"It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride"

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Susan Ware  0:03  

You know, if she were alive today, she would have her own podcast. There's no question in my mind. She'd be doing it from that barn she'd converted in the Catskills and she would just think it's great.

Brett Barry  0:16  
Who is this Catskills woman born in an era without podcasts? Dubbed the "first lady of radio," Mary Margaret McBride was a welcome voice in millions of homes in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, pulling in 6 to 8 million listeners daily! That's a couple million more than NBC's "Today Show."

Audio  0:23  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  0:38  
Mary Margaret interviewed 30,000 guests, from Eleanor Roosevelt to the neighborhood plumber, and produced 15,000 shows with no repeats! When I learned about Mary Margaret, I picked up a copy of Susan Ware's biography, "It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride," and reading about her life in journalism, her passion for audio storytelling, and the heartfelt connection she made with her audience, I was awestruck. You know that question that bounces around, if you could have dinner with one person living or dead. Well, Mary Margaret's at the top of my list and if John Burroughs and Sarah McLachlan want to join us, there's room at the table. But anyway, in lieu of dinner with Mary Margaret, today's Kaatscast is the next best thing: a conversation with biographer Susan Ware. We are speaking with Susan Ware, author of "It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride," a radio biography. Now, Mary Margaret McBride was the first lady of radio. She famously had no notes for her guests. I have many. Let's start with ... how did you discover her and why did you want to write about her?

Susan Ware  1:51  
Well, I discovered her in a kind of backwards way, I was editing a biographical dictionary called ... "Notable American Women" and it was to include 500 women who died between 1976 and 2000 and there are many ways to compile a database, but one of the things I did was start reading New York Times obituaries and it really was how I found Mary Margaret, and if I'm on a first name basis with her, it's because everybody was on a first name basis with her, so she's really Mary Margaret, and I remember just being intrigued that ... here I was a scholar who had studied the 1930s and I had never heard of her and it seemed to me a chance to explore the field of radio, which is so central to twentieth century American history and also women's history ... because she was a pioneer in a field, which like most fields, we think of as dominated by men. And yet, when we dig a little deeper, sure enough, there are quite a few women who have made contributions and those contributions have often been lost to history, even though these women were household names in their ... in their time—and so that kind of hook of trying to figure out ... well, who is Mary Margaret McBride and what did she mean, and then what made it possible really was that she and her manager/partner, Stella Karn, had deposited her papers and recordings at the Library of Congress. So, you know, when I'm doing this research, it's the early 2000s. It's before digitization of everything, audio tapes, and whatever. I had access to tapes. I mean, literal tapes, big tapes that had been made of ... of her shows that I could listen to in real time. You know, listening booth at the Library of Congress—and so I could ... in many ways, experience what it was like to be one of her listeners. I think I could have done the book without that kind of access, but it made it much more personal to me and it made it easier for me to really imagine myself as one of her audience [a member of her audience] and I was actually, frankly, amazed at how timely and interesting ... many of these shows still were and that's not true of everything that gets created in popular culture these days, but there was something that it was kind of ... kind of timeless and ... and also she is a wonderful interviewer and you hear it. She really puts her guest at ease. So I warn you ... you have a high standard to live up to. If you're playing the role of Mary Margaret McBride and I'm playing the role of a guest, because that seems to be one of the reasons why her program was such a success. She would really just put her guests at ease and it would be as if the two of them were having a conversation ... no matter that one of them might be Eleanor Roosevelt or one of them might be a recent refugee from Romania. It didn't matter. It was the same kind of personal conversation, which she could undertake, and then make it in a way that was really accessible to her audience.

Brett Barry  1:58  
At the height of her career, she had 6 to 8 million listeners daily, which was a 20% share of broadcast media at that time slot. She was competing mostly with soap operas at the one o'clock time slot. And today, barely anyone remembers her, even Jacki Lyden who is an NPR correspondent who interviewed you in 2005 ... admitted that she hadn't heard of her before your book.

Jacki Lyden  6:22  
And if you were a general, a writer, a celebrity, a gourmet chef or simply had your 15 minutes of fame, you were on her show. Susan Ware has written a biography of her called ... "It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride" ... and Susan Ware joins us now. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. You know, tell me a little bit more about her. I had never heard of her ... remarkably enough, how did she come to radio?

