Source for 1930's Radio Commercials?

[F. J.]

I have read on the Lounge of members having period commercials playing on their radios along with music to impart that period atmosphere. I would like to know of a source for these commercials.

However, I am a little "picky"; viz, I only want commercials that are from the time period of the late '30's/early '40's, which means a commercial from 1947 or 1952 won't fit the bill.

I have found sites such as this one that have quite a varied selection, but hardly any of them are dated. Does anyone happen know of a source for dated commericals or have any dating information about any of these?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have read on the Lounge of members having period commercials playing on their radios along with music to impart that period atmosphere. I would like to know of a source for these commercials.

However, I am a little "picky"; viz, I only want commercials that are from the time period of the late '30's/early '40's, which means a commercial from 1947 or 1952 won't fit the bill.

I have found sites such as this one that have quite a varied selection, but hardly any of them are dated. Does anyone happen know of a source for dated commericals or have any dating information about any of these?

There were very very few free-standing pre-recorded radio commercials of the 15 to 60 second variety prior to the end of the decade -- most transcribed spots prior to then were at least five minutes long, and weren't so much commercials as they were mini-programs. Relatively few such recordings have survived -- most were discarded or destroyed by the stations after the contract for their use expired, or found their way into wartime recycling campaigns.

There were many short-form spot commercials prior to 1938-39, but they were almost always live, read by a local announcer during station breaks, and were rarely preserved except by chance in an air or line-check recording of a longer program.

Network commercials were integral to the programs in which they were broadcast and would only have been heard in that context. You never would have heard Jack Benny and Don Wilson selling Jell-O, for example, in a locally-produced recording music program. There were no "spot commercials" of the modern type in sponsored network programs.

You'll find good examples of both the recorded and live-read varieties of local spot advertising in the WJSV complete broadcast day set, available from many vendors. We don't allow the posting of direct links to OTR material due to copyright issues, but the recordings are easily found if you want to find them.

Most of the "classic radio commercials" you find online are derived from various cassette collections released in the mid-seventies. Almost all of them are either extracts from live network broadcasts -- and thus not actual "spot" commercials -- or are spot commercials dating from the 1950s and early 1960s, which survive in far greater numbers than anything from the 1930s or 1940s.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I have an original lacquer disc of Benrus watch commercials from the thirties. Recorded on one side only. Six spots of 30 seconds or so.

(A lacquer disc is a disc of aluminum covered with black lacquer or plastic. It is slightly larger than an LP vinyl record which it resembles in format, but is played at 78 RPM)

 

[F. J.]

Reason why . . .

The reason I was asking in the first place is because of the following post:

Bumping this one to the top to ask folks what sort of programming they feed to their AM transmitters, and how they do it -- do you run yours constantly, or is it just an occasional thing?

What I've found is that it's very easy to use I-Tunes to create a reasonable approximation of an always-running vintage-style radio station. I've loaded a couple of thousand musical selections from 78s into the I-Tunes application running on my desktop computer, and added an assortment of vintage commercials and actual vintage station ID's as well. I use the "rating" feature of the application and the "play higher rated selections more frequently" function to cause the commercials and ID's to come up on a frequent basis, and the result sounds startling like what you'd actually hear from a typical small record-oriented station of the Era.

I've also begun the long and torturous process of digitizing some of my OTR recordings (all of which are on tape), and store these in a seperate library. The only drawback of the system is I have to switch manually from one library to the other, but that's a minor inconvenience.

It's also quite a lot of fun to mystify visitors, who hear some obscure 1930's dance band record coming out of my Philco, followed by a cigarette commercial "by electrical transcription" and an ID for "WHDH, 50 Thousand Watts, In Boston." My landlord was able to tune it in at *his* house as well (he lives next door), and I haven't had the heart to tell him it isn't a real station...

I was particularly interested in the last paragraph.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was particularly interested in the last paragraph.

The vast majority of those commercials come from 1942-48, not the '30s, as you specified. Most of the ones I have come from discs that I'm not at liberty to circulate.