Younger people in the room will likely furrow their brows and wonder what that "gibberish" was supposed to mean. But those words were as well known thirty-five years ago, as the cry "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman!" is today. Our Gal Sunday, was a popular radio soap opera. Each day it came on the air to the tune "Red River Valley," and the narrator's voice, reminding the listener of the central question of that rags-to-riches tale.

Our Gal Sunday ran for 22 years beginning in 1937. At that time, radio was regarded as television is now—the principal source of mass media entertainment and information. And even more than today, soaps dominated the daytime air waves. If we can't remember radio dramas ourselves, it's likely that our parents and grandparents can. Many of them were as devoted as any fan of television soaps can claim to be. They tuned in hour after hour, day after day, and knew the Brinthropes, Youngs, and Rutledges as well as current fans know the Hortons, Frames, and Fosters. They could recount a year of plots and probably still can recall high points and choice bits of dialogue. Soap fans are not new. They've been around since the beginning of the genre almost a half century ago.

How did it all begin? Norman Brokenshire claimed that he accidentally discovered the soap audience. In the early 1920s, radio was a new and chaotic medium where almost everything was adlibbed. Brokenshire, an announcer, was waiting for some actors to show up and, to kill time, began reading a short story over the air. He was part of the way into it when the actors arrived and he put the book aside. Over the next couple days, he reported that he received hundreds of letters begging him to finish the story.

Whatever the truth of Brokenshire's claim, soap opera was still several years away. Before it could be successful, three crucial developments had to take place. First, the radio itself had to become familiar. At the time Brokenshire read his story, radio was still a novelty. People who owned a radio would sit around and marvel at any static-filled sounds that came out of it—which was about all that did come out. For theatrical entertainment, people went to the theater or the movie house. In fact, those who lived in rural areas were often so far away from the low power transmitters, that they did not hear radio until the medium was several years old.

A second development was that people had to get used to the idea of a radio serial. They had to begin to listen to one program five days a week and become involved in the story of a set of fictional radio characters. The serial form wasn't new. There were film serials and written serials, in magazines, for example. However a film serial meant that a person would plan to go to the theater for one hour a week (at any one of maybe 20 possible hours). A printed serial could be read at one's leisure. To hear a radio serial, on the other hand, people would have to tune in every day at one specific time. Since radios were large heavy objects that had to be plugged into a socket, a listener had to be home (or in some place that had a radio) at the same hour each day.

Finally, before there could be soap opera as we've come to know it, drama had to become a daytime radio feature. Traditionally, the day was work time. Those who weren't in the work force—especially housewives—had socializing, shopping, or child care to occupy them, Entertainment was something for the evening and the weekend. Indeed it can be fairly said that all-day entertainment on weekdays went against the work ethic ingrained in American life. The very idea would have scandalized our nation's founders. In order to entice people into listening to daytime entertainment, radio producers had to find a formula that would first of all, appeal to those most likely to listen—i.e. house-bound women—and that would in time become so familiar that people might be able to go about their chores and still drift in and out of the programs.

While the proliferation of stations and the availability of equipment made the popularity of radio inevitable, there's no doubt that the Depression helped propel it to the forefront of daily life. People simply couldn't afford to go to the theater or the movies very often. It was cheaper and easier to stay home and listen. It was also a ready means of escape from the harsh realities of the world, a more desirable way to pass the time than reading the stock market reports. And it was in the early 1930s that the radio did become the principal medium of entertainment in the country.

Around the same time, America had its first popular radio series. The program was Amos 'n' Andy, a nighttime comedy series (not a soap) about two lovable naive black Alabamians who had migrated to Chicago. It was amazingly popular. In 1930-1 it was estimated that over half the people in the country listened to it regularly. Every night of the week for fifteen minutes, life would stop as everyone caught up on the latest doings of Amos Jones, Andrew H. Brown, George "Kingfish" Stevens, and their associates. Not surprisingly, other series like Myrt and Marge, The Goldbergs, True Romances, and Moonshine and Honeysuckle, quickly followed.

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