Brett Barry  6:45  
How did she disappear like that?

Susan Ware  6:47  
Well, I think there ... there are two ways of answering that. One is three ways: one is our general historical amnesia and I'm a historian. I ... I'm always amazed when I give talks on a variety of subjects ... what I assume is common knowledge often isn't anymore, so ... so there's that. There's also a subversive way that women are often especially forgotten in history. They excel and they do great things, and then we don't hear about them anymore, and then the third thing is really the place that radio plays in media history. If you have a degree in media studies from some university, you are likely to have studied film. You know, film is sort of the ... what everybody's concerned about. People don't really study radio. I sort of think of it as this great black hole that anybody who was involved in [falls into] and it seems to be a huge shame because radio, especially in the middle part of the twentieth century, before television's dominance. Radio reached so many people in such an intimate and important way. It was really part of their daily lives, and I think, you know, one thing that I was thinking about getting ready for this interview, it's now been ... well, my book came out in 2005. And since then, we've really seen the wonderful explosion of radio and podcasts and people realizing [again] the joys of listening and of being an active listener. When you just have the words and the sounds, it's up to you to fill in everything else and that's what radio was like, so maybe people will come to more of an appreciation of where this came from the history of radio, but for Mary Margaret had all those things working against her and I'm not exactly sure that my book succeeded in making her a household name again. But I felt it was very important to have her in the historical record: both for women's history and for ... for radio history.

Brett Barry  9:13  
Well, once this podcast comes out, she's just going to explode in popularity again.

Susan Ware  9:16  
Right. I'll let my publisher know to expect the urgency.

Let's talk a little bit about her career. So she started as Martha Deane, a stage name?

I think, really to understand how she got to ... to becoming Martha Deane. She started life as a journalist and I think that ... that really is key to her success as a radio interviewer. Not all journalists become good radio folks, but there were things that she learned that really helped her ask questions: be curious about people and whatever. So when, you know, she's in her, I guess, her mid-thirties ... when she takes up radio, which is kind of late, but she takes to it right away and I think that's because the journalism she was doing throughout the 1920s really helped prepare her for it. Even though she didn't know that she was preparing for a career in radio and had no idea of the success that she would have really to be on top of her game for the next 20 years at that point.

Brett Barry  10:26  
She used the Martha Deane moniker from 1934 to '40 on WOR for a 30 minute show, and then under her own name for NBC and ABC with a 45-minute show until 1954, so 20 years of really active radio broadcasting, and at the end of that run, she'd produced 15,000 shows interviewed 30,000 guests and never repeated a show. That's really incredible!

Susan Ware  10:26  
Yeah, it's quite a record and, you know, again, another thing I was hoping to do with my book was to alert historians and journalists that there was this resource. There are these interviews with people like Paul Robeson and Zora Neale Hurston and Eleanor Roosevelt that really are a window on the times and that they're interesting and fun to listen to still today.

Brett Barry  11:21  
I didn't have a very easy time of finding those ... I wonder if they've been digitized or if you still have to go to that listening booth at the Library of Congress to hear them.

Susan Ware  11:29  
Well, that is one way of doing it there. There are some that have been selectively digitized. But again, I think it's often a low priority: digitizing old radio programs. I hope that they will be preserved because I think they are an incredibly important resource. I think one thing that probably works against them and one of the things that ... that she always demanded in her show, she needed the long format. 45 minutes was really the best format for her for a radio program and ours would be okay ... a little bit too long. 30 minutes ... she was rushed, but 45 minutes just felt about right and you do interviews ... I'm on the receiving end of a ... I do a lot of interviews ... what a luxury to have 45 minutes for a conversation and we don't really get that. I guess we're getting it now again with ... with podcasts somewhat. But so often, it's just the short truncated sound bytes, you know, maybe five minutes to promote a book or talk about something like the centennial of the 19th Amendment, but to be able to really have a conversation, it was really a gift and she needed that. She needed that time to sort of settle in and put her guests at ease, and then also, these were commercial programs. They were not NPR. She had sponsors and she had to find time to mention her sponsors, so she needed. She needed the extra time there, too.

