Chapter 1: Who is Ruth Lyons and why is she considered a TV pioneer?
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So I'm like delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Hats off tribute, even white gloves off tribute, to a true unsung, I would say, pioneer in a lot of ways.
Certainly sung in certain areas and certain age groups, but as far as history's concerned, I'm going to go ahead and say that Ruth Lyons is an unsung pioneer in the history of television. Agreed. And this is a listener recommendation. I think I've been sitting on this one for a while. Yes. So for all I know, Nick Bauer gave up on the show and won't even hear this. It's possible. It