Milton Berle Emptied the Streets on Tuesday Nights and Ended Radio’s Reign

For one hour every Tuesday night, beginning in the fall of 1948, a good part of the United States stopped what it was doing. Restaurants in television towns went quiet at eight. Movie houses cut their Tuesday shows or closed outright. Corner taverns bought a set and packed people to the walls. And in Detroit, as the story came down, the water department kept noticing something strange in the reservoir gauges: the levels dropped sharply every Tuesday between nine and five past nine, week after week, as if the whole city sprang a leak on schedule.

There was no leak. Milton Berle had just gone off the air. Texaco Star Theater ran from eight to nine, and an audience that had sat riveted for an hour got up in a single wave and went to the bathroom. The plumbing recorded the size of the crowd — or so Berle loved to tell it, in the story that trailed him for the rest of his life.

Berle was the first man television made into a national habit, and the habit came on fast. When he took over the show in 1948, there were a few hundred thousand sets in American homes. He was called Mr. Television, and the joke was that he sold more of them than any salesman alive: people bought a set to see what he would do next, borrow a wig, take a pie, come out in a dress. For the length of his run, the country reorganized its Tuesdays around him.

The Set You Listened To

To understand what was ending, you have to remember what radio had been.

For roughly twenty years it had owned the American evening. The radio was a piece of furniture, often the largest single object in the front room, a wooden cabinet with a lit dial that the family arranged its chairs around. They did not watch it. They faced it and listened, and the pictures happened behind their eyes. A creaking door, a footstep, a voice dropping low, and each listener built the scene privately, which is why radio drama could stage a fire, a shipwreck, or a war on a budget of sound effects and nerve.

The programs were built for that attention. Comedy hours with a live studio audience. Fifteen-minute serials that ran every weekday and left housewives on a cliff until tomorrow — the shows sponsored by soap companies that gave the word soap opera its name. Detective thrillers. Anthology dramas. And the giants of the form: Amos ‘n’ Andy, a nightly comedy so popular in the early thirties that theaters would stop the film and pipe the broadcast into the auditorium so the audience wouldn’t have to miss it. This was the medium in full command of the household’s ears. Its stars were among the most famous people in the country, known by voice — and many of them could have walked down the street with the crowd never turning a head.

The Vault Was Left Open

The stars were the whole game, and in 1948 a rival network walked off with them.

Network radio in the late forties was a two-horse race, and NBC was the front-runner, carrying most of the top-rated shows. Its chief rival, CBS, was run by William Paley, who understood that a network is only the sum of the talent it can put on the air. He also understood the tax code. In the postwar years the top income-tax bracket ran past eighty percent, while money made from selling a piece of property — a capital gain — was taxed at twenty-five. A performer earning a fortune in salary kept almost none of it.

Paley’s move was to let the stars incorporate. A comedian could turn himself and his show into a company, and Paley would buy that company outright for a large lump sum. To the performer, a career’s earnings arrived as a capital gain instead of income, and he kept three times as much. To Paley, the beauty was that CBS now owned the star’s name and could not be raided in return.

He went to Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the two white men who wrote and voiced Amos ‘n’ Andy, and reportedly offered to double whatever they were making. They came. So did Jack Benny, radio’s top comedian, and Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, and Burns and Allen. In a single season NBC watched the vault it had left open emptied by its competitor. And the timing was no accident: these were exactly the years television was arriving, and the stars Paley gathered would step, one by one, from the microphone in front of them to the camera beside it. The audience followed the faces to the new box in the corner.

The Freeze, and Then the Flood

Television could have swept in even faster than it did. What slowed it was a government pause.

In 1948 the Federal Communications Commission stopped issuing new station licenses. The early rush had jammed stations too close together on the dial, their signals bleeding into one another, and the agency needed time to redraw the map and find room on higher frequencies. The freeze was meant to last a few months. It lasted until 1952. During those four years the country made do with the stations already on the air, and whole regions had no local television at all — which is part of why radio’s dominance held on as long as it did.

When the freeze lifted, the dam broke. In five years the number of stations went from about a hundred to nearly five hundred, and sets poured into homes to meet them. In 1950, roughly nine percent of American households owned a television. By the end of the decade it was close to ninety.

The moment the new medium had truly arrived can be dated. On the night of January 19, 1953, I Love Lucy aired the episode in which Lucy gives birth to Little Ricky — timed to coincide with Lucille Ball’s own delivery hours earlier. Forty-four million people watched, better than seven in ten American sets. The next morning Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated president, and about twenty-nine million watched that. A sitcom had outdrawn the swearing-in of a president by fifteen million viewers. Eisenhower later needled Ball about the son who had knocked him off the front pages.

The Long Silence

Radio did not die on a single day, but it can be watched dying by the schedule.

Through the fifties the great shows thinned out, migrating to television or simply ending, and advertisers followed the audience. National sponsors pulled their budgets out of network radio and poured them into television, and within a few years the networks’ share of the radio dollar had collapsed. The comedy hours went first, then the anthology dramas. By 1955 television had plainly replaced radio as the country’s main source of entertainment.

The last holdouts were the daytime serials. On November 25, 1960 — the day after Thanksgiving — CBS broadcast the final episodes of its last six radio soap operas, among them Ma Perkins, which had run since 1933. Actors who had spent their careers at the microphone were out of work in an afternoon. A pair of dramas hung on a little longer: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense aired their last broadcasts back to back on the evening of September 30, 1962. When the second one ended, the golden age of network radio drama was over. The theater of the mind had gone dark; the pictures were on the screen now.

What Was Left Turned Out to Be Enough

The obituaries for radio were premature, because radio stopped trying to be television and became something television couldn’t.

In Omaha in the early fifties, a young station owner named Todd Storz sat in a bar and watched the same thing everyone had seen a thousand times without noticing it — or so the story goes: patrons feeding the jukebox, playing the same few hit songs over and over, and then, near closing, playing them again. He drew the lesson that the networks never had. People did not tire of a song they loved; they wanted it again. Storz built a station around a tight list of the most popular records, played on heavy rotation, stitched together by a disc jockey with a personality — Top 40, the format that would define the sound of American radio for decades.

It worked because it answered the one thing television could not do. A television held you in a chair, facing it, in one room. Radio, especially once the transistor shrank it into something you could carry, went where you went — into the car, onto the beach, up against your ear at night. It stopped being the household’s shared hearth and became the individual’s private companion, playing music while you did something else. The living room belonged to the screen. The rest of your life belonged to the dial.

Two decades of American evenings had been organized around a wooden box the family sat and listened to. In the span of Milton Berle’s run, the box was moved to the corner and the family turned its chairs toward a new one, this time to watch. The old set didn’t leave the house. It just got smaller, went into a pocket, and learned to follow you out the door.