Mary Margaret McBride  13:07  
You wouldn't believe that a cake mix could make such cakes. I'd say it has a homemade flavor, but sometimes homemade cakes fail. Pat-a-cake mixes never fail. The cakes are perfection. Every single solitary time ...

Brett Barry  13:22  
And just like she didn't prepare for her interviews, she didn't go by scripts for the sponsors that was all ad-libbed because she really spoke about them in a way that was meaningful to her.

Susan Ware  13:34  
I think that remains one of the hardest things for me to recreate for people who haven't heard these, you know, a 45-minute Mary Margaret McBride show. Maybe 15 minutes of it would be what she called doing the products. She usually had 12 sponsors and she would mention all of them. This is all ad-libbed. I would be forgetting them. Oh my god, what? Who did I leave out? But she spoke with them as if they were her best friends. I mean, things like Dromedary Gingerbread Mix and Bohack's Supermarkets and these are products that they come alive in her telling, and then her listeners were so loyal. They would troop to the grocery store and they would buy these things, and if the grocery store didn't have them, they would say, "Well, Mary Margaret mentioned these. You ... you better get them and they would," but it's not onerous for her. I mean, she devoted as much time and enthusiasm to pumping these products and her sponsors as she did to interviewing the guests and hardest of is to believe. It really is fun listening to her do the products.

Brett Barry  14:49  
And speaking of the products, we'll be right back.

Campbell Brown  14:53  
Kaatscast is supported by the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com; and by Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599. This episode is proudly sponsored by Ulster Savings Bank, stop in and meet the friendly staff at their Phoenicia and Woodstock locations. Call 866-440-0391 or visit them at ulstersavings.com. Member FDIC Equal Housing Lender.

Brett Barry  15:50  
We hear sometimes about sponsor dropping a show because of some controversial thing that's being aired. Mary Margaret McBride was known to drop sponsors, if she didn't agree with them or if there was some kind of an issue. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Susan Ware  16:07  
Yeah, there was, I think, only one sponsor that dropped her and she did drop a couple that either didn't live up to her high standards ... that soup wasn't as good as they said it was or that she just didn't have a good business relationship with them. Another thing, I mean, as a corollary to that, one thing that's quite distinctive about her and very different from the way radio worked later on. If she basically had total control of the show, she and her manager, Stella Karn, they found the sponsors, they worked with the sponsors, they promoted the sponsors, they weren't having to get approval from people about who their guests were, they had total control, and I suspect that ... that is a rather unusual situation even back then, but especially now. A lot of her base was really the New York metropolitan area stretching up into the Catskills where she had a home. But at various points, she was syndicated—and so people would hear the show in Missouri or in California or in Chicago, so she really had nationwide reach, but I think that the core of her listeners were really in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area.

Brett Barry  17:35  
So you mentioned Stella Karn ... Life Magazine called them ... "The Most Famous Team in Radio." Can you characterize their work and personal relationship for us?

Susan Ware  17:45  
Well, it's ... it's complicated. Stella Karn had ... had many careers, including being a press agent for a circus and she was one of those no nonsense ... take no prisoners kind of people. She was the person who said, "NO," and she would say it quite emphatically. Mary Margaret would say yes to everybody, if left to her own devices—and so the two of them actually worked very well together, but they also fought all the time and, you know, their battles were legendary. They were clearly linked together. Their lives were intertwined. They never lived together. I don't think either of them considered themselves as lesbians. Nobody thought of them as a couple, but when you look back and you see two women who were just so devoted to each other. There's something more than just a business relationship there, but Stella was quite something and, you know, she alienated a lot of people when she was dealing with network executives or whatever, she wouldn't hold back. And sometimes, they said, "Hey, we're not working with Mary Margaret if we have to deal with Stella." But without Stella, Mary Margaret McBride couldn't have done this show. She needed Stella there in some ways to be the bad cop to her good cop, and then what it meant was that she could just devote all her energy to doing a good show. Her whole life revolved around doing things that she believed her listeners would want to hear. And again, you think of her listener as a young housewife, maybe with kids who aren't in school yet, doesn't have access to a car ... it's the depression or it's war time and she's got a radio—and so she's really housebound and what Mary Margaret McBride does every day at one o'clock is bring the wider world into her home. She consumed books that she wanted to tell people about or interview the author. She went to Broadway plays. She especially loved to sample exotic foods. I could have written an entire book about Mary Margaret McBride and food ... everything that she does ... she's thinking, "What can I tell my listeners about this? Would they be interested in this? And they were." But I don't want to leave the impression that this is all fluff. She's just talking about having had Chinese food the night before for dinner. I mean, she's really talking about serious issues, especially during the 1940s. When she's talking about civil rights, she's talking about the refugee crisis because of the disruptions of World War II and these are serious issues she's bring in, but there's also a lightness to it. She manages to find a very good balance.

