Ruth Lyons: TV Pioneer

Ruth Lyons basically invented the daytime talk show, yet she doesn't get the credit. Why is that? Probably because she was a woman in a man's industry. Today we tell her story. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:38Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:48Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Agreed. And this is a listener recommendation from, I think, I think I've been sitting on this one for a while.

• 2:23Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  So for all I know, Nick Bauer gave up on the show and won't even hear this.

• 2:29Josh Clark?

  It's possible. It happens.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Uh, I also should mention that my dogs are over here today and they usually are put away, but they can't be because of, uh, work people. So they're laying down now and they're being quiet.

• 2:46Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  But we'll see what happens.

• 2:49Josh Clark?

  Hey, Momo's appeared on the show at least once, so I, I can feel your pain. It's all right.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  I think we should have a, um, policy moving forward that anytime Mo speaks in the background, Jerry just leaves that in.

• 3:01Josh Clark?

  Okay. I'm fine with that as long as, yeah, I'm fine with that. No qualifiers needed.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  It makes you like a real person like Ruth Lyons strove to be.

• 3:11Josh Clark?

  Oh, I don't, I don't like that then.

• 3:15Josh Clark?

  I strive to do the opposite and seem robotic and wooden.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  No, uh, 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, uh, Ruth Lyons was quite a pioneer. And in fact, I mean, unless somebody corrects us, I would be pretty, I feel pretty good about saying that Ruth Lyons invented the format of the TV talk show.

• 3:42Josh Clark?

  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, um, not only being the first daytime television host, talk show host, but have, having also invented the format.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:01Josh Clark?

  And his show is on from 1951, get this, till 1993.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Are you serious?

• 4:07Josh Clark?

  I am dead serious. He recorded 28,000 plus episodes and he never missed a show.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  So no shade at Joe Franklin.

• 4:15Josh Clark?

  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 yeah, let's, let's get into this, shall we? Because even aside from that, 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.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. And she not only was a TV pioneer, she was a, 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 this, 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, all male colleagues tell me what to do. Like she was calling the shots.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:58Josh Clark?

  And she did it by, by building up her, her professional career, just by being reliable, trustworthy, charming, 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. I'd 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.

• 6:34Josh Clark?

  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.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think brash is a word that was used and is still used to describe women in the workplace who, you know, call their own shots and behave essentially like men might.

• 7:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  You know?

• 7:03Josh Clark?

  Take no McGuffins.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Take no McGuffin. 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, and as you will see, she was a big Reds fan.

• 7:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:33Josh Clark?

  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. The people have been doing it before us. But we were there at generally like the, the beginning of it, kind of, and certainly the, 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, some of the points throughout her career, too. I thought that was kind of neat.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah?

• 8:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I'll point them out as we go along. How about that?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  All right. So she was born in Cincinnati. She had a sister. Her parents were, you know, 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, you know, she was like little Eddie Murphy. She was always putting on a show for the family. And if she like got on stage and did something and messed up, like she wasn't the kind of kid to run off stage crying. She just kind of rolled with

• 8:49Speaker 02

  it. And that seems to be sort of a formative thing for her throughout her career.

• 8:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and speaking of formative, her like 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.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it also seems like it certainly wasn't shtick, but it seems like something that she was like, hey, I'm just like you. You know, she was an every woman and 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.

• 9:41Josh Clark?

  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.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  I knew a guy named Johnny Lyons, by the way.

• 9:52Josh Clark?

  Do you really? Is this the same guy?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  I knew him a long time ago, but when I read that, I was like, oh, yeah, Johnny Lyons. Whatever happened to that dude?

• 9:59Josh Clark?

  It's a good name, good, solid name.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:02Josh Clark?

  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?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Go Bearcats.

• 10:17Josh Clark?

  Wildcats?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Bearcats.

• 10:19Josh Clark?

  Bearcats, thank you. And she was just there for one year. She made quite a splash while she was there. The first year, she was 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?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  I saw that coming a mile away.

• 10:42Josh Clark?

  So, 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.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:59Josh Clark?

