It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride - A Radio Biography (Hardcover, New)

View the Table of Contents. Read the Prologue.

"Drawing on archives that include McBride's radio interviews, as well as letters from former listeners, Ware begins with a description of McBride's radio show when it was at its height."--"Booklist"

"While there have been more than a few fine radio histories written by professional and nonprofessional historians in the last forty years, the last decade must be the golden age of radio scholarship...and Susan Ware's "It's One O'Clock and Here is Mary Margaret McBride" continues this current focus in radio scholarship."
--"Journal of American History"

"Sincere and sometimes self-effacing, Mary Margaret was the Oprah of her day- her name a household word that might be forgotten if not for Susan Ware's carefully researched and charmingly likeable biography."
--"American Journalism"

"Ware has restored McBride to a rightful place in broadcasting history."--"Columbia Journalism Review"

"Tune in and treat yourself to Susan Ware's fascinating saga of the life and work of radio personality Mary Margaret McBride. Like McBride, Ware is at once probing and entertaining as she analyzes McBride's success from the 1930s through the 1950s, restoring McBride to her rightful place as the mother of talk radio and television."
--Lizabeth Cohen, author of "A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America"

"This discerning biography of radio pioneer Mary Margaret McBride illuminates an entire cultural era and offers fascinating parallels to our own time. In Susan Ware's engaging narrative, McBride emerges as an icon of twentieth century popular culture and its romance with what we now describe as 'talk radio.'McBride's story is a tale of power, freedom and connection boldly interpreted by a leading woman's historian."
--Joyce Antler, author of "The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America"

"Well written and lively, Susan Ware's biography rightly restores McBride to her proper place in broadcasting history."
--Susan Douglas, author of "Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination"

One of the most beloved radio show hosts of the 1940s and 1950s, Mary Margaret McBride (1899-1976) regularly attracted between six and eight million listeners to her daily one o'clock broadcast. During her twenty years on the air she interviewed tens of thousands of people, from President Harry Truman and Frank Lloyd Wright to Rachel Carson and Zora Neale Hurston. This is her story.

Five decades after their broadcast, her shows remain remarkably fresh and interesting. And yet McBride--the Oprah Winfrey of her day--has been practically forgotten, both in radio history and in the history of twentieth-century popular culture, primarily because she was a woman and because she was on daytime radio.

Susan Ware explains how Mary Margaret McBride was one of the first to exploit the cultural and political importance of talk radio, pioneering the magazine-style format that many talk shows still use. This radio biography recreates the world of daytime radio from the 1930s through the 1950s, confirming the enormous significance of radio to everyday life, especially for women.

In the first in-depth treatment of McBride, Ware starts with a description of how widely McBride was revered in the mid-1940s--the fifteenth anniversary party for her show in 1949 filled Yankee Stadium. Once the readers havegotten to know Mary Margaret (as everyone called her), Ware backtracks to tell the story of McBride's upbringing, her early career, and how she got her start in radio. The latter part of the book picks up McBride's story after World War II and through her death in 1976. An epilogue discusses the contemporary talk show phenomenon with a look back to Mary Margaret McBride's early influence on the format.