Radio Announcer  20:58  
It's one o'clock and here is Mary Margaret McBride.

Mary Margaret McBride  21:01  
"Who has been in a steady state since about nine o'clock, but no earlier than that," said Eddie Rickenbacker. Last night, I have a heart just turning somersaults inside of her that was watching your picture and seeing those rap scenes and I tell you what really just did me and was that ... on that first airplane. You could hear the noise of it.

Brett Barry  21:25  
Well, critics of the day called her a brilliant interviewer and at the same time would dismiss her as a serious journalist or radio host. Is that disconnect ... having to do with the fact that she is a woman that she was broadcasting in the daytime ... are there other factors that play there?

Susan Ware  21:42  
Well, I think it's both those things that she's a woman and, you know, some of the coverage and places like time and life, they used words like "goo" and they ... they really couldn't take her seriously, and also there was this dichotomy. It's actually a false dichotomy, where people at the time thought that daytime radio was soap operas and silly things devoted to brainless housewives.

TV Announcer  22:12  
"The Guiding Light"
[MUSIC]
Brought to you by the Makers of P and G Soap.

Susan Ware  22:24  
And evening radio was serious when the men come home from work and this is what you listen to.

TV Announcer  22:31  
Presenting the distinguished international news commentator and foreign correspondents ... Raymond Gram Swing. This is another of his programs known as world events on which Mr. Swing gives his interpretation of international affairs.

Susan Ware  22:45  
And so, she was a woman and she was on daytime radio and those ... those things worked against her, but she was a superb journalist and a superb radio interviewer and she was serving an enormous need for her audience at the time and that was why they were so loyal. She's taking women seriously at a time when American culture and society did not always take women seriously. She realized that they were hungry for news of books and Broadway and what was going on in Europe and what was going on in the World War and also what she had for dinner last night. There was really [again] a need for connection that only radio could provide at this point. This happened every day and it happened every day at one o'clock and people literally design their days around being able to sit down and just listening to Mary Margaret and, you know, the other thing is she never announced in advance who her guests are. But in some ways, that was part of the attraction. It also is one reason why subversively, she could sometimes get on controversial people, especially African Americans. Voice does not necessarily give away one's racial and ethnic background—and by the time an identifying detail might have surfaced; hopefully the person being interviewed had already caught the imagination and interest of the listeners and their race or ethnicity no longer mattered, and I think that she consciously exploited that in positive ways.

Brett Barry  24:38  
Very clever and she was also very gracious to her guests and would send a handwritten postcard—which, at a time when the post office worked more expediently would arrive a day after the interview.

Susan Ware  24:50  
Hard to imagine.

Brett Barry  24:53  
She also responded to listener feedback and would personally write up to 400 postcards daily. You wrote in your book and in red pencil for some reason.

Susan Ware  25:02  
They're quite distinctive and, you know, many of them are at the ... at the Library of Congress—as are some of these letters and she had regular correspondence who sort of thought of her as a member of the family, and then they would write to her and send her flowers on the anniversary of her mother's death around her birthday. They really felt connected.

Brett Barry  25:26  
So we're conducting this interview remotely. You're in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the moment and remote work is a well-established practice at this point in our history. Mary Margaret McBride was a pioneer. Can you talk about the fluidity with which she shifted between studio recording and home recording or broadcasting? She was blazing some paths there.

