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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
Hats off tribute, even white gloves off tribute to a true unsung, I would say pioneer in a lot of ways.
Certainly sung in certain areas and certain age groups, but as far as history is concerned, I'm going to go ahead and say that Ruth Lyons is an unsung pioneer in the history of television.
Agreed.
And this is a listener recommendation.
I think I've been sitting on this one for a while.
Yes.
So for all I know, Nick Bauer gave up on the show and won't even hear this.
It's possible.
It happens.
I also should mention that my dogs are over here today and they usually are put away, but they can't be because of work people.
So they're laying down now, and they're being quiet.
Okay.
But we'll see what happens.
Hey, Momo's appeared on the show at least once, so I can feel your pain.
It's all right.
I think we should have a policy moving forward that anytime Mo speaks in the background, Jerry just leaves that in.
Okay.
I'm fine with that as long as, yeah, I'm fine with that.
No qualifiers needed.
It makes you like a real person like Ruth Lyons strove to be.
Oh, I don't like that then.
I strive to do the opposite and seem robotish and wooden.
No, but I'm glad you introduced this as an unsung hero story, because I had never heard of Ruth Lyons.
But as it turns out, Ruth Lyons was quite a pioneer.
And in fact, I mean, unless somebody corrects us, I would...
I feel pretty good about saying that Ruth Lyons invented the format of the TV talk show.
Yeah, which really flies in the face of essentially everything you will find in research, which credits Joe Franklin, who hosted the Joe Franklin Show, as not only being the first daytime television host, talk show host, but having also invented the format.
Yeah.
And his show is on from 1951, get this, till 1993.
Are you serious?
Yes.
I am dead serious.
He recorded 28,000 plus episodes and he never missed a show.
So no shade at Joe Franklin?
No, not at all.
Not at all.
But you will not find if you look up who invented the daytime talk show.
It's Joe Franklin, across the board.
But we have clear evidence here that our hero of the story, Ruth Lyons...
Definitely invented the talk show at least two years before Joe Franklin.
So let's get into this, shall we?
Because even aside from that, whether she invented it or not, she was clearly an early pioneer in daytime talk and TV in general.
It was also a pretty interesting person.
Yeah, like everything I read about her, it was just like, could she get any better?
Like every time I read a new thing, it was like she was a super rad lady through and through.
But she, like you said she arrived at the beginnings of TV because, as we'll see, she started out on radio and then transferred to TV.
But it was, you know, there were no.
You know, she kind of invented the formula because there were no formulas to follow.
And she was like, I mean, not only a pioneer and just sort of being the first to do things, and certainly the first woman to do these things, but just like all these great ideas.
Like every time she had a new idea for something for the show, it was just like a super cool idea.
Yeah, for sure.
And she not only was a TV pioneer, she was at the onset essentially of radio too.
So she was there for the proliferation of radio as a mass medium and same for TV too.
So just that in and of itself is pretty remarkable.
But yeah, the fact that she was doing this as a woman and then also not like –
I'll go out there and host, uh, all male colleagues tell me what to do.
Like she was calling the shots and she did it by by building up her, her professional career, just by being reliable trustworthy charming um interesting, but also like.
This is kind of how it's going to be.
Although I never saw anything.
So she was described as brash here or there.
Um, I never got the impression that she was one of those people who was just pushy and like.
This is the way it is.
I never got that impression.
And then similarly, she talks a lot.
I read her, well, skimmed her memoirs.
Highly readable, by the way.
And she talks a lot about herself.
Obviously it's her memoir but she never quite crosses the line into like boasting.
So it's really, that's a tough, like a tough tightrope to walk and she manages to do it.
So yeah, she's just pretty great all across the board.
Yeah.
And I think brash is a word that was used and it's still used to describe women in the workplace who, you know, call their own shots and behave essentially like men might.
Yeah.
You know, take no MacGuffins.
Take no MacGuffin.
Oh, man.
Why do you have to say that word again?
So Ruth was born Ruth Reeves in 1905 in Cincinnati.
And, as you will see, this is a very Cincinnati centric story along with some other markets in the area.
But that was really her home.
And as you will see, she was a big Reds fan.
Yeah.
Even to the point of like getting people to stuff the ballot box for the Reds on the all-star team, which is pretty cool.
Yeah.
And we should also say one more thing about the pioneer thing.
