nellie Revell, who was the top woman publicist of the country, I think she was the first in motion pictures as a publicist. But Nellie Revell was famous throughout the country and a dear friend. I adored her. But these were the women that you were exposed to.

As far as the staff was concerned, we had very fine women on the NBC staff. As I told you, Ruth Keeler was the personnel director, and she hired everybody from top to bottom. Then there was Helen Guy, who handled continuity. She was the head of continuity.

Ingersoll: What did that mean, continuity?

Meserand: Everything that was spoken on the air. When an announcer introduced a program, it had to be written. The writers were continuity writers. They wrote the introductions and the closings or whatever had to be written that had to do with the program. And the same thing with the commercials. The commercials all went through the continuity department to see that all copy was good copy and there was nothing in it that would be objectionable on the air.

The head of the library was a gal by the name of Galbraith, and they used to call her "Battle Axe" because she was so jealous of her files. God forbid you should do something to the copy that she let you borrow!

Bertha Brainard, who was program director, she had the most fascinating and fantastic job of all, I think, and was a great influence in my life. I think I showed you a picture of me in a satin blouse. I even copied her blouses.

Ingersoll: Tell me as much as you can about the sort of influence that she was on you, please.

Meserand: Well, Bertha was my size. That was number one. I identified with this.

Ingersoll: And you were small.

Meserand: Oh, very small. [Laughter.] Wet, I must have weighed ninety pounds! But you know how small I am now. I was not much bigger. I've shrunken, I know. Now at eighty-two, I would shrink. But I was not much taller than I am now. I was 4'11" and a half or three-quarters or something like that in my stocking feet, so I wore enormous heels just like Bertha Brainard wore, but I wore those before I knew her. But I loved the way she dressed, and I was influenced by this. She had brilliant, brilliant red hair and a temper to match, and she had eyes that went right through you. She saw right through you. But she had a great feeling for people, and she knew instinctively, I think, whether or not you were the kind of person who could do the job that had to be done, whether it was singing, whether it was drama, whatever.

She proved this with the programs that she was responsible for. Milton Cross, who was an announcer, she selected him to do the opera broadcasts. Milton had the right voice for it, he had the right personality, right persona. He was opera! He didn't know he was opera; he was an announcer.

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Ingersoll: "His Master's Voice."

Meserand: "His Master's Voice." That's right. The Victrola. I think it goes back to those days, because I think that the things that you learn in your very, very early childhood up to the age of seven or eight, perhaps, stays with you forever. You never lose them.

Ingersoll: I think that's so true. Was Margaret Cuthbert there at that time?

Meserand: Oh, indeed. Oh, how I loved her.

Ingersoll: Did she also have a strong influence on you?

Meserand: Throughout my whole career.

Ingersoll: Could you give me some examples of that, please?

Meserand: Yes, I will. Johnny sent me up. I don't know where my dear boss was. Margaret [Cuthbert] was director of talks for NBC. I didn't even know what that meant. But her office was a floor above ours. He told me to go up to see Margaret and to take down all the information so that Johnny could write this story if Herb [Devins] didn't get in. I went up. I had no idea who Margaret Cuthbert was; I had never met her. She had a young gal by the name of June Hynd, I think, and June ushered me into her office, and this woman stood up. And you know how short I am. I probably reached her waist. Tall, stately, very, very severe-looking, and my heart was in my throat. I could barely talk, I was so scared of her. She used to laugh about it later. She said to me, "You're new."

I said, "Yes, ma'am."

She said, "You don't have to call me 'ma'am.'" [Laughter.] She told me to sit down, and I sat down with my little book. I told her why I was there, and she gave me the information. By the time she got through, I wasn't scared anymore. She had put me at my ease very easily and very quietly. She was a very quiet person. She wanted to know about me, where I came from and so forth. I told her. She told me that she hoped that I would be with NBC for a long, long time, that I would enjoy it, and to feel free to come and see her whenever I wanted to talk. I thought that was the dearest thing I had ever heard from an utter stranger!

Well, our lives met many, many times, both at NBC and after I left NBC. She actually is the one who pushed me into AWRT [American Women in Radio and Television], because she called me when they were going to have the convention in New York to organize, and she said, "Now, you're going to be the organizing convention chairman."

I said, "Oh, no, I'm not."

She said, "Oh, yes, you are, because I've already given your name to the committee." And that's how I became the convention chairman of the AWRT organizing convention and then, of course, was elected president. But she never stopped.

I think all my records are with Catharine [Heinz], as you know. There's a letter there from her (when I won the McCall Golden Mike), from Margaret Cuthbert that's absolutely precious. You must read it the next time you're there.

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Jack Foster, who was radio editor of the New York World Telegram, had called me and said that he wanted an interview with Madame Schumann-Heink. It was just at the time that the organization had given her an office and all she did in the office was to have interviews. If there was a musical program, she would say, "I don't like that selection. You should use thus and so." You know who Madame Schumann-Heink was?

Ingersoll: Yes.

Meserand: She spoke with a very heavy accent. I had a mad crush on Jack Foster. He had said to me, "After the Madame Schumann-Heink interview, why don't we go out and have a bite to eat together?"

And I said that was fine, because it was in the afternoon that he was going to interview her. So I got dressed up in my best suit, because that's what I wore, suits and blouses, just like B.B., Bertha Brainard. We all called her B.B.

So Jack arrived and I had gone into Madame's office and talked to her secretary. I said, "I'll bring him in as soon as he arrives."

She said, "Fine."

So we went in. I have never used a lot of makeup. The only makeup I ever used was powder and lipstick. I never used anything else. Never used rouge or eye makeup. I went into Schumann-Heink's office with Jack and introduced the two, and she looked at me and she said, "How old are you?" This is in front of the man that I had a mad crush on!

I told her, and she said, "Go in there and wash your face." She had her own bathroom. I did as I was told. You didn't argue with Madame Schumann-Heink. Jack had very little eyes, very twinkly eyes, you know, the dark eyes that twinkle like that. I could see his eyes twinkling, and I said, "He's laughing at me," and I was so embarrassed. I went in and washed my face, and she said, "You're too pretty to have that makeup on your face. Now you look like a nice little girl." [Laughter.] And we had our interview, and Jack never let me forget that I was a nice little girl and I didn't need makeup. But these are the funny things that happen in your lifetime.

Ingersoll: Yes. Do you remember how much you were paid in those days?

Meserand: I haven't the slightest notion. I think something like $25 a week was a fantastic salary. I think that's what I was paid. You know, in that period your bread was 5 cents a loaf, and you rode the subway for 5 cents. Your top executives might make $10,000, if they were lucky. You say these prices of these things today and they sound ridiculous.

Ingersoll: Surely. Yes.

Meserand: But this is what it was in that period.

Ingersoll: Did you live at home?

Meserand: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Mother would never think of letting me out of her clutches. [Laughter.]

Ingersoll: When I was looking through your scrapbook, there was a squib in the Evening Graphic. Was that a New York paper?