Susan Ware  25:48  
She was blazing many paths. I ... I think that if she had her druthers, she would always want to have her guest in the studio with her and she also liked having a studio audience. But because of developments in the broadcasting world, there was the possibility to be having guests remotely or broadcasting from places other than a studio, which now this is what we do all the time. And as you say, she was very much ... very much ahead of her time.

Brett Barry  26:23  
You had a story about her interview with Gary Cooper in her Central Park South apartment and she heard the banging of pipes ... next door in an adjacent apartment. This is something everyone who has ever used Zoom in a meeting can relate to things like this happening—and so she or maybe it was Stella, who went and asked them if they could stop and they said, "We'll stop if we can meet Gary Cooper," so they wound up coming in being part of the show and she had a hard time getting them off the air.

Susan Ware  26:53  
That's a perfect Mary Margaret story that the, you know, ingenuity of, you know, there's this banging, that's obtrusive, but then just incorporating them in. And then, of course, it becomes one of those stories that gets handed down by her listeners. It'll be sort of like ... "Oh, yeah, remember the story about Gary Cooper and the plumbers," whether they actually heard it at the time or not. But it often got referred to so many times that people thought they had and there was another one where Mary Margaret was a large woman and, back in those days, women wore corsets and you zipped yourself into them, which was always a challenge, I guess, and one time she got her ample flesh caught in the zipper and had to get a doctor who lived in her building ... her apartment building to come and basically undo the zipper and bandage her back—and so she was 10 or 15 minutes late to her show. And instead of just saying, "I'm sorry, I'm late," she said, "Well, let me tell you what happened ... the most embarrassing thing, but maybe it's happened to you"—and so she tells a story. It's basically a story on herself. You know that she's so ample and fat that she gets stuck in her corset. And, of course, it gets picked up by the wire services and she's kind of surprised because she honestly, I think, thought she was just telling her audience. It was like she was telling a friend this and she forgets that she's got 6 or 8 million people listening to her every day. But that story then again, enters the sort of pantheon of Mary Margaret McBride stories—whereas, I think, by the end of her ... of her time on the radio, probably most listeners would say, "Oh, yes, I heard that one had happened," where really all they had heard was it had been mentioned over and over. But again, it sort of builds a sense of a community. It's a community of listeners and they feel part of this and they feel connected to her.

Brett Barry  29:11  
You mentioned in your book that she herself did not consume media. Do you think that ... that played a big role in the types of interviews she conducted in the way that she kind of presented herself?

Susan Ware  29:23  
Well, I think there's a notable lack absence of ego in some ways. When she's doing her interviews, she's not trying to grab the spotlight. She's not really going for attention, but she's not staying in the background. She wants to have a conversation that really shows off her guest and I think that is often unusual among especially successful media types who tend to have rather large egos on screen and off and she really was much more self-effacing. Now, her own ego was quite fragile. She was incredibly insecure. She could have the best show in the world, but she thinks something was wrong with it or she'd be worried about whether she could replicate; do another one just as good the next day. I mean, she's never really satisfied with what she did. But I do think that this quality in her that really put the guests first was one reason why these interviews turned out so well.

Brett Barry  30:34  
And as much as she loved her guests, she had two rules: one is that her guests couldn't have notes or preparation, so no one got their questions in advance.

Susan Ware  30:43  
I have no notes.

Brett Barry  30:44  
Yeah, we're replicating that here.

Susan Ware  30:47  
I did write a book about it, but ...

Brett Barry  30:50  
And her show had to be first, so if you had Tennessee Williams and he was promoting a new play and he appeared on another show first ... forget it.

Susan Ware  30:59  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  31:00  
Uninvited by Mary Margaret.

Susan Ware  31:01  
Yeah, and she had the power to enforce that. I mean, it was also Stella who was enforcing it. But, you know, with Eleanor Roosevelt, she would get first dibs when Mrs. Roosevelt had a new book and that was true of ... of many other people because they respected her and they respected her bond with the audience. They ... they knew it was in their interest to do this. But I think that is a good example that she's not just all sweetness and light. I mean, she's ... she's out to keep her position at the top of the game and she was able to do that and, you know, it really is a range of people. You know, Tennessee Williams and other playwrights and actors and soldiers during the war ... her friends would fill in ... we haven't really talked about her. Announcer Vincent Connolly who was what was then called a confirmed bachelor.