I noticed some things.
I certainly wouldn't call us pioneers in podcasting.
People have been doing it before us.
But we were there at generally like the...
The beginning of it kind of, and certainly the spread and proliferation of it becoming a popular form of media.
So I kind of can commiserate here or there with some of the points throughout her career, too.
I thought that was kind of neat.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah, I'll point them out as we go along.
How about that?
All right, so she was born in Cincinnati.
She had a sister.
Her parents were, you know, seemed like sort of middle-class family.
Her dad was a railroad clerk and her mother was a homemaker.
Had a very close family.
It seems like she was probably influenced some by her paternal grandmother, who was involved in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, because Ruth would never drink alcohol throughout her whole life.
But even from a kid, she was like little Eddie Murphy.
She was always putting on a show for the family.
And if she got on stage and did something and messed up, she wasn't the kind of kid to run off stage crying.
She just kind of rolled with it.
And that seems to be sort of a formative thing for her throughout her career.
Yeah.
And speaking of formative, how she was during her formative age kind of set the stage for the rest of her life, wherein she was a feminist in many, many ways.
But at the same time, she was also totally comfortable with fulfilling traditional women's roles.
What's cool is they don't seem to have ever particularly contradicted each other in her.
Yeah.
And it also seems like it certainly wasn't schtick, but it seems like something that she was like hey, I'm just like you.
You know, she she was an every woman.
And she, she even sort of poo pooed.
Sometimes, like you know, the movie stars with their fur coats and like they're basically unrelatable.
And she I don't think she wanted to be relatable.
I think she just was relatable.
Yeah, I think that's well put, man.
So getting back to her bio, she started dating a guy named Johnny Lyons who lived down the street.
I knew a guy named Johnny Lyons, by the way.
Do you really?
Is this the same guy?
I knew him a long time ago.
But when I read that, I was like, oh, yeah, Johnny Lyons, whatever happened to that dude?
It's a good name, good solid name.
He lived down the street, and they ended up getting married about eight years after high school.
And as we'll see, it didn't last very long.
But in the meantime, she went to the University of Cincinnati.
I think the Bearcats?
Go Bearcats.
Wildcats?
Bearcats.
Bearcats, thank you.
And she was just there for one year.
She made quite a splash while she was there the first year.
She's the humor editor for the yearbook.
And she wrote music for the school musical.
And I think she became a tri-delt even.
She was the one who coined the phrase delta, delta, delta.
Can I help you?
Help you?
Help you?
I saw that coming a mile away.
But she stopped.
She dropped out after the first year.
Her father became ill.
He apparently lost a decent amount of money in the Depression.
And so her family was kind of hard up.
And she's like I'm really like nothing I'm doing here is actually going to further my career down the road.
I might as well drop out and go find work and help support the family rather than being a drain on the family finances.
Yeah, for sure.
She was also a musician and a songwriter.
Something she did kind of throughout her career, even though that was definitely like a side gig, that like clearly something she loved doing.
But when she was young, right after she dropped out of school, she got a job playing sheet music at the Willis Music Company, which was downtown Cincinnati.
And she kind of got hip to the local music scene and the radio scene and did other side jobs along the way, obviously to make some money.
But she was writing songs this whole time and, in fact, wrote a song that I wouldn't call it a hit.
But her most popular song in 1946 was called Let's Light the Christmas Tree.
So she wrote a, you know, probably in the area as well, sort of a classic Christmas song.
I mean, she took everything in the kitchen, including the sink that's even remotely Christmassy, and threw it at that one.
There's bells that are pealing along with the choir.
There's children's parts.
All of the lyrics are real schmaltzy, like Christmassy stuff.
I mean, it's a Christmas song through and through.
It's not great, but it is a Christmas song.
Josh's review.
It's a Christmas song.
Yeah, period.
So Ruth Reeves got on the radio for the first time in 1925, just playing piano along with a singer.
But then in 1929, fate came a-knocking, and she got a full-time gig at WKRC in Cincinnati.
In Cincinnati.
And she was assistant to the musical director there.
And she was basically, you know, she organized the music.
She played piano whenever they needed someone live in studio.
And then another fateful thing would happen.
When the host of a show called The Woman's Hour got sick, She filled in and started ad-libbing kind of right away, kind of Robin Williams style in Good Morning Vietnam.