Meserand: Yes, it was.

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Ingersoll: In your next job.

Meserand: Yes, in my next job. Joe Connelly was president of INS [International News Service]. I wasn't even out of NBC when he offered me the job at WGBS, which Hearst had just bought, and that later became WINS. Our studios were on the top floor of the Hotel Lincoln, and the control room was in the bathroom, the control panel was in the bathtub, the engineer sat on the john to work the controls. The studio was an improvised old bedroom that they hung monk's cloth all around the walls and opened the windows so I could get air, and I did the Musical Clock program there from six o'clock until nine o'clock in the morning.

Ingersoll: That was a news program, wasn't it?

Meserand: That was news, it was weather, it was stories that could come up or something that I read somewhere, music, mostly classical and the musical comedy type and some popular, but early morning was not the time to have razzmatazz type at that time, at least not for me. [Laughter.]

Ingersoll: Was that the one where you were known as the Musical Clock girl?

Meserand: Right.

Ingersoll: So it was a variety program.

Meserand: Yes. Then I switched hats and became program director. [Laughter.]

Ingersoll: So you wore the two hats. What about that very first program, the one you referred to a few minutes ago, that you did, I think, in December of '31? It was one that the Brooklyn Eagle announced by saying [reading], "Miss Meserand has joined the staff of WGBS, and while not known as a broadcaster, has a radio voice and will make this special broadcast about the people she knows best"—I take that to mean the radio editors—"and with whose eccentricities and idiosyncrasies she has had to deal during four years of service with the big network stations." There were several things in there that interested me. I knew that radio voice was very important, wasn't it, for women in that day?

Meserand: Yes.

Ingersoll: Many women were told they did not have a radio voice.

Meserand: That's right.

Ingersoll: But yours must have been different.

Meserand: Well, mine had a low timbre, as it still has, only it didn't shake as much as it does now. I had a good radio voice, there's no doubt about it. It was deep, I enunciated properly, and I didn't do it on purpose; I just spoke that way. It was a natural voice. That was Joe Ranson of the Brooklyn Eagle, I think, that wrote that.

What happened was that Joe Connelly of INS, as I told you, hired me for this and he decided that what we should do is to have a big cocktail party for all the radio editors that I knew so well and have them all come and we would do a broadcast from the hotel. I told you we were at the Hotel Lincoln. I would talk about each of the radio editors that I knew and tell a

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programming to publicity, and from publicity to sort of special features like that program we just discussed.

Ingersoll: Sometimes did you wear those two hats both at the same time?

Meserand: Oh, yes, yes. For instance, there was a man who claimed to be God, Father Divine. Father Divine was a Negro minister who claimed to be God. He got the most fantastic amount of publicity! He had lawyers who represented him. He wouldn't come to the telephone. I think my special features—what is the word I want?

Ingersoll: Role?

Meserand: Well, the thing that made me valuable in WOR was because of some of the special features that I did when I was with WINS, only I didn't know it. When all this publicity took place about Father Divine, I think the thing that really made the big splash in the newspapers, particularly in the Hearst newspapers, was the fact that he married a young white woman, and yet this was accepted in his church in Harlem, which they didn't think would happen, but it did and it was fine. So we said, "Why don't we have him do a broadcast?" Or I said. [Laughter.] "Why don't we have him do a broadcast for us on the air?" So that started the negotiations with Father Divine, who would not talk to you on the telephone, but his lawyer talked to you. The outcome was that we had to have a white microphone, and the engineer had to have a white cassock type of thing, you know, over his suit. Oh, he had all sorts of recommendations.

I never saw this man until the night of the broadcast. We arrived there, and I always had somebody with me when we went on location. Incidentally, these remote broadcasts were called Nemo in those days.

Ingersoll: Were they rather new, the remote broadcasts, at that time?

Meserand: They were new when I was at NBC, and they were still new when I was at WINS, but, of course, you had to go over there and set up, had to buy lines from the telephone company to have the power to broadcast, and you set up your microphones and your equipment, the portable equipment which was available at that point. Prior to that it wasn't available.

But anyway, we get to Harlem and Father Divine had, I think, three houses that had been sort of gutted so that it made one large auditorium and he had a stage, and this is where he broadcast from. Well, the place was absolutely mobbed. I got out of the car. I was a chain smoker, incidentally. I had a cigarette in my hand, and this gentleman came over to me and he said, "Take that cigarette out of your mouth. You're in front of God's house."

I said, "Yes, sir." He was much, much bigger than me and certainly bigger than the two men I had with me. [Laughter.]

So we went in, and it was just amazing to me to see the kind of audience. Really, some of the people were such that you would not believe that they would be followers of this kind of sect. Then in the basement they had a group of women who were cooking, and they had these enormous tables, just miles of them. Well, imagine three houses' worth. They were all set up with tables and place settings, and the food was unbelievable—turkeys and hams and roast beefs and so on. See, what they did, they signed over all of their money to this man who was God, and then they were fed and clothed by him. I don't know about housing; I don't know how they did that. I don't remember, really. But this was an image during that period of time that was really one of the first of the so-called sects that later became like the Moonies and the rest of the Oriental groups that have been formed in this country.

Ingersoll: Was it your idea to cover this?

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I went, and there was a man by the name of Emile Gough, who was head of Hearst Radio, whom I had known. He's a pioneer in radio. Emile knew me and knew my work, and he said, "There really isn't an awful lot available right now, but there is an opening in the sales department. You'll be working with the salesmen. Is that all right? Would you take that?"

I said, "Sure." I didn't care, but I wanted something better.

He said, "We're going to move and have regular offices." They were just setting up the Hearst Radio office. See, they had ten stations. Hearst owned a building on Fifty-Seventh Street. I don't remember just where. Anyway, they decided they'd take those offices and Hearst Radio would be there. They would have a person to handle the promotion, ads in Broadcasting and in Variety and in whatever publications they put ads, if I would do the ads for the ten stations. Well, you know, this was an assignment again that I knew nothing about, so I quick got myself acquainted with what was necessary, and where angels fear to tread, I did tread. [Laughter.]

So that's when I went into the Hearst Radio executive offices to handle the promotion for the ten Hearst stations and did very well with it and was very happy in it, because it was another challenge.

Ingersoll: I think you mentioned in your oral history with Catharine Heinz that you went to Columbia [University] and took some special courses at that time, to be sure you were doing the right thing.

Meserand: That's right. That was the period. I had forgotten that. I'm glad you reminded me.

Ingersoll: I thought it was interesting that you sometimes took that route along the way.

Meserand: Yes. In order to do that, I had to learn what I was supposed to do. I certainly wouldn't let anyone down who was kind enough to have faith in me to give me the job, as was Emile Gough. First Jack Hearst and then Emile Gough, because they both had faith in the fact that I would be able to handle the assignment, I guess, or they wouldn't have given it to me. That was a very nice experience and a very good experience for me, and I enjoyed it very, very much.

