Welcome to Retell Seller, an ephemera podcast where I uncover forgotten stories and the ephemera people leave behind. I’m Angie a reseller of 10 years, and I’ll share one of those snippets with you. Let’s see what today’s find has to say.
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Today I’m looking at a colorful linen postcard of Chicago. The wording at the top says, “Aerial view of the Chicago River and Loop, Chicago, Illinois.”
There’s a small #45 in the upper right corner, and the bottom says, “United Airline Photo.”
The back describes the photo saying, “This scene shows the pattern in which Chicago is laid out. Chicago is the greatest metropolis of the Midwest, having the greatest railroad center in the United States.”
Vertically along the right says, “Pub by Cameo Greeting Card Co., Chicago, Illinois.” Vertically down the center says, “A “colourpicture” publication, Boston 15, Mass. USA.”
It’s postmarked October 13th, 1953, Chicago. It has another stamp saying, “Earn, learn, serve. Join women in the armed forces now.” The stamp is the two-cent John Adams.
And here’s what the message says. “Hi, Brayton. Having a swell time. Was on Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club broadcast this morning. I really enjoyed myself in Dayton. As ever, Arthur.”
Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club was a radio variety show which ran from 1933 to 1968.
Don McNeill himself had applied for a job and ended up being hired to host a show called “The Pepper Pot”, and he ended up reorganizing the show and changing the name to The Breakfast Club. The show consisted of regulars like an orchestra leader and pianist and humorists. He also brought on musicians, actors, comedians, and would interview everyday people.
He’d also encourage audience participation, bringing up viewers to talk, and he would ask questions of them.
There was also another radio program in the early 1930s I kept coming across in the papers, and it was called Wyman’s Breakfast Club. It was connected to George Wyman & Co., which was a woman’s clothing store with ads telling people to tune into the program on WSBT, and many of the mentions I found were in Indiana newspapers saying music would be played in the morning.
So there appears to have been some overlap with two different programs using The Breakfast Club name. While Don’s definitely carried a larger network audience.
Before Don’s Breakfast Club began, he was already working in radio as an announcer while he was in college. Later, according to an article from 1930, he was performing radio comedy with a man named Van Fleming.
The article promoted them as the “two professors” playing fictional college professors in a weekly radio show, and the whole point was comedy, and the article joked that listeners should “tune in to be amused and not informed.”
Then in 1933, McNeill became the master of ceremonies for a new Saturday night radio show called Jamboree, offering up a night of what they called “rollicking fun and light music programs.”
And if The Breakfast Club began in June of 1933, as Wikipedia states, one woman already seemed a bit obsessed when the paper published, in September of that year, saying, “A woman wrote Don McNeill, NBC’s Breakfast Club master, and he has the letter to prove it, that she became interested in his program. In fact, she became so interested that she did not notice the fire which had started in her kitchen, or hear the fireman who finally put it out.”
Don had received a letter from a fan in Pennsylvania who had reported it was so hot a golf ball had exploded, and as a result of hearing this news, Don said he’d make sure to produce a lot of synthetic rain on the show, which was achieved by pouring sand into cellophane.
Throughout various articles from the 1940s, I read Don had used his programs to drum up support for the war efforts. He featured a program called Let’s Draw Straws, where he and other headliners in radio would buy war stamps after drawing straws to see who would purchase the most.
A woman by the name of Mrs. Bowsher was on the show talking of how hats could be made from straw leaves and flowers.
He was once a judge on another show of a mind reader where he would attempt to tell the thoughts of the judges as they went through a store.
In 1946, he started Sunshine Shower, where his listeners sent thousands of cards to patients in hospitals.
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An article published in 1950 talks of how Don McNeill’s work did not take him away from his duties as a father and said one evening his youngest son, Bobby, who was eight at the time, asked for some help in preparing for an ancient history exam. “Bobby did all right by the Egyptians and Babylonians, but when his father asked what major contribution to civilization was made by the Phoenicians, ‘Blinds,’ answered Bobby without a second’s hesitation.
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There was a time where Don put on his show from the U.S.S Enterprise, and his family was with him, and after the show, they left on the Queen Mary for a tour of Europe.