She threw the script out the window, did her own thing and afterward got called into the manager's office where it's like something out of a movie.
She thought she was going to get in trouble, and they were like, you're a hit.
And sadly, apparently this woman she replaced or filled in for was out for one day and she came back in and lost her job the next day because Ruth had made such a splash.
So she inadvertently took this poor woman's job and went on to not only host Woman's Hour, she added another one called Open House.
And then another one.
So she's hosting three different radio programs.
Third one's called The Woman's View on the News.
And she was not only hosting those, she was also still working with the musical director and very quickly made a name for herself.
And again, this is where Johnny Lyons comes back in and exits almost as quickly, because they got married in 1932.
And shortly after that, Johnny was transferred to Cleveland.
And Ruth was like, I'm just starting my career here and it's going really well.
I'm going to stay in Cincinnati.
Let's try this long distance.
And anyone who's familiar with Ohio geography, the drive from Cincinnati to Cleveland is not a short drive.
It's just long enough to be like a long drive, you know?
Okay.
So I can imagine in the 1930s, it was even harder.
And sad to say, it didn't quite work out.
And they ended up staying married for about seven years.
But I have the distinct impression that they were basically consciously uncoupled long before then.
Yeah, it seems like it, very sadly.
She kept that name.
Obviously, Ruth Lyons was the name she started her radio career with.
So I think she kept it for name recognition from that point forward, even after getting remarried, as we'll see later.
And she didn't really talk about that first marriage a lot.
It's not in her memoir.
She did say in, you know, when she was talking about her second marriage, I think in interviews later on that she didn't think she would ever marry because she thought men would hate her success.
So I don't know if that had anything to do with their marriage or if it was just a long distance thing.
But at any rate, they got divorced and maybe that is a decent time for a break.
I'd say Ruth Lyons would approve.
All right.
We'll be right back with more on Ruth Lyons.
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Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk at mom's.
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Okay, Chuck, so we're back.
We held the seance in the break and we did verify that Ruth Lyons thought it was a great time for us to take a break.
So that was great.
Yeah.
And I said that she had made a name for herself pretty quickly on Cincinnati radio.
And one of the things that came along that really helps her with that which, I guess, if you can ever be helped by a flood, she was.
There was a huge flood in 1937.
I saw that it was described as up to the streetlights, which is a pretty decent sized flood.
And it was a catastrophe for Cincinnati people.
And at the time, again, radio was like really just kind of starting out.
And this is one of the ways that it proved itself as a medium where you could help people thoroughly.
She stayed on the air essentially for 48 hours reading bulletins, I think, from the local authorities on where to go for help or how to donate to the Red Cross or where to go get sandbags, that kind of stuff.
And just that, that right there kind of showed Cincinnati that she was a trustworthy voice to be listened to.
Yeah.
And I don't know if it was that or just her overall butt kicking at the job, but she got a promotion.
She got promoted to program director.
This is a woman in the 1930s.
So she's already, sort of, you know, breaking new ground and breaking glass ceilings all over the place.
Yeah, just to point out, she had by this time Venus Flytrap's job, Johnny Fever's job and Andy's job as well.
That's right.
So she didn't have Lonnie Anderson's job.
That's the key there.
Right.
She had Lonnie Anderson and about 17 other people working for her.
That's right.
One of the other great things she did was work with kids.
She started a Christmas fund.
It's kind of like a sort of an early version of Toys for Tots.
It was in 1939.
She put on a show at Cincinnati Children's Hospital and was like, these kids need more than this.
And so she founded what was called the Christmas Fund.
And raised about $1,000 from listeners in that first year.
And that is a fund that is still going strong today, long after she has passed.
And I think they do it every year on her birthday.
They start it up on October 4th.
Yeah, and that was something she had a talent for was getting people to donate money to causes that she thought were important.
You said they raised $1,000 that first year in 1939.
Four years later, they were up to raising $54,000, and this is 1940s money.
So it was pretty substantial.
They spread out very quickly after that to include children's homes and other hospitals and other areas that the broadcast reached like, as far as I think, Indianapolis.
So it was a big deal right off the bat.
And she, so I think 1942, she'd been doing this for about 10 years, a little less.
No, about 10 years.
And she made a move to a different radio station.
They offered the plum can't turn it down deal of an extra 10 a week over what she was making at her original station.