Ingersoll: That must have been a very growing time for you, doing things, again, as you had many times in the past, that you'd never really done before.

Meserand: That's exactly right.

Ingersoll: You simply had to jump in.

Meserand: Yes. I got to be very good friends with all of the station managers, the one in New York and the one in Pittsburgh. I used to remember all their names, but I can't remember them now. But Milwaukee. Ralph Weil, I remember his name. Isn't that funny? All ten stations, they seemed to be very pleased with the advertisements that I mapped out. They would feed me material, of course, because I didn't know what they were doing. I did go to visit all of them to see their setup so that I would know what I was talking about, because I felt very keenly about this sort of thing. Unless you know what you're doing—I always quote my mother, who always said, "Having a maid isn't the answer. The answer is knowing how to do it so that the maid knows what to do; what she's doing, you have to know how to do first." So this was something that I followed through subconsciously without realizing I was doing it. She had a great influence on my life.

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sort of "heads of the department" with their bosses. Turns out that she was my former secretary, Johnny's niece, whom I had trained at NBC and was very unhappy about my being there. Her name was Eleanor Hurley.

Ingersoll: Why was she unhappy?

Meserand: She didn't feel secure with my being there. Why she thought that I was after her job, only God knows, because I was not after a secretarial job. I was not after anything. I just wanted to work with Johnny because I loved the way he worked and I liked the things that he did. Remember, throughout the years, anytime I had a problem or anything that I wanted to discuss, PR-wise or publicity-wise, I would talk it over with Johnny either on the phone or we'd have a drink together or whatever, because we had been friends for all those years. You don't lose that kind of friendship.

Incidentally, I had a lot of male friends who were not lovers or sweethearts or anything; they were just friends. And Johnny was one of them. So when he said this, I said, "I don't care, Johnny. Do you think I'll get along with Eleanor?" She was known as Pat Hurley.

He said, "Well, you'll have to work that one out."

So I said, "Okay."

So I went to see Streibert, and Streibert kept me in his office for two hours, because he knew my background, he knew who I was, and he couldn't get over the fact that someone who had gotten out of an executive position—my expense account was more than I was to make as a salary, for god's sake!—and that I would give up that kind of prestige for the lowest kind of job in the press department of WOR. Well, the only reason I wanted to work there was because of Johnny, plus the fact that I had heard from other sources that WOR was the nearest thing to what NBC used to be. And I missed that. I missed it very much, that family loyalty kind of thing that we all had at NBC in the beginning. And he couldn't understand that. Streibert couldn't understand it. He kept saying, "You will never get anywhere. You will never be an executive in this organization. I just want you to know that that's the way it is here." Well, of course, he ate his words a few years later.

Ingersoll: Why was that? Why would he say you would never be an executive?

Meserand: Because he didn't believe in women! Women had two places. You know the same old story. One was the kitchen. I was never in a kitchen. So he just couldn't understand this. No amount of talking—I just said, "I'm resigned to it. I just ask you for the opportunity of letting me work here for the length of time that I can."

Finally, he said, well, if he couldn't break my spirit down, he wasn't going to try. So I went to work there under very adverse circumstances, really.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Ingersoll: So you began to work in WOR in a fairly lowly position, but how long did that go on?

Meserand: It's hard for me to remember at the moment now. It didn't go on too long, because I was bored with what I was doing. It was not giving me the opportunity to do the things that I might want to do.

But at that time the publicity department, which Johnny Johnstone headed, had several reporters. Dave Driscoll was one, Alvin Josephy was another, Jerry Danzig was a third. What they did was that certain programs were originated by the press department and the boys would

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announcement of our engagement was going to be made following this little weekend trip. You remember you saw some pictures earlier of dear friends of ours.

Ingersoll: Oh, yes.

Meserand: It was on their boat that we were going on this little yachting trip. So my beau called. He was a young lawyer. He was just leaving a courthouse that was midway between my office at 1440 Broadway and the marina at City Island where the boat was docked. He was at the courthouse at, I think, 149th Street, if I recall it correctly. I said, "It's silly for you to come all the way downtown. I'll take the subway and meet you at City Island," because he was so near there. So that was fine. That was about a quarter of four.

A few minutes after that—see, we had no newsroom at WOR. We had no news operation whatsoever.

Ingersoll: None at all?

Meserand: None. There was a printer. You know what a printer is?

Ingersoll: I'm not quite sure what that is.

Meserand: A printer looked like a teletype machine, without a keyboard. It printed the reports on a continuous roll of paper. Bells would announce a story coming in, and if it was a bulletin, this was preceded by a constant ringing of bells. The material was supplied by the news agencies—AP, UP, INS, etc.

Ingersoll: Did it come through on a tape?

Meserand: It came through on very much like the things on the computer now, a whole page. It wrote right across as you would a normal page. It had a roller on it, and as it rolled off, you tore off the bulletin or whatever.

Ingersoll: Did you have all three services?

Meserand: No, no. There was only one—Trans-American or something unbelievable. I think that was the name of it. It was not one of the major ones.

Well, this printer was in the back of master control, and when something came through, bells would ring. When the bells started to ring, the man in master control, the engineer, would pick up the phone, call Johnstone, and say, "Bells are ringing." Johnny would race upstairs, tear the thing off the machine, and run into the production office, and they would get an announcer and the announcer would put it on the air. That was the whole news division. You see how inaccurate that could be and how terrible that could be and how time-wasting.

Well, this is what happened right after that phone call at a quarter to four. I remember the time only because they had just told us that we could leave at a quarter of four. So Johnny dashed upstairs when master control called and said, "Bells are ringing." He dashed up to master control, which was right upstairs on the same side of the building where our office was, so it was just up the stairs and into the master control. The next thing that happened was that Johnny called downstairs and said, "Driscoll, get Meserand and get up here."

So I went upstairs with Dave, and that's the last anybody saw of me until the following morning when John Gambling went on the air and said, "Guess who was here all night?" [Laughter.] And mentioned my name. You can imagine my family! Because everybody was calling Mother to find out where I was and why wasn't I at the marina to go on this trip. So then

Page 23

went out was rewritten by our writers. They each had assignments. If you look through my things, you'll notice that each person that was listed on the staff when we first started had an assignment, an afternoon programmer or morning programmer or the night shift. What did they call that night shift? We had a name for it. I can't remember it right now. Anyway, we were on twenty-four hours a day, so that we had coverage in that newsroom for twenty-four hours. Everything was written for that particular period.

We also started having news on, but that didn't happen until later in the year, not the year that England declared war [1939], but when we went into the war ourselves [December 8, 1941], we had news periods on every hour and every half-hour. So you can see the amount of work! And these were not the same news stories. These were all new segments that were put in. So you could see how much work was involved in putting these on the air.

I don't know what other stations did. I was too busy working my own job. But I do know this, that thirty-five years after we left WOR, they were still using the same procedures that we set up. The people might have been different, although the news staff was pretty much the same. They had additions, of course, because there's always the case of somebody dying or moving on to other things. But on the whole, the actual setup and function of the newsroom was still the same.