  I might as well drop out and go find work and help support the family rather than being a drain on the family finances.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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.

• 11:50Josh Clark?

  I, yeah, I mean, she took every, everything in the kitchen, including the sink, that's even remotely Christmasy and threw it at that one. There's bells.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:59Josh Clark?

  That are peeling along with the choir, there's children's parts, all of the lyrics are real schmaltzy, like, like Christmasy stuff. It's a, I mean, it's a Christmas song through and through. It's not great, but it is a Christmas song.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Josh's review, it's a Christmas song.

• 12:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Period.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:38Josh Clark?

  Cincinnati.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:17Josh Clark?

  That's right. And sadly, so 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 like quickly made a name for herself. And again, this is where Johnny

• 14:01Josh Clark?

  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, my, 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?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:29Josh Clark?

  So I can imagine in the 1930s, it was even harder.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:34Josh Clark?

  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, they were basically consciously uncoupled long before then.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  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 the 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.

• 15:27Josh Clark?

  I'd say Ruth Lyons would approve.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  All right. We'll be right back with more on Ruth Lyons.

• 15:45Josh Clark?

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• 18:58Josh Clark?

  Okay, Chuck, so we're back. We held the séance 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.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:08Josh Clark?

  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 helped 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. 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.

• 19:48Josh Clark?

  Uh, 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.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, just to point out, she had by this time Venus Flytrap's job, Johnny Fever's job, and Andy's job as well.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  That's right, so she was, she didn't have Lonnie Anderson's job, that's the key there.

• 20:36Josh Clark?

  Right, she had Lonnie Anderson and about 17 other, other people working for her.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  That's right. One of the other great things she did was work with, 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 a thousand bucks from listeners in that first year. And that is a fund that is still going strong today, uh, long after she has passed. And I think they, uh, they do it every year on her birthday, they started up on October 4th.

• 21:14Josh Clark?

  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 a thousand dollars that first year in 1939. Four years later, they were up to raising $54,000, and this is 1940's money, so it was pretty substantial to help. 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, off the bat. And, um, she, so I think 1942, she'd been doing this for about 10 years, a little less, um, no, about 10 years. And she made a move to a different radio station. They offered the plum.

• 21:59Josh Clark?

  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.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  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 that, because that's what Ruth Lyons does. She added a morning show called the WLW Consumers Foundation. And this one was like gangbusters with the company because it was great for advertisers

• 22:48Speaker 02

  in 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 added, 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 first store.

• 23:13Josh Clark?

  Right. And if you kind of go back and look at 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.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 23:31Josh Clark?

  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.

• 23:52Josh Clark?

  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 headbutting with the ad sales department. But she would typically

• 24:32Josh Clark?

  win because that's how powerful she had become, again, as a woman in broadcasting in the 40s.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  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

• 25:18Speaker 02

  out that she very sadly suffered a stillbirth at six months and adopted an orphan newborn at the time that she had lost her, her own baby. So she didn't, you know, 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 know, you could probably figure it out if you were paying attention.

• 25:43Josh Clark?

  Right. So, um, yes, and Candy became their beloved child. Like, I, 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.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Very cute.

• 26:03Josh Clark?

  For morning matinee. Yeah, her quote was goo.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Goo goo.

• 26:07Josh Clark?

  So she came up with another program, Ruth did. She said, hey, guys, I got a great idea. There is a, 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 a dollar each, which is about $18 today to have a smashing lunch at the Gibson Hotel. And, um, 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.

• 26:49Josh Clark?

  They ended up selling tickets to the thing. They would sell them in three and four year chunks at a time.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  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. Uh, pretty smart to, to keep that 50 in there instead of calling it the 100 Club or the 700 Club.

• 27:08Josh Clark?

  That's right. That's a lot of studio audience.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in 1949, um, they said, you know what? The 50 Club is going great. 50, 50 Club's even better. So let's make this thing a TV show. Uh, 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

• 27:53Speaker 02

  all a bit of a challenge. Um, but, you know, she got on TV and of course immediately executives started saying like, you need to lose weight, lady.

• 28:03Josh Clark?