And she said sold.
Sold.
Yeah, I think this had more to do with getting out to more voices, because Crossley Broadcasting was broadcast in several more markets than just local Cincinnati radio.
So the station definitely like publicized on her notoriety at that point.
And they said, let's have a contest where we have listeners write in to name her new show.
The name wasn't great.
They came back, the winning one was Petticoat Party Line.
She added more shows because that's what Ruth Lyons does.
She added a morning show called the WLW Consumers Foundation.
This one was like gangbusters with the company because it was great for advertisers and that they had a couple of hundred women test out products and then come back on the air and report what they found out.
So advertisers always loved her.
They kind of gussied it up.
She added music and then games and eventually changed that terrible name to Morning Matinee much, much better name and also had a game show called Collect Calls from Lowenthal's, which was a fur store.
Right.
And if you kind of go back and look at that the morning matinee, in addition to you know having women test products and then come in and say like well, this is what I thought of this.
Adding music and games, that kind of stuff, like all of a sudden it's starting to take like a morning show format.
Yeah, for sure.
You can start to see the contours of it just kind of coming into view here or there.
And she.
One of the things she did was she we'll talk about this a little more later but she was really good at just understanding that you need ad revenue to survive.
And that you're going to make more ad revenue and also keep your viewership if you are forthright and honest about your advertisers.
And so one of the things she did was she would turn down.
She negotiated the ability to say nope, not them.
I don't believe in their product because like her ads were all endorsement.
So for her as a very ethical person, she didn't do any endorsements that she didn't personally believe in, which was a big deal, especially at the time, and also led her to tons of disagreements and head-butting with the ad sales department.
But she would typically win because that's how powerful she had become again as a woman in broadcasting in the 40s.
Yeah, absolutely.
She you know, I mentioned earlier she got married again.
She married a guy named Herman Newman this time, who was a semantics professor.
And he was a big liberal guy, progressive guy, which meant that he didn't mind her having a lot of career success.
He was very supportive of her and which was awesome.
And, I think, aligned with her political values as well, as we'll see, you know, with some of the things that she did.
They had one kid in 1944.
It was a little bit of an unusual situation in that they announced the birth of young Candace, who they called Candy.
Later on, people found out that she very sadly suffered a stillbirth at six months.
And adopted an orphan newborn at the time that she had lost her own baby.
So she didn't cover it up or anything, but she didn't come right out and say it.
But everyone knew the timeline of her pregnancy so you could probably figure it out if you were paying attention.
Right.
Right.
So, yes, and Candy became their beloved child.
Like she was just, her parents absolutely adored her.
And she would go on to kind of make appearances here or there on the radio show and then later on the TV show.
And I guess she made her first appearance at six weeks old on the mic for Morning Matinee.
Yeah, her quote was goo.
Goo goo.
So she came up with another program, Ruth did.
She said, hey guys, I got a great idea.
There are a lot of women out there who haven't and may never have the chance to have a really fancy luncheon at a nice hotel downtown.
So we're not only going to give them that opportunity, we're going to make a show out of it.
And she called this the 50 Club because there was room for 50 paying customers.
You paid $1 each, which is about $18 today, to have a smashing lunch at the Gibson Hotel downtown.
And after lunch, you were treated to her radio show.
You were part of the studio audience.
And it was a smash hit right out of the gate.
They ended up selling tickets to the thing.
They would sell them in three and four year chunks at a time.
Yeah, and so big that they had to double the audience and get a new venue.
And so that's why her show ended up being called the 50-50 Club.
Pretty smart to keep that 50 in there instead of calling it the 100 Club or the 700 Club.
That's right.
That's a lot of studio audience.
Yeah, so in 1949, they said, you know what?
The 50 Club is going great.
50 Club's even better, so let's make this thing a TV show.
Because that radio station also had a TV counterpart.
And she was like, I don't know about this, like...
I'm a radio person.
I don't like these studio lights.
They get really hot.
I don't like you know.
I feel like I could be more myself without this camera in my face, especially with these interviews I'm doing with people.
And you know she was flying off, you know flying by the seat of her pants and sort of off the cuff on the radio.
And wanted to do that on TV.
But that's a bigger problem for TV because of lighting and blocking and stuff like that.
So it was all a bit of a challenge.
But, you know, she got on TV.