Vincent Connolly  32:02  
It's one o'clock and this is Vincent Connolly introducing the Mary Margaret McBride program.

Susan Ware  32:07  
So the sexual politics of the show are really interesting when you look back. You've got a gay man as the announcer, you've got Stella and Mary Margaret, who knows what their relationship was and they're mainly talking to presumably heterosexual housewives, but Vincent is very much part of the show because he helps her do the products. He sort of gives her prompts and whatever—and so her listeners really felt that they knew Vincent and they would, you know, write in suggestions for him and how ... how he might meet somebody and, you know, it's really quite ... quite something.

Brett Barry  32:50  
Are there any comparisons that you can make today to someone who either interviews like Mary Margaret or has the influence to push brands like Mary Margaret did or anything like that ... that maybe she pioneered, but other people kind of picked up?

Susan Ware  33:10  
Well, the obvious one is ... is Oprah Winfrey and I'm no authority on her, but I think you can see how in terms of a bond with her listeners, promoting books and other things dealing with topics that come out of her own personal life, and sharing them with her audience that there ... there are many parallels. But the world that we inhabit now, in terms of media and exposure and what gets talked about and how it's done on television is ... is really worlds away from the world of radio in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, which was Mary Margaret McBride's main period. But I do think there are parallels and there are also parallels to the kind of talk show like, you know, "The Today Show" with authors. Now, did Mary Margaret McBride get any credit for that? Of course not. She sort of forgotten. I'm convinced that, you know, if she were alive today, she would have her own podcast. There's no question in my mind. She'd be doing it from that barn, she converted in the Catskills, and she wouldn't really care about how many people listen, but she would love it, and the technology would be pretty simple. She could manage it and she would always have something to say and she would just think it's great. So maybe in that way, what you're doing is really carrying on the legacy of Mary Margaret McBride.

Brett Barry  34:53  
It's exactly what I was hoping you would get to Susan that the "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is a continuation of the amazing work that Mary Margaret McBride had done and, in a way, I think she was probably bigger than Oprah in her day. I mean, you write that the tenth anniversary of her show was a celebration at Madison Square Garden with Eleanor Roosevelt. They filled the Garden. The fifteenth anniversary was at Yankee Stadium. They filled the Stadium. It's amazing! All these, I guess, listeners ... these housewives mainly flooded these arenas to experience her in some kind of a live format.

Susan Ware  35:30  
Yeah, no, it is amazing and I think when I was sort of revisiting my research for this and just reminding myself of what had drawn me to her in the first place that just her how interesting her career was in terms of women's history and radio history and she turned out to be a perfect window on the kinds of things that—as a historian, I really liked to write about. But again and again, what I came back to and I hope comes through and what I've said today and in my book is that Mary Margaret McBride really took women seriously and we don't have enough of that even today. I don't think there is a way in which women's voices and women's concerns are often dismissed as secondary or unimportant and she would have none of that. She centered women and she knew that they were just as interested in the issues of the day as men and she wanted to be able to have them be part of that conversation. This is a time when there's not an active feminist movement, she wouldn't necessarily have called herself a feminist, but she takes women seriously. And that, to me, is one of her most important and endearing qualities and a model that, I think, can be aspired to still today.

Brett Barry  37:03  
So I think we've ... we've almost hit the 45-minute mark that would have defined a Mary Margaret show, but we haven't talked about the Catskills yet. So Stella, I think, was the person who first started kind of looking for properties in the Catskills and you say in your book that she found an old farmhouse on 185 acres that had formerly grown potatoes and supported an apple orchard. It's located in West Shokan; had a view of the Ashokan Reservoir and the southern Catskills ... Mary Margaret [you say] burst into tears when she first saw the property in the rain-soaked piggery chicken house and other outbuildings that dismal day ... Mary Margaret says, "I saw the dreary ghosts of rented farms in Missouri," but her tune changed ...

Susan Ware  37:50  
Yes, it did.

Brett Barry  37:50  
... and before they moved up, Mary Margaret said, "When I retire, I'm going to marry a nice old time newspaper man and run a nice country newspaper," and then you say in your book ... maybe she didn't really think that—and yet, once she was safely settled in West Shokan, she admitted, "I'm glad I don't have a husband to clutter my converted barn home." Did she share that barn home with Stella?