While he was on the tour, Don Ameche, from movies like Cocoon and Harry and the Hendersons, among others, filled in for Dan for six weeks while he was traveling. The show advertised that two Dons were better than one, with McNeil reporting back every so often while on his trip.
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19 years into the show, Mrs. McNeill understood what was keeping her husband’s show going, and she said, “10 million women are in love with my husband.” The article finished with, “As the Prince Charming of the ironing board set, the object of its sublimated love affairs, Don keeps perfect time with the pulse of Mrs. America.”
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In 1953, the Chicago Defender, a Chicago-based African American newspaper founded in 1905, wrote an article titled Orchids to Don McNeill Bans Insults on Program.
I’m reading the article in its entirety.
“Radio listeners heard Don McNeill reprimand a guest Tuesday morning on his WJZ Breakfast Club after the little guest unwittingly insulted many who were listening in. A little boy on the program had brought along a pet dog and the dog’s puppies. In the course of the program, McNeil asked the dog’s name, and the boy replied with the N word. Taken aback, McNeil chided the little boy, telling him to immediately change the animal’s name. The program was unrehearsed, and the reply was so sudden, McNeil had to think quickly to cover the faux pas.
Robert Kitner, president of WJZ and the American Broadcasting Company has repeatedly gone out of its way to prevent insults to minority groups, and the station and its staff knows this. That’s why McNeil was so quick to call the child’s hand in the matter.”
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By January of 1968, an article wrote of how its young audience had no particular taste for Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club. With other programs in the same boat, they decided to offer it up for syndication, and later that year in December, The Breakfast Club did end its run.
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The show was good, clean fun with music and jokes, and McNeill knew, though, that listeners were no longer, engaged in that type of format on the radio.
Those types of shows were going to TV. So after 35 and a half years of hosting the show, it was longer than The Tonight Show’s at 29 1/2, and The Price is Right’s Bob Barker at a little over 34 1/2.
I did find a couple of videos of part one and part two on YouTube of The Breakfast Club show that I’ll be sure to link to. And all of this talk about radio brought back a few memories for me.
When I was around five or six, I had a little recorder that I’d sit outside in my driveway talking about the weather. I can hear my little voice with a Southern accent because I lived in Texas at the time, and I remember saying like, “It’s gonna be a hot one today,” which is probably not a good impression.
My uncle was a radio personality, and he’d sent me a tape of him doing his show, giving me a shout-out while he was on the air for my birthday, and I was so excited. I remember Love Shack being one of the songs on there.
Uh, my husband and I have always loved to sit outside, have a fire, listen to music, and back in the early 2000s, we were listening to Truck’in Tom. And so one night I called to request a song. I was so nervous, and when all he said was, “You sound mobile,” as in being on my mobile phone, I replied, “Thanks,” and was immediately embarrassed as he started laughing saying something like, “Well, it wasn’t really a compliment, but okay.”
So we still laugh about that call today, and unfortunately I found out in looking Truck’in Tom up to see if he was still on the radio, I found out he’d died in 2024 from cancer.
One of the last things I did in more recent years was I read for the blind and visually impaired. It was a program where those who needed it would receive the necessary equipment, which was a receiver, to hear the day’s news read by volunteers. And I do need to look this up again because we had to stop due to construction, and I remember them saying I’d hear from them when the new location was ready.
But I never did hear from them, and the site I’d originally gone to to get involved isn’t even available anymore. So I need to do some looking around for that.
But I love how I went from being a kid who recorded herself sharing the day’s weather with herself to talking about today’s finds with you.
And one more thing about Don’s show coming to an end. It was basically clashing with what people wanted to listen to. Tastes were changing, and he said in part, “People will always enjoy the old-fashioned friendliness others call corn. If ever the world needed sunshine and happiness, it’s now.”
And I would agree.
How about you?
Thank you for joining me. As I shared a snippet of the past, I’d love to know if it connected with you in some way. Did it spark a memory or make you see something differently? If so, consider sharing it. Be sure to check out the show notes for additional info, links and ways to connect. It’s not nostalgia, it’s human.
Until next time, may you find something worth holding onto.
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pinny please
