Lum and Abner: Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio

In the 1930s radio stations filled the airwaves with programs about rural Americans struggling through the Great Depression. One of the most popular of these shows was Lum and Abner, the brainchild of two young businessmen from Arkansas. Chester Chet Lauck and Norris Tuffy Goff based Pine Ridge, the community they created on the air, on the hamlet of Waters, Arkansas. The title characters, who are farmers, local officials, and keepers of the Jot ‘Em Down Store, manage to entangle themselves in a variety of hilarious dilemmas. In Lum and Abner: Rural America and the golden Age of Radio, historian Randal L. Hall contributes an extended introduction explaining the history and importance of the program, its creators, and its national audience and then presents a treasure trove of twenty-nine previously unavailable scripts from the show’s earliest period.