Susan Ware  38:15  
Well, Stella died in 1957, and when you're thinking about the chronology of Mary Margaret McBride's career [1954] is when she gives up her nationally syndicated show and partly it's because Stella is battling cancer and things are never quite the same. After Stella's death, I mean, she lives on for another 20 years. But by that point, Mary Margaret had gotten hooked on the Catskills in that part of the world and had actually constructed or, I think, Stella oversaw some of the construction of her own converted barn—which, at the end of her life after she moved up there, that was her studio. It really is remote broadcasting and people would come in. It wasn't five days a week. I think it was three days a week and they would come to her house. She had her own studio.

Audio  39:09  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  39:15  
This clip from a TV pilot was filmed in her West Shokan home.

Male Voice  39:20  
This is the first in a new television series starring Mary Margaret McBride. It was filmed at our home at West Shokan, New York.

Mary Margaret McBride  39:28  
I'm Mary Margaret McBride. Hello, and this is Eddie Dowling and he's our wonderful guest today. We're welcoming you to my Catskill home—made out of a barn and we're sitting right now as you probably can tell ... in my living home with the ... it's a paneling ... redwood paneling and the big bluestone and ... and a brick chimney that goes way up to the ceiling where are the beams that are 200 years old ... beams and timbers of oak and chestnut and sometimes I hope very much that we're going to show you other parts of this place like Lover's Lane with birches and laurel or we might be set up beside the little pond, where every morning and every evening, deer come to drink or we might go way up in the mountains where waterfalls cascade all around.

Brett Barry  40:28  
Well, from her Catskills home, she was doing a 5-minute NBC show called ... "Thought for the Day," and then she did a radio show for Kingston's WGHQ, which is now called ... "Kingston Community Radio" and she called it your Hudson Valley neighbor and she produced that with a live studio audience in her West Shokan barn. Eleanor Roosevelt was a guest on that show in that barn, which is amazing.

Susan Ware  40:50  
Well, no, she just had to drive over from Hyde Park. That's not quite far. I know the geography and Eleanor Roosevelt always loved coming to see Mary Margaret. I mean, they were ... they were good buddies, but that does suggest the kind of guests that she could ... could draw. Oh, yes, the former first lady will just be joining us today.

Brett Barry  41:11  
You wrote in your book, even though McBride had dropped from nationally syndicated shows with listeners in the millions to a radio station whose range covered only the Catskills to Mary Margaret, it was all the same. I love talking to people. That's all she said in 1975. It doesn't matter whether the guest is famous or unknown. I'm doing the same show now that I did all those years on the networks and it's every bit as interesting, even without so called names. She attributed this to her ability to draw out people and her unshaken conviction that famous or obscure ... I believe everybody has a story to tell.

Susan Ware  41:44  
Well, that sounds like public radio, doesn't it?

Brett Barry  41:48  
Exactly.

Susan Ware  41:49  
And podcasts and so many things that she ... she really understood the power of conversation, the power of words, and ... and of listening ... active listening. And, as I said earlier, I think we're in some ways, we're coming back to that through podcasts because you're listening in on something, but you feel part of something. She got that. She really got that. And, as I said, I'm sure she would have her own podcast and she wouldn't care whether it had ten followers or ten million followers. To her, it would be just the chance to be able to talk to interesting people to share ideas and to just feel like she was part of this larger conversation. What an interesting way to live a life!

Brett Barry  41:52  
Check out our show notes for a link to Mary Margaret McBride biographer ... Susan Ware. Thanks to Ray Faiola at Chelsea Rialto Studios for bringing McBride's TV pilot to light and sharing it with us here. Additional support from Mollie Zoldan, Jerome Kazlauskas, Juliana Merchant, and Campbell Brown. This show was produced in memory of our friend, Barb Redfield, who worked with Mary Margaret, but left us unexpectedly before she was able to share those stories. Kaatscast is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. Find us at kaatscast.com. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on Instagram @kaatscast. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

Campbell Brown  43:37  
Kaatscast is supported by a generous grant from the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation and by listeners like you. Thank you!