And of course, immediately executives started saying, like, you need to lose weight, lady.
She said in her memoirs that she had gained a bunch of weight from all the delicious pies and cakes she ate at lunch at the Gibson every day.
Sure.
So, yeah.
So there was one other thing that she had a complaint about with being on television.
She said that the engineers are in complete control, which was a reversal of what she was used to in the radio studio.
She said one even wore a beret with an exclamation point and everything.
So she ends up because she's an overachiever.
Clearly we've established this at this point.
She was program director at WLWT.
And so all of a sudden she has authority on television as well, after she had already sort of asserted herself on the radio for quite a while at this point,
But like I said earlier, she was inventing the model.
She couldn't look to other shows to see what people were doing.
Also, not a lot of people were watching.
This was, you know, very early in the days of TV.
I think the whole station in 1946 was a bit of an experiment.
So not a lot of families had TV sets in the early 1950s, which was kind of good.
It was kind of like us, in a way, starting out with podcasting, like we weren't very good for a while, but not a lot of people were listening to podcasts.
So you had a lot of room to sort of grow and learn the craft, just like she did.
Exactly.
That was definitely one of the things that came up that I was like yeah, I can totally identify with that.
That's certainly how we managed to kind of get along at the beginning, right?
Yeah.
One other thing I noticed at the time TVs were so new this is the early 50s that she was making these TV shows that a lot of people had to stand around, often outside furniture stores, just like you see in movies, to watch a TV show from one of the models on display in the front window.
And that's just like podcasting.
People used to stand outside of furniture stores to listen to podcasts.
You can make a really good case that Rooms to Go is at least as important in podcasting as Apple is.
So she's crushing it on regional TV now, so much so that NBC is like hey, we want to take you national
It would be the first national daytime talk show hosted by a woman, obviously because it's 1951 at this point.
And they did.
It was literally less than a year.
They put it across the country for 11 months, I think.
And it seems like it basically stopped because she didn't want to move to New York.
They said hey, why don't you come to New York, give it more of a sort of a national appeal, because you're there in Cincinnati and nobody cares in 1951 about the show out of Cincinnati across the country.
So they said she said, no, she said, I want to stay here.
And so she went back to the Crossley Market, which was, I think Indianapolis Columbus, Dayton and, of course, Cincinnati.
Yes.
And so there's something really important to know about that.
So she stayed true to her roots, but she didn't say, like, I don't really want to make it big time.
I just want to go stay in Cincinnati.
New York scares me.
Despite going back to being a local or regional talk show, she had the highest rated daytime program in the country ever.
Right?
From 1952 to 1964.
Even nationally broadcast talk shows could not beat her ratings in basically four markets.
Yeah.
I mean, she had 7 million viewers over that time span.
That's an incredible amount, like in the early days of TV, especially.
I mean, that's a lot now.
But, you know, her audience was growing because it was also broadcast on the radio.
So she had even more people listening there.
And they were reaching sort of across the Midwest with the radio by that point.
And she was, like I said, she was always a sort of a beloved figure for advertisers.
So she was making a ton of money for the company.
And tickets were selling out four years in advance to come to the studio audience.
Right.
Yeah.
One other thing I saw is that she mentioned that it was kind of common for school kids to go home during lunch and watch the show with their mother in the middle of the day.
And it turns out, one of those little kids and this is totally genuine, I'm not making a joke here was David Letterman, who credits Ruth Lyons as introducing him to the entire concept of a talk show.
And yeah, she was one of his inspirations.
That's awesome.
I thought so, too.
And she didn't love the switch to color.
They hired a makeup artist to, you know, kind of help her through that transition.
And she didn't like that.
She didn't like the foundation they put on her.
So in a very Ruth Lyons way she turned that into a bit and had the artist do makeover for her like in front of the audience and then have the audience vote about like which look they like better.
Yeah.
And they sided with her, of course.
Of course.
So let's talk a little bit about the show format.
You want to?
Yeah, I mean, it was a straight up talk show.
It was.
So again, this is not like she's like I want to do what Kathie Lee and Hoda do, or I want to do what Kathie Lee and Regis did.
They based their stuff on her.
So one of the things that she did that definitely became a thing, especially in the next couple decades 70s, 80s the studio, the set, looked like a living room.