  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.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 28:11Josh Clark?

  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.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  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, you know, quite a while at this point. But, you know, 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,

• 29:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:23Josh Clark?

  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?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:33Josh Clark?

  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 like, 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 as in podcasting as Apple is.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  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. They put it, uh, it was literally less than a year. They put it on the, um, across the country for 11 months, I think. And it, 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, uh, because you're there in Cincinnati and nobody cares in 1951 about a show out of Cincinnati across the country. So, uh, 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,

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Columbus, Dayton, and of course Cincinnati.

• 30:55Josh Clark?

  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, 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 was, she had the highest rated daytime program in the country, right? From 1952 to 1964. Even national, nationally broadcast talk shows could not beat her ratings in basically four markets.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, she had seven million viewers, uh, over that time span. That, that's an incredible amount, like in the, in the early days of TV especially. I mean, that's a lot now. Um, 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, uh, 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.

• 32:04Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah. Um, one other thing I saw is that, um, she mentioned that it was kind of common for, uh, school kids to go home during lunch and watch the show with their mother in the middle of the day. And, um, 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. Um, and yeah, she was one of his inspirations.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 32:33Josh Clark?

  I thought so too.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  She also inspired a lot of people to get color TVs because in 1957, it was one of the first shows in the region to air in color. And people wanted to see everything in color. They want to see Ruth Lyons in color. So they bought up so many color TV sets in Cincinnati that it became known as Color Town USA for a while. And she didn't love to switch to color. They hired a makeup artist to, um, 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.

• 33:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And they decided with her, of course. So let's talk a little bit about the show format. You want to?

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was a straight up talk show.

• 33:29Josh Clark?

  It was. Um, there were some, so again, this is not like she's like, I want to be, I want to do what Kathie Lee and Hoda do. Or I want to do what Kathie Lee and Regis did. She, they based their stuff on her. So one of the things that she did that, um, that definitely became a thing, especially in the next couple decades, seventies, eighties, her, the, the studio, the set looked like a living room. It was meant to be comfortable, like she was inviting the viewers 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 wanted some, this is different, that never got picked up, but that her interview seat in the seat she normally sat in was a love seat that was also a rocking chair.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Love those rockers.

• 34:16Josh Clark?

  A rocker love seat, though. You don't see that very often. Even Rooms to Go only has a few of them.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  We have, uh, outdoor versions of those. They're called gliders.

• 34:25Josh Clark?

  Okay, yes, sure. Maybe that's why I was having trouble conceiving of what it was. It's a glider.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  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 onstage a bouquet of flowers and with a guest and you might think, well, that's an odd 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.

• 34:55Josh Clark?

  It is. It's pretty cool. I actually did see some pictures of her and there's one from, I think she was about 30 years of age, something like that. And she is the spitting image of a cross between 1980's peak cute Meg Ryan and the bride from the new Maggie Gyllenhaal movie, but without the ink blot on her face.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Wow, okay.

• 35:18Josh Clark?

  I mean, just like if you put those two together 50% and 50%, you would have Ruth Lyons at age 30.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  All right. Well, we'll let the public decide.

• 35:28Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  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 I 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 onstage. She had Roy Rogers and Trigger at one point.

• 36:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Peter Paul and, get this, Mary came and performed.

• 36:18Josh Clark?

  Clarabelle the Clown from Howdy Doody, who I didn't know this, but the first person who played Clarabelle the Clown was Captain Kangaroo.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:27Josh Clark?

  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 like celebrities she met and like interviewed and what they were like. And she's got some pretty, 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. Okay?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Get out there. I think you can just get it online, right?

• 37:03Josh Clark?

  You can.

• 37:05Josh Clark?

  Yes, there's like a PDF out there of scanned. 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.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  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 seemed 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

• 38:09Speaker 02

  is interesting.

• 38:11Josh Clark?

  Sure. Yeah. A lot like some podcasts read their stuff today.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, other shows do that. We, we've been told we can't do that.

• 38:22Josh Clark?

  No, no.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  It's interesting though. I hear it all the time. I'm like, well, how do they do it? But whatever.