Ingersoll: Was this local, national, and international news that WOR newsroom collected?

Meserand: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. You see, we were the key station for the Mutual Network.

Ingersoll: How many other stations were there, do you know?

Meserand: On the Mutual Network?

Ingersoll: Yes.

Meserand: I honestly don't know, but there were lots. There were an awful lot. It must be in that folder that I gave you on WOR and the Mutual Network.*

So we originated it. Anything that came out of New York or the area of New York, we fed it to the network. Also, many of the programs that were on WOR were fed to the network. We also picked up from the network certain programs that originated, let's say, at WGN in Chicago or someplace in California or whatever. One of their stations in Pittsburgh, I know we'd pick up some of our commentators from there if they were traveling in that area. They would broadcast from there and we fed through WOR to the whole network, you see. So there was a constant interchange there between WOR locally and Mutual Network, as far as the network itself was concerned. But on the whole, they took practically everything that we originated.

Ingersoll: Then I understand that Dave Driscoll was often away as a foreign correspondent during that time period [1941-1945].

Meserand: During the war, yes. You see, prior to that I had been made a full-fledged member of the special features staff. Once we started to do the newsroom, we were still WOR News and Special Features. I don't remember what year it was. I'm very bad on dates.

______________________ * WOR was the flag station, that is, the originating station of the majority of the Mutual programming. Originally, WXYZ in Detroit, WGN in Chicago, WLW in Cincinnati, and WOR formed Mutual's nucleus [1934]. Later Mutual had five hundred outlets, making it the largest network in the world. From WOR Radio: The First Sixty Years (1922-1982).

Page 25

suggestion of a man by the name of Robert S. Wood, whom I knew as "Cap" Wood.* I don't know why he was called "Cap" Wood, but when I first knew him was when I was press contact for NBC. "Cap" Wood would call and say, "I'm sending So-and-so over for an interview with Countess Albani," or Damrosch or whichever one he was sending. We got to be telephone friends. I found that I had a lot of telephone friends. I had no idea what they looked like, and I didn't know what "Cap" Wood looked like, but to me I thought he was an old, old man. Remember, I was very young. When it came about that we were talking about a city editor, I said to Dave, "I don't know whether this man is available, but he was city editor of the [New York] World and then the [New York] World Telegram, and he was a great guy on the phone. That's all I know about him. I never met him, but we worked very closely on the telephone."

Well, anyway, we found him. Dave asked him to come in for an interview, and I was very glad to see him. I said to Dave, "I want to ask him just one question," and that was, "Bob, do you feel any resentment to the fact that you will be answering to Dave and me?" Because here was a man who was old enough to be my father! I had great respect for this man, and I didn't feel that it was right that he should be working for me, as it were. It was a completely different—a reversal to the positions that most people would have taken under the circumstances, I think.

So he said absolutely no—he just laughed. I have a picture of him someplace. I'll show it to you. We became very close friends. After everybody was fired, I don't know where Bob went. I lost him after I left WOR, and I don't know. I'm sure that he has gone to his rest by this time. But he was living in Virginia the last I heard.

Ingersoll: Did you ever suggest any women for positions in that newsroom?

Meserand: During the war, we hired two women in the newsroom. Both had good qualifications, both did an adequate job. One did a particularly good job. But they were not as dedicated as one would hope. Times had changed a little bit, too. All of a sudden there was a feeling, "Well, he's getting more money than I'm getting," kind of thing, and it wasn't true, because WOR paid the same scale to them that was paid to another writer if she was a writer. But people do talk sometimes and they do exaggerate things. No, there was never any—and I didn't know anybody who would fit into the positions available. So it was hard for me to recommend somebody if I didn't know anybody who did that kind of work. I didn't know any women reporters. The only reporters I knew were men, because they were the reporters from the newspapers. They had very few [women] staff reporters on the newspapers in comparison to the male element, even during the war.

Ingersoll: I noticed that one of the women who was on a list of staff at one time, I think it was a woman, Alois Havrilla.

Meserand: No, no. Alois Havrilla was an announcer on WEAF when I was at NBC. Alois was just an announcer. He was not a reporter. He became an announcer on WOR Mutual when he left NBC, but he was not Hispanic.

Ingersoll: That is exactly the question I was going to ask you.

Meserand: No, he was not Hispanic.

Ingersoll: I am interested in when Hispanics got into broadcasting.

______________________ * The Meserand papers contain a memo from David Driscoll (November 7, 1946). This was the first time Robert S. Wood was listed as a member of the staff. He was a product of Pulitzer's Evening World, the London Times, and the Manchester Guardian.

Page 27

Meserand: No. Absolutely not. No, no. There was nothing that they had to sign. I think at some places they had loyalty oaths, and I don't think that we even had that, not that I recall, anyway.

Ingersoll: A little bit later, maybe, then.

Meserand: Maybe. Probably. But I don't remember us having it at all, really.

Ingersoll: As the war went on and probably some of the younger men from the newsroom were taken into the service, who filled their places?

Meserand: Very often there were quite a number. Of course, during the war, World War II, if you had children, you were relieved of the responsibility of going to war. Now, we had a number of men, like Campbell Crawford, I remember him because he had so many children. I can't tell you how many he had. But if you were a man who was sustaining a family or the sole support of a mother or parent or whatever the situation, you were excused. Now, a lot of these men worked for AP, UP, INS, and this is where we drew our members. Most of our members came from AP and UP.

Ingersoll: Then to talk just a little bit about the content of wartime news, was there very much about the home front news, industrial mobilization? Was there very much coverage of the women who worked in shipyards and factories?

Meserand: There was coverage of the story, not of women. They were not separated. They were part of a team that worked in whatever it was, whatever the field might be. I don't remember anybody doing any specific—except for special event kind of things, you know, where you did the story of a factory where they hired Rosie the Riveter or whatever. Those were features. But the actual mobilization story was that the factories were running, they were producing. Whether it was man, woman, or child at the controls was not important; what was important was the bottom line, as they say today, the article that came out of that factory. This is what we covered in the news.

Ingersoll: That's interesting. Then what about patriotic coverage? I've read that World War II was one of the few wars where there was no criticism of the war per se. Was there anything at all of that kind of thing on WOR? Anybody wanting to get on a story that maybe Hitler could have been stopped in a different way or anything like that?

Meserand: We covered news, Fern. Only news. We did not cover somebody's opinion. You had commentators for that. We covered the news as it happened. Whatever it was, was given without being slanted in any way. We covered the story as it was, not as we wanted it to be or somebody else wanted it to be. I think that answers your question.

Ingersoll: I noticed in something that was put out somewhat later—your saying "not slanted" brought it to my mind—that there was an unwritten policy that news should not be slanted in any way, even by tone of voice.