It was meant to be comfortable, like she was inviting the viewers in and the people she was interviewing into her home, just to kind of make it that much more casual and laid back right.
And she also.
This is different.
That never got picked up, but her interview seat and the seat she normally sat in was a love seat.
That was also a rocking chair.
Love those rockers.
A rocker love seat, though, you don't see that very often.
Even Rooms to Go only has a few of them.
We have outdoor versions of those.
They're called gliders.
Okay, yes, sure.
Maybe that's why I was having trouble conceiving of what it was.
It's a glider.
Yeah, I love those gliders.
But if you've ever seen a picture of Ruth, you know, there's not a ton of stuff out there, sadly.
But a lot of times you might see her holding on stage a bouquet of flowers and with a guest.
And you might think, well, that's a lot of thing to do.
Or maybe she's just giving flowers.
She actually had her microphone inside the bouquet of flowers.
That was her thing, which I think is just a very sort of lovely thing to have on television.
It is.
It's pretty cool.
I actually did see some pictures of her.
And there's one from, I think she's about 30 years of age, something like that.
And she is the spitting image of a cross between 1980s peak cute Meg Ryan and the bride from the new Maggie Gyllenhaal movie, but without the ink blot on her face.
Wow.
Okay.
I mean, if you put those two together, 50% and 50%, you would have Ruth Lyons at age 30.
All right.
We'll let the public decide.
Okay.
So she stayed, you know, with her sort of off-the-cuff thing.
That was just what she was known for in her career.
And, you know, she played it very loose, which for TV now would be sort of a nightmare.
But at the time, like...
It said no one knew what they were really doing, so they just kind of rolled with it.
But they would put, you know, various male sidekicks alongside her over the years.
It was always her show, though.
And she had some real heavy hitters.
It was, even though it was regional, like we said, she had a ton of viewers.
So, I mean, she had Sammy on the show.
She had Duke Ellington, Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, the Smothers Brothers, Carol Channing.
She had a horse on stage.
She had Roy Rogers and Trigger at one point.
Yeah.
Peter, Paul, and get this, Mary came and performed.
Claribel the Clown from Howdy Doody who?
I didn't know this, but the first person who played Claribel the Clown was Captain Kangaroo.
Yeah.
So, yes, that's just like a slight list of it.
If you read her memoirs, like the entire middle part is just story after story about the different celebrities she met and interviewed and what they were like.
And she's got some pretty interesting stories.
I would encourage anybody to go read her memoir, Remember With Me, from 1969.
And on the cover, it's got a cute little like a bouquet with a microphone sticking out of it.
So we're not going to get into that much.
I would just say read the read the book.
OK.
Yeah.
Get out there.
I think you can just get it online, right?
You can.
Yes.
There's like a PDF out there of scan.
I mean, I don't know who does this.
People who literally change page after page and scan entire books.
And you can tell it's a person too, because every like third or fourth page is like kind of diagonal, because it wasn't flat enough for the scanner.
So God bless people who do that.
Oh, for sure.
So you know we talked about her show being financially successful because of the advertisers, but she had an odd way of dealing with advertisers that people seem to love.
She didn't love just regular sort of boring ad copy.
She liked to kind of make things up and ad-lib.
And I don't know.
I mean, the sponsors kept coming back, even though at times she was even bagging on the sponsors.
So it must have worked just to get attention.
There was one example where she was talking about a food product that they said was big brawny, bold and brave.
It would make kids big, brawny, bold and brave.
And she said, yeah, the next B word that comes to mind is baloney.
So she would definitely give guff to like the people that were paying her money, which is interesting.
Sure.
Yeah.
A lot like some podcasts read their stuff today.
Yeah.
Other shows do that.
We we've been told we can't do that.
No, no.
It's interesting, though.
I hear it all the time.
I'm like, well, how do they do it?
But whatever.
Yeah, it's kind of a thing.
We're one of the rare ones that don't do it like that.
Yeah.
All right.
There's another great anecdote about the clout that she had as far as advertisers go.
There was a brand of canned vegetables that bought a 10-week ad buy on her show and went from number seven to number one.
And I looked into the brand.
It was Black Brand canned broccoli clods and botulin squeezings.
I mean, she took that from number seven to number one.
It's crazy.
I think it's time for a late break.
And then we'll come back and finish up with Ruth Lyons.
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I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk at mom's.