• 38:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's kind of, it's a kind of a thing. We're one of the rare ones that don't do it like that.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, alright.

• 38:31Josh Clark?

  Uh, there's another great anecdote about the clout that she had as far as advertisers go. She, um, there was a, a can or 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.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  It's crazy. Uh, I think we'll, it's time for a late break and then we'll come back and finish up with Ruth Lyons.

• 39:14Josh Clark?

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• 40:17Josh Clark?

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• 40:41Speaker 02

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• 40:53Josh Clark?

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• 41:10Josh Clark?

  World Mental Health Day takes place in October, and it's really meant to be more than just awareness. It's about actually taking the next step and getting support if you need it.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  But a lot of people still talk themselves out of therapy. They think it's too expensive. They're not sure if it'll actually work. They don't know how to find the right therapist, or they just get overwhelmed trying to navigate the whole system.

• 41:29Josh Clark?

  And that's exactly what Rula is built to fix. Rula makes therapy feel a lot more approachable, a lot more human. You can find a therapist who actually fits your needs, not just whoever's available. And with insurance, sessions average around $15 copay.

• 41:43Speaker 02

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• 41:48Josh Clark?

  And it's not just about starting. Rula helps you stay consistent and actually make progress because taking care of your mental health isn't a one-time thing. So if you've been thinking about therapy, don't talk yourself out of it. This is a really easy way to take that first step.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to rula.com, that is R-U-L-A dot com, to find a therapist the easy way.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:12Josh Clark?

  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.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  No, I mean, people, I think people accused us of that when I talked about KFC recently. I was like, I just like KFC.

• 43:32Josh Clark?

  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.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  That's right. So she wasn't without her detractors, of course, because she was a woman on the air.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  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. And someone from that story, it was an anonymous source, said she was a very dominating kind of woman. She needles and browbeats the men on her program and this delights the housewives. You know, again, I think this is all just coded language for somebody having fun on the air. And maybe if she was poking fun at men on the air to the delight of housewives,

• 44:28Speaker 02

  you know, I'm sure that was a thing she did because that's funny, it's comedy.

• 44:32Josh Clark?

  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.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 44:43Josh Clark?

  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

• 45:26Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  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. So it was one of those things where she was sort of like our Jerry. She wasn't on camera, but like, 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 Lyons retired, she worked as associate producer for The Bob Braun Show, because Bob Braun

• 46:45Speaker 02

  would take over. He was one of the sort of sidekicks that they used. He would take over after she retired.

• 46:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And one more thing about her too, she was pro-union too, right?

• 46:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:12Josh Clark?

  Right. 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 also, who was a coworker of hers, also at WLWT. 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.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:40Josh Clark?

  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, as it played out. And that was, that was pretty much it. Like, she came back and she was, she tried to kind of keep going, but she'd miss a lot of shows. And when she was there, she had Trouble just doing what she wasn't herself any longer after Candy died. And so the writing was on the wall to her and she 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.

• 49:24Josh Clark?

  So she had the station's vice president announce it. And apparently even the crew hadn't hadn't been informed before then.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, super, super sad for the 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'd passed away at the age of 81 in 1988.

• 50:15Josh Clark?

  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.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  That's right. Go Reds. I've always liked the Reds.

• 50:44Josh Clark?

  Sure. Remember Eric Davis? He was awesome.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:49Josh Clark?

  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.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is one of those cool things that happen 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 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 US Navy had ended most of, but not all of its operations in Sugar Grove, and much of the

• 51:45Speaker 02

  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

• 52:27Speaker 02

  I hope this has shed some light on this for you guys. And that again is from Stephen Kersey, author of The Quiet Zone.

• 52:35Josh Clark?

  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?

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Always great.

• 52:44Josh Clark?

  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.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:53Josh Clark?

  I think we were manipulated by the NSA.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 52:57Josh Clark?

  If you want to be like Stephen Kersey and write to us, you don't have to be an expert. That's okay. You can send your email to [email protected].

• 53:09Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 53:24Josh Clark?

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• 54:25Speaker 00

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