Meserand: That is correct. We watched that very carefully. I was really the watchdog on that. I didn't care who it was. If he did it once, he never did it again—he or she or it. This was something that we prided ourselves on, and I think it was the thing that made WOR the top station in news for the simple reason that people believed us because they knew that we were telling them the truth.

______________________ * Reprint of an advertisement written and produced by WOR for Broadcasting Magazine, November 17, 1947.

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Meserand: Well, number one, I didn't know what a Seder was until somebody happened to mention it. I think it was the man who was head of the American Jewish Committee, Milton Krents. Milton was working with me on something; I don't remember what it was. He said, "I have to get back home because of the Seder."

I said, "What's that?"

And he explained what it was. I said, "Oh, that's wonderful." I was very, very interested in religions, too, as well as other things. So we had a lady who was secretary to Alfred J. McCosker, who was then president of WOR, and her name was Bert Greene. Bert was sort of the Mother Hubbard of the whole organization. She took care of everybody. No matter what happened, she took care of it. I went over to her and I said, "Bert, you know all about the Jewish religion. Fill me in on a Seder."

She laughed and she told me. So I went to the library and I got out all the books I could on the Jewish holidays, particularly the Seder, which was happening very soon. When he [Krents] said he was going home for the Seder, he didn't mean he was going home for the actual holiday period; he was going home to either work with his wife in preparation for it or whatever it was. It wasn't that particular night that he was anxious to get back home for.

So I found out about the Seder and I read on it. The next day I called him [Krents] and I said, "What would you think if we put on a Seder for the boys who are shipping out?" Because the Seder was going to be, let's say, Friday night, or whatever night it was, and this was the beginning of the week. I said, "We could do it from the point of embarkation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard."

Henriette Harrison at that time was the publicist and PR person for the national YMCA. She was the only woman on their entire staff. This is the national YMCA. I called "Hank" and I said, "Do you think that we could use the Y?" They had a Y at the Navy Yard, and they gave the boys accommodations, doughnuts, and all that sort of thing. I said, "Do you think that we could do this at the Y?"

She said, "Oh, I think that would be great." Now, "Hank" was Jewish. Although she was not a religious person, she knew what the Seder was and what it represented. She said, "I think the boys would be very grateful for such a thing."

So that's how that came about. Through Milton Krents I got the right kind of rabbi, the cantor, and somebody to do the four questions of the Seder, to ask the four questions. It has to be the youngest member, and so forth. I wrote the script with his help and the library, and we did the broadcast. It was the first time that it had ever been done on the air, and I did the same thing when we went into television. I did the first Seder on television, which was beautiful.

Ingersoll: Do you think one could think that perhaps a woman might have more of a feeling for how important something like this, which is really a religious and a family event, would be for boys of a certain religion going overseas than a man might feel?

Meserand: Well, if a man had the same kind of background that I had and the family was the hub of his life, and if he felt about whatever his religion was—mine happened to be Catholic, and I was very interested in Catholicism, but I was also interested in everybody else's religion. So if he felt the same way as I did, I don't see any reason why there would be any difference, really. I think it's up to the individual. I have never separated man and woman, obviously, as you can tell by my comments. But the fact remains that it was the individual that did it, not the sex.

Ingersoll: And it was during this period that you did the first St. Patrick's Day celebration?

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Ingersoll: Yes, there are any number of those.

Meserand: Yes, and that certain people were responsible for certain operations of the department. In other words, this staff member would be responsible to make sure that all the newsmen were where they were supposed to be and when they were supposed to be and had to work directly with the newsroom. But everybody reported back to me because I was representing him [David Driscoll].

Well, he decided that he wanted my job, and he worked in cahoots with the secretary in the department, who didn't have much love for me, apparently. She was the only one that I ever had any problem with. I was not aware of what these two were doing, except that I was so busy with what I had to do, believe me, that I didn't have time for the kind of nonsense that they were up to.

But one morning I came in and I found the side drawer of my desk had been monkeyed with and it was open. I always locked that drawer because it had a lot of my personal papers in it. Whenever I would write, for instance, to Dave [Driscoll] overseas, I always made a carbon so that I would not forget what I had said or written and just to make sure that I'd given him the information and not give him the information two or three times. So I always made carbon copies of everything that I did. My desk had obviously been opened, the papers were not in the sequence that I normally [kept them]—that's how I found out that somebody had tampered with the desk—and they were misfiled. I later found out that this is what had happened.

He wrote a letter to Dave overseas, accusing me of doing something, and to save my life, to this day I can't remember what it was. I did not know that he had done this. He had never faced me with it. So Dave had written to his wife. We were very close friends, all of us. As you can see from this letter, this was addressed to me care of her. Lib [Driscoll] called me and said she had this letter from Dave and what was it all about. I said, "I'll call you back on a private line." I had a phone that was not connected with the switchboard so that whatever I wanted to discuss with someone was not within hearsay of anybody else in the organization. So I called her back and she read the letter to me, and I was fit to be tied, needless to say. Well, you can see from the letter that he wrote me, care of his wife, that this was—what angered me most was that he had gone to the executive board and made this accusation, whatever it was, and really it was not anything terribly important. But the fact that it was done was important.

Ingersoll: And never speaking to you about it directly.

Meserand: And never facing me, you know. If you face the person, you know whether that person is telling the truth or not because he can't look you in the eye. Apparently he got nowhere over there, because apparently Streibert, from what Dave says in the letter, shut him up and said that "that would be discussed at a later date when Mr. Driscoll was back or that he would talk to me." He didn't talk to Whitmore about it, see.

So when I got this, I realized how disturbed Dave was by it, and this is the thing that angered me, because here he was in the trenches, carrying all this terrible equipment. We had lousy equipment in those days. We had wire recorders that weighed a ton and that didn't work at all. And the frustration that these poor newsmen must have felt, carrying all this equipment that didn't work—well, what they were going through was not very pleasant. Then to have a letter from home giving him this disturbing news was very, very upsetting. So you can read for yourself what he says and what I wrote him.

At that same time—and I think this is the thing that was bugging him, because he didn't know what it was about—BBC offered me a job in London at a fantastic salary in those days. I don't remember what it was, but it was much, much more than I was making. I had talked it

Page 33

During the hectic periods, the very hectic periods, Streibert had a bathroom in his office and I would go in there and take a shower. Mother would send some clothes down, and I would change my clothes. But I would just catch cat naps. I had a little divan in my office, and that's where I would catch a little bit of sleep. But no one complained. It was part of what you were doing. You were covering the war! [Laughter.] You couldn't be over there, so you were doing the best thing that you knew how.

Ingersoll: I understand that in 1942, going back a little ways, there was a Radio Women's Service Unit for Defense formed.* I guess these were all New York women.

Meserand: This was an organization that was like a government organization. We worked with government agencies. They were all women in broadcasting. Some were broadcasters, you know, on-the-air personalities. Let me see. I think Helen Sioussat was one for CBS. She was director of talks. Margaret Cuthbert was director of talks at NBC. I've forgotten who was at ABC; I don't remember now.