Yeah.
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All right.
So, finishing up with Ruth Lyons, you know we talked about the fact that she always said that.
You know, in her words, she was just a housewife with a radio program, all in an effort to be relatable to people that were watching her.
The audience called her mother, her staff and everyone there called her mother, which I think is like super kind of cool.
And she would, you know, she would get on the air and talk about housekeeping and stuff like that, which sponsors obviously loved.
And then sometimes she would turn that into a bit.
Like when her housekeeper quit, she brought in her husband's laundry and had an ironing contest for the audience, which of course, incorporated spray starch as an advertiser.
Yeah, she did what you would call integrated advertising today, like where people just suddenly you realize they're talking about a product and it's not actually part of the show.
She kind of did stuff like that, which we don't do.
No.
I mean, people I think people accused us of that when I talked about KFC recently.
I was like, I just like KFC.
Or the whole Pepsi ad that we did, that we said at the beginning was an ad seemed to have confused people a lot too.
So we still don't do integrated advertising, everybody.
That's right.
So she wasn't without her detractors, of course, because she was a woman on the air.
Just like today, you're going to have people that are going to be picking apart her appearance.
In 1960 Ladies Home Journal of all places there was a reporter named Betty Hannah Hoffman who said that she has a bad slouch and a sandpaper voice.
Someone from that story, it was an anonymous source, said she was a very dominating woman.
She needles and browbeats the men on her program and this delights the housewives.
Again, I think this is all just coded language for somebody having fun on the air.
Maybe if she was poking fun of men on the air to the delight of housewives, Uh, you know, I'm sure that was the thing she did because that's funny.
It's comedy.
Sure.
Yeah.
I think that's kind of what I was talking about at the beginning, that some people were like she's a little brash or whatever, but they didn't know what they were talking about.
They were just being catty.
That's right.
And you had said earlier too, that she was one of those people where, the more you found out about her, the better she kept getting.
And I'm sure that this is one of the things that struck you because it did me as well.
But I think in 1952...
She had a singer on, a black singer named Arthur Lee Simpkins who was performing in town.
She'd seen him perform the night before with her husband and she invited him to be on the show the next day and she noticed that while he was singing his first number, that he looked very nervous.
So she went over to him and started dancing with him and they danced for a couple of minutes and then he did some more performances and loosened up and everything was great.
Well, that caused quite a scandal because a white woman danced on television with a black man.
And this, again, was 1952.
And apparently, while she was doing this, it didn't even occur to her that this was going to be a thing.
That was kind of how she was as a person.
But she got a lot of pushback about it.
And then simultaneously she got a lot of like kudos and thanks for just basically – I saw one woman wrote that – that she demonstrated heartfelt love for another human being without being hampered one bit by the color of his skin.
And she didn't shrink from that controversy at all, Chuck.
She came on the next day and spent 15 minutes talking about how there was nothing wrong with what she had done.
Yeah, it was pretty great, like very publicly.
She was also very supportive and tried to advance the careers of other women on her staff.
And we definitely should mention Elsa Sewell, who was the executive director for her show from 1944 until she retired from the show.
It was one of those things where she was sort of like our Jerry.
She wasn't on camera, but she talked to her off camera.
So everyone knew who Elsa was.
And, you know, she ran the contest.
She even wrote some of the songs, some of the parody songs that Ruth Lyons performed.
And she kept working there after Lions retired.
She worked as associate producer for the Bob Braun show because Bob Braun would take over.
He was one of the sort of sidekicks that they use.
He would take over after she retired.
Yeah.
And one more thing about her.
She's pro union, too, right?
Yeah.
She, you know, the musicians went on strike at a certain point and she was like, oh, wait a minute.
I'm a musician.
I've always thought of myself as a musician as well.
So I'm going to go on strike with these people.
And the station immediately was pulled back and was like, oh, well, we can't have that.
So they gave in.
All right.
So you said that she retired.
She ended up retiring, I think, in 1967.
But that was after a few really hard years that began in 1964, starting with the death of her sister, Rose Reeves Lupton, who was a co-worker of hers also at WLWT University.
And she had been living with cancer for 10 years and succumbed to it eventually again in 1964.
And that was kind of the beginning of a bunch of hardships that she faced.
Yeah, it was it was really tough.
She had a stroke herself, a very minor stroke, but it was enough that she felt like she needed to take a break for a little while.
