WJAZ reply card, 1925

["Skeet" McD]

Dear Friends,
My dear friend and musical colleague Ralph Richey spent HIS youth (in the 1960s) the way I did: grubbing around for neat stuff when it was still fairly thick on the ground...because no one else was interested. He was attempting to bring order to the resulting hoard (better late than never...) last week and came up with the attached, which he sent to me with the suggestion I share it with you. And so: here it is. I've heard of these things, but never seen one before, and expect they are somewhat rare. I'm sure the esteemed Lizzie Maine can tell us everything we might want to know....

http://gallery.me.com/finiancircle#100014/WJAZ1

I don't know about you...but I'd give a great deal to see that "Spanish Garden" studio...perhaps pictures exist; and if they do, I imagine we stand a good chance of seeing them here.

"Skeet"

 

[LizzieMaine]

Reply cards were very popular in the earliest days of radio, when DXing was the favorite pastime of listeners. The idea was to log all the different stations you could receive, look them up in a guidebook -- of which there were many different -- and then write to the proprietors of each station telling them when you received their program, what you heard, what type of radio and antenna you were using, and any comments about the performance. In a week or so you'd get one of these cards back in response, and you'd put them all in photo albums or hang them on your wall as proof you'd received all the stations in your log. Most stations sent these out after checking the listener's report against their own log, so they were considered full verification that you actually received those stations.

WJAZ was a very popular station in the mid-twenties -- it was owned by Commander Eugene MacDonald, founder of the Zenith Radio Corporation, and was used as sort of an indirect goodwill advertisement for the products of that company.