Ingersoll: Was Henriette Harrison there?

Meserand: Henriette was, I told you, the head of public relations for the YMCA, and she was very active.

Ingersoll: Agnes Law?

Meserand: Agnes Law was CBS. She was the librarian for CBS. Do you remember the play "Desk Set"?

Ingersoll: Oh, yes.

Meserand: That was written about Agnes Law. Agnes Law was head of the steering committee for AWRT. You see how we were all intermeshed later. [Laughter.] It was all through our lives that we sort of tread on one another's toes.

Ingersoll: That's interesting. You mentioned some women in that oral history with Catharine Heinz who learned Morse Code during the war.

Meserand: Yes.

Ingersoll: Was that these same women?

Meserand: Some of them were the same women. That's very interesting. I came across that just recently. I found one of my sheets, my homework. This came about through one of our engineers. I can't remember which one. Charlie Singer, I think. He said, "You know, you gals ought to get a group together," he said to me, "to learn the Morse Code. You don't know what's going to happen. What if a bomb should fall here? If you needed help and you knew how to use the Morse Code, you might be able to save your life."

______________________ * "Radio Women Form War Emergency Unit" in Radio Daily, July 2, 1942. The article states that the "members of the news service unit include the following: Bessie Beatty, Bertha Brainard, Viola D. Calder, Marian Carter, Ilka Chase, Margaret Cuthbert, Mrs. Roy Durstine, Dorothy Gordon, Henrietta K. Harrison, Adelaide Hawley, Isabel Manning Hewson, Helen Hiett, June Hynd, Grace Johnson, Alma Kitchell, Mila Mack, Alice Moslin, Edythe J. Meserand, Natalie Da Nesi Murray, Mary Margaret McBride, Adele Gutman Nathan, Lisa Sergio, Lucille Singleton, Helen J. Sioussat, Jane Thompkins, Mela Underwood, and Marion Young.

Page 35

Meserand: The switchboard just lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree with people saying thank you for that and how wonderful it was, because they had missed it, you see. That was the first documentary. [Laughter.]

Ingersoll: Isn't that interesting! The original glass disks would have been made in the United States or in Europe then?

Meserand: Here. The original commentary took place at SHAEF or wherever it was being transmitted from.

Ingersoll: Would it come by telephone or wireless?

Meserand: Wireless, because it came from overseas. When it was broadcast here, you see, it came through, let's say, BBC came through BBC and so forth. Well, we would get the information at WOR, recording would record it there, and then the recordings were sent up to the newsroom for us to do with what we pleased. This is when I got the idea of putting all this stuff into a neat little package of a half hour.

Ingersoll: That would have meant listening to them again and recording.

Meserand: Oh, my! Listening.

Ingersoll: The important parts.

Meserand: So that you'd have the right substance, too, and you would have the right sequence of events. It was a very thrilling moment for me.

Ingersoll: Oh, it must have been. Have they ever replayed those?

Meserand: Yes, they did. They replayed them. We did what was called "The Year in Review" each year, and we did the whole year's events. Incidentally, some of those are in the Library of Congress now.

Ingersoll: Then in August of 1945, in your scrapbook there was a memo from Streibert [August 17, 1945] appreciating your "superb performance and really extra effort during the peace negotiations and the surrender of Japan." Can you tell a little bit about what those special efforts were?

Meserand: By this time Mr. Streibert knew that I didn't belong in the kitchen, shall I say. [Laughter.] No, we were very good friends after thirteen years. You see that memo here from him congratulating me on being still there after thirteen years. But what took place was that I was there two days and two nights, never off my feet, and he knew it because he was in and out of the office and I was constantly working to get every bit of information out to, not only the people, our audience, but also I wanted to give, in addition to the communiqués that came through, there were a lot of people of all religions who were looking for comfort.

So I did a program with Cardinal—well, he wasn't cardinal then, he was Archbishop Spellman, who was a very dear friend of mine. Cardinal Spellman, for the Catholics; [Norman Vincent] Peale for the Protestants; Rabbi Finkelstein, who was head of the Jewish Seminary of America, for the Jews. And who was the other? Have I got everybody? Catholic, Protestant, and Jews. All right. So I had the three, and I had choral groups from each, you know, from two cathedrals and a synagogue. I had a cantor from the synagogue. And the voices of these three men, the three reverend men, giving comfort to the families. I think that's what he was referring to as the extra, because he thought it was so wonderful that I had thought of the people who were the mothers and fathers and wives and children of men and women who were overseas, because

Page 37

Then it was my suggestion that we do one on Chinatown. Now, Chinatown, at that time, was vastly different than it is today. There was no crime in Chinatown. They had their own newspapers, they had their own schools, they had their own way of living, which was the Old World China where the master of the house was the papa and he married the person that his family had chosen for him at birth, and he never knew his bride until they were married. There was such a vast difference in culture that I thought it would be interesting to bring this to the American public. So I made arrangements through the newspaper down there to select a family that was typical of the new China. Now, this is long before what's happened in China, when it was just China. They still had their war lords and all the rest.

So he gave me the name of the man who spoke English very well, and he was involved in I don't know how many different ventures—the newspaper, the temple, he had a grocery store, he had four or five or six different—because their theory was that if one thing didn't become successful, they had the other things to rely on, you see.

Ingersoll: Excuse me just a minute. I want to get another tape.

[End Tape 2, Side B; Begin Tape 3, Side A]

Ingersoll: Do you think you covered that Chinatown story in any way different from the way a man would have covered it?

Meserand: We go back to the same thing. I covered it as a story. I gave the story of this family and what its aims and purposes were. I gave a factual report. There was no angle to it; I just gave a report of life in Chinatown in, I would say, an upper middle-class family. They had two daughters and a son. I lived with them for three weeks. I didn't sleep there, but I had all my meals with them. I did everything that they did during the day and very late into the evening, but I went back to my own apartment to sleep and change clothes and so forth.

As I said before, they had two daughters, one who was a graduate of Barnard, the other one was at Hunter College, and the boy was at M.I.T. [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. So you get the picture that this was not the ordinary downtrodden Chinese that we see. All of them had been educated in the schools down in Chinatown and then came, of course, uptown to the high schools and universities. The second girl, who was at Hunter, was the worst tomboy you ever saw outside, but the minute she stepped foot inside that apartment, she was Chinese. She bowed to the scroll, went to her grandmother and bowed to her grandmother, went to her mother and bowed to her mother, and then went to her room and changed clothes and became Chinese. When she went outside, she wore Western dress, of course, to school.

The other girl had been graduated from Barnard and was engaged to marry her brother's roommate, who was studying to be an engineer. He was at M.I.T. There was great disturbance in the family because she had already been promised to somebody when she was born, because that's the way the Chinese household was run. You had a girl child, you already knew who was going to be her husband. You had a boy child, you knew who was going to be his wife. They never saw one another until the day they were married. But in Chinatown at that period, they had their own societies. In other words, all the Lees were one society, all the Wongs were one society, and so forth. According to your name, you had a society. When you had a problem, you went to that society and that society determined what was going to happen to you or the problem. Consequently, there was practically no crime in Chinatown then because this was all resolved. At least if it was there, they resolved it. It wasn't in our courts and so forth.

So when she decided that she was going to be an American rather than a Chinese, this was a big decision, particularly at that time. You must remember that we're talking forty years ago or more. Fifty years ago. My god! Well, that problem was resolved this way. Upon his graduation,

Page 39

Meserand: That was "For Americans Only"? No, that was another one.

Ingersoll: I think that was another one that began with the women, then went on to the mobilization of other parts of society. It ran weekly.

Meserand: Yes, I remember.

Ingersoll: For a half hour.

Meserand: For a half hour.

Ingersoll: It explained and dramatized various phases of the nation's mobilization.*

Meserand: Oh, I know that. I remember now. Yes. There was a woman by the name of [Nadine] Blakesley. I can't remember the rest of her name. She was a socialite. Her husband was a very famous doctor in New York.

Barton: Amanda?

Meserand: No, it was not. I can't remember what her first name was. Nadine, that was it. She came to Streibert with this idea of doing a program on what people were doing who had worked in the war effort and now the war was over and how could they channel their energy and their know-how for the rebirth of a nation, really, is what it was. She said that they [the companies involved] couldn't afford to pay for time on the air, but that she would make it possible herself to see whether or not we could put a program together that she would pay the scriptwriter or the orchestra or whatever—in other words, putting together the program. Either she would do it or the company that we were referring to would do it, and that's how that came to be.

Who was assigned to it? I was.** It's not the kind of program [arrangement] that I was particularly interested in, but she was such a nice lady and she wanted so much to do this. The first program that she did I don't remember too well, but the one program that I do remember that was extremely interesting to me and I enjoyed doing was with Texaco. What she did there was to show—or they told me what they had done during the war effort, and then how they were transferring responsibilities in their plants for the use of today after the war, post-war use, and how they were using their personnel who had been highly skilled in their endeavor prior and during the war to a peacetime operation. This is the scripts that we wrote.

Ingersoll: Oh, that's interesting.

Meserand: What we did was to intersperse with music and we had regular actors to portray the roles that the company was talking about. Because to use the actual personnel was deadly, you know. They're not actors and they were scared to death of the microphone. So we did this with actors, but using the material that was supplied to us by the corporate firm. Then we always had a message from the president of that company. But it was at no expense to WOR except for time, but in relation to this you got a very fine program.

______________________ * According to WOR-TV News, July 26, 1950, "Mobilization Story" was arranged and produced by Edythe Meserand. **Edythe Meserand suggested that we add the following list of programs which were in the "Mobilization Story": 1) The Women; 2) The Traitors; 3)Communism; 4) Replacement for the USO [United Service Organization]; 5) The Draft Dodgers of 1950; 6) The A-Bomb Story; 7) Civilian Defense.

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Ingersoll: Yes. Then in April of 1951, I think it was, you became the head of the committee to form, and then later became the first president of the American Women in Radio and Television. How did that all come about? It came about from the group of American Women in Broadcasting, didn't it?

Meserand: American Women in Broadcasting was headed by a lady by the name of Dorothy Lewis, who then became the U.N. correspondent for all of the networks. In other words, you went to her if you wanted anything from the U.N. Dorothy was a very ambitious, wonderful lady, but she was very pushy, shall I say. [Laughter.] She was, at the time, the head of the American Women in Broadcasting, which was an arm of the National Association of Broadcasters, that was headed by Harold Fellowes. In order to belong to the American Women in Broadcasting, your station had to be a member of the NAB [National Association of Broadcasters]. So it eliminated all the women who were in broadcasting on other stations, and WOR happened to be a member of NAB.

So who does Mr. Streibert assign to go to the AWB meetings? Me. And I hated—hated!—women's organizations with a passion. I was not a joiner. I argued with him, and he insisted that I go. I remember the first one I went to was in Cleveland, I think, and there was a gal by the name of Pat Mower, who walked in the room. She was Pat Griffith then, and she was a captain in the WAAC. She was a great big gal. To this day she teases me because she said I took one look at her and she knew how much I hated her! [Laughter.] We are very, very close friends.

Well, I came back from that meeting and wrote Mr. Streibert a two-page memo on why you shouldn't belong to the American Women in Broadcasting. He paid no attention to me or the memo. He said, "When there is another meeting, you will please attend." That's what he wrote. [Laughter.]

Mr. Fellowes decided that the time had come for the Women in Broadcasting to have their own organization, and he called several women to Washington—Henriette Harrison, the same old group, Doris Corwith of NBC, Margaret Cuthbert of NBC, Agnes Law from CBS, Geraldine Zorbaugh of ABC—she was ABC then. Yes, she was ABC then; she went to CBS afterwards. She was a vice president of CBS. There was somebody else.

Anyway, we went down there and he said, "You have to form your own organization." He kept Dorothy Lewis out of it because he knew that she would try to take over, and he didn't think that was right. He thought that we should form our own organization, and then if we wanted her, we could include her into it. He said that he would support us and he was sure that a lot of other people would support us in the broadcasting industry, meaning the men and the women who were station owners, who belonged to the NAB. We would have their blessing.

Ingersoll: The main reason was to get in the larger group?

Meserand: Yes. All the other women who were not members, whose bosses were not members in NAB. He had foresight. He was a wonderful man, Harold Fellowes.

So we came back to New York and we had a meeting at CBS. Agnes Law was appointed the chairman of the steering committee. So she and Geraldine Zorbaugh, who was a lawyer and a vice president of ABC, a wonderful gal, and somebody else formed a committee within a committee, if you know what I mean, to start working on the constitution. Dorothy Kemble was the other person; I couldn't remember her name. Dorothy Kemble then worked with Henriette Harrison on writing the code of ethics. So all of us worked together in forming this so-called group. There weren't very many meetings, because actually the steering committee, Agnes Law, Margaret Cuthbert, Gerry Zorbaugh, and "Hank," I think those were the four, because they used to meet at "Hank's" apartment. It was the easiest place to meet—Henriette Harrison's apartment,

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Ingersoll: Would you think maybe that some, at least, of these women were women who had gotten into broadcasting during the war when the men were away, and when the women all went home, were then doing women's programs?

Meserand: No. No, no, no. A lot of these programs were on the air before the war, during the war, like the [Alfred W., Jr.] McCanns, like Marion Young, Mary Margaret McBride. She was on the air all during the war. These people were broadcasters. They gave recipes, they gave book reviews, they gave news bulletins, because we would feed it to them. They did reviews of the theater, if there was a new play. It was a magazine, really, is what it was.

Ingersoll: It was a genre that we hardly have anymore.

Meserand: We don't have it anymore. The one person I blame for that is a man who I knew when I was with Hearst Radio. He was a salesman. His name was Ted Oberfelder. I met him again after he had left and he'd gone up in the ranks. Did he become president of NBC Radio? I don't know. But he grew in the ranks. He was one of the speakers at one of our conventions or conferences in Chicago, oh, way back. I met him for breakfast because I knew he was there and he knew I was there, and we said, "Let's have breakfast together." Of course, he ate my English muffin like he used to do at Hearst Radio when we'd always send out for breakfast. He never ordered one; he always ate half of mine. Well, he did the same thing that morning and I said, "You haven't changed a bit," and we laughed over that.

We got talking about women broadcasters, because that's what we were there for. He said, "Edythe, I'm going to see that every one of those women is off the air before the year is out."

Ingersoll: Why was that?

Meserand: He hated women and he hated women broadcasters and he hated any woman who was on the air. I don't care what she was or who she was.

Ingersoll: He was high enough to be able to do it?

Meserand: He was high enough to do enough damage so that a lot of the stations got rid of their women broadcasters. That was my first inkling of what was going to happen.

Then I blame a lot of the women, because they did not keep up with the trends. They were still giving recipes, they were still doing book reviews when they should have been doing newsworthy things. The women who had been working all during the time of the war, had come out of their shell, they were much more progressive, they wanted to know more about everything. They didn't want to be pacified with a new brownie mix, you see. A lot of them went by the wayside. Those who did keep up, those who did continue, stayed on the air.

Ingersoll: That's very interesting.

Meserand: I can't tell you the dates of these things, but it was in the course of events, in other words. That may answer your question.

Ingersoll: Yes. Then the following year, after AWRT was formed and you became president, 1952 was the year that you retired.

Meserand: 1952 was the year that we were all fired. I didn't retire. [Laughter.]

Ingersoll: How did that all come about?

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The main speaker was Mary Anne Krupsak, who was the first lieutenant governor of the state of New York, who was to leave at five o'clock the next morning to go to Poland. She just about made it from the Saratoga. The third person was Joanne Miller, the wonderful singer who used to have the Cooperstown Playhouse here in Cooperstown and has since done a fantastic job in Granbury, Texas, where she has her own theater. She was the top singer for Tommy Dorsey's band, and my favorite singer, and she flew up from Texas to sing at the party. So you see the kind of thing it was.

Then the only remaining vice president for WOR at that time was Jack Popele, who was the vice president in charge of engineering, and he drove up from New Jersey to come to the banquet and insisted on having equal time. He brought me—I must show you—a Swedish glass squirrel about so big, and he said that he had saved that from the WOR Christmas fund that I started forty years ago, forty-five years ago [1948], and they still have it, incidentally.

Ingersoll: That's something we should have talked about.

Meserand: He had saved that from the Christmas fund to bring to me. [Laughter.] Which I thought was rather cute. But it was a great night for me, one of the most thrilling that I've ever had, believe me.

Ingersoll: Is there anything else that you think we should talk about that we've missed?

Meserand: You just said the Christmas fund. That was something that was very dear to my heart. You asked me how that came about. I wasn't hired for the job. That was my pet project. It had nothing to do with my work. Dave and I had worked very late this one night, I don't remember on what, and we decided we'd better have something to eat. His favorite eating place was Joe Madden's, the Sportsman. We called Joe and said, "Is the chef still there?" It was about ten o'clock at night.

He said, "He's just leaving. Why? Do you want to come and eat?"

We said, "Yes." So he held him to put two steaks on for us, and we went over and had dinner.

Joe said, "Have you got your car here?"

Dave said, "Yes."

He said, "Will you drive me to Bellevue Hospital?"

So we said, "What are you doing at Bellevue at eleven o'clock at night?"

He said, "Well, I have some candy." This was in early November of mid-November. "I have some candy that I want to bring to the hospital for the children that have been abandoned." He said, "I do it every year."

So Dave said, "Sure. I'll take you over." So I had no recourse but to go, too, because we wanted to get him there and he would drive me to the apartment and then he would go on home.

So we went, and the nurse there told me about what Joe had done in the past, and said, "Would you like to see the children?"

I said, "At midnight?"

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Ingersoll: Yes, the combination is very, very interesting.

Meserand: That's true. Well, what happened then was that we put the announcements on the air, I scheduled them, I wrote them so that nobody had any extra work to do, and we had the [Reuben C.] Donnelly Corporation, so that nobody could say we were stealing, and the response was overwhelming. I had no contacts in the toy field or clothing; I just used the—

Barton: The children's names were on the presents.

Meserand: Oh, yes. I just called the manufacturers that were listed on Seventh Avenue who did clothing and toys or whatever and told them what I was doing, would they cooperate, all I wanted to do was buy them. Well, not only did they give them to us wholesale, but they also contributed, a great many.

Then I worked with Bellevue Hospital and Dr. Jacobs there. It was Dr. Jacobs who really, really helped me so much, because when we went through one ward where the unbalanced children were from beatings and so forth, he said, "There but for the grace of God go I." Oh, boy, that did it to me. That did it to me. I went to each ward, got each child's name, and had the nurses give me sizes, because I don't know one size from another. We bought the clothing, we found out what the children wanted. Each gift was wrapped in Christmas wrapping. You saw the picture of Streibert holding the dolls. I sent a memo to the staff, men and women, and said, "We're going to be working on such and such a night to wrap Christmas presents. Please cooperate." They all did.

Then Mr. [Robert] Dowling gave us a whole loft, because this developed in years afterwards, it developed so that it was all the hospitals, not only Bellevue, but there were over ten thousands kids that had to be taken care of. So we had to have room for all this, and Mr. Dowling gave us a loft that we could use. In those days, it was safe to walk on Broadway. Again, the things were all gift wrapped and given to the children with their names on them and they were distributed by our staff. What we did was to use our personalities to deliver the gifts. But when I would walk into a ward, the kids would call me the Christmas Lady. So it was very rewarding, but I was always sick for Christmas.

Ingersoll: I can imagine so, after all that work.

Is there anything you would have done differently through the years if you had it to do over again, do you think?

Meserand: Yes, I think so. One thing. What I did, I did because I wanted to do or because I felt it was my duty to do, it was my job to do it. Whatever I do, I always put everything I have into that particular endeavor. I don't know how to do it halfway. But I think that I would have taken a section out of the pages of the new women in broadcasting who have agents, whatever they call those people who do the negotiations for salaries and so forth. But that was unheard of then.

Ingersoll: Yes.

Meserand: I never wanted to talk about myself. I talked about whatever we were doing. I think I might have done that just a little bit differently if I were to do it again. I think I would have given myself some credit for some of the things that I originated, that I did. But in the long run—when I think about and say, "Why?"—I have gotten all the recognition that I could possibly get from my peers and from everybody. So I think I've been an extremely fortunate person.

Ingersoll: You certainly have, and thanks ever so much for sharing these parts of your life with us.