But just a few weeks after that and this is just brutal her daughter Candy, at 20 years old, was diagnosed with breast cancer, had a mastectomy.
And she thought about retiring at the time.
Ruth Lyons did.
She was like, I just don't, you know, this is just too much.
But Candy wouldn't have it.
She was like, no, you got to keep doing the show.
This is your life. she started coming in more and more on the show as a regular guest.
And as she got worse, it was pretty clear that she, you know, it was a terminal case.
So in 1966, they took a trip, a family trip to Italy.
And that was sort of, you know, the last trip they would take.
I think they knew that going in.
And very sadly, Candy passed away just at 21 years old in June of that year.
Yeah, on the trip, on the ship they were taking.
And it was very sad.
And the public grieved with her because, you know, just like other parts of her life, she shared that whole tragedy with Candy, with them as it played out.
And that was pretty much it.
Like, she came back and she tried to kind of keep going, but she'd miss a lot of shows.
And when she was there, she had trouble traveling.
Just doing what she wasn't herself any longer after Candy died.
And so the writing was on the wall to her.
And she retired officially the next year after Candy died.
She was 60.
She'd been doing this for decades by then.
And she couldn't bring herself to tell the public that she was retiring.
So she had the station's vice president announce it.
And apparently even the crew hadn't been informed before then.
Yeah, super, super sad for the audience, for sure.
But she wrote that book that you talked about.
She also wrote a songbook called Sing a Song in 1969.
But she never got on TV again.
She was asked a lot.
Of course, everyone wanted her to come on TV and be on their show.
But she never did it again.
She was the honorary chairman in 1972 for the Save the Terminal campaign which rescued the Art Deco, the beautiful Art Deco Union Terminal in Cincinnati, because they're going to tear that down.
So that was kind of one of her, you know, big public final acts.
But she would go on to live for a while.
She passed away at the age of 81 in 1988.
Yeah.
And one last footnote the 1957 Major League Baseball All-Star game, heavily stacked with Cincinnati Reds players who were outmatched by plenty of other players around the league.
But they had gotten more votes because this is when the public voted, I think, for the first time.
And that was because, like you said, Ruth Lyons had led a stuff-the-ballot-box drive to get as many Reds players on the All-Star team as possible, because she was a huge fan.
That's right.
Go Reds.
I've always liked the Reds.
Sure.
Remember Eric Davis?
He was awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, that's it for Ruth Lyons.
Again, hats off to you.
White gloves off.
And I think, Chuck, it's time for listener mail.
Yeah, this is one of those cool things that happens sometimes where somebody we reference on the show maybe someone who's written a book or something writes in because they heard it.
And this is great.
This is from Stephen Kersey.
He wrote the nonfiction book The Quiet Zone and he listened to our episode on the National Radio Quiet Zone and had a correction.
He said the National Security Agency remains very much active at Sugar Grove Station guys, which means the NSA Defense Department remains a major unseen force and influence behind the National Radio Quiet Zone.
You guys cited an old news story about Sugar Grove being partly sold off, which is accurate.
The U.S.
Navy had ended most of, but not all of, its operations in Sugar Grove, and much of the military housing community was put up for auction in 2016, but I don't know if it actually sold.
In any case, the government retained ownership and usage of the highly secretive classified radio antennas at Sugar Grove, which are up a guarded mountain holler, that is out of public view.
However, you can see the facility if you go up another mountain road, as I've done.
That's Stephen talking.
You can also see the facility and its half dozen antennas on Google Maps.
The Intercept did an excellent piece on Sugar Grove in 2017.
I still have contacts at the Green Bank Observatory.
And they'd know if the NSA was no longer active in Sugar Grove, and nobody has said they're not.
So hope this has shed some light on this for you guys.
And that, again, is from Stephen Kersey, author of The Quiet Zone.
Very cool.
I wrote him back too and said it's always neat to hear from the person who literally wrote the book on whatever it is we're talking about, you know.
Always great.
Thanks a lot, Stephen.
I'm not sure how we missed that, that the NSA actually hadn't cleared out.
Although now that I think about it, it's probably easy to do.
Yeah.
I think we were manipulated by the NSA.
Probably.
If you want to be like Stephen Kersey and write to us, you don't have to be an expert.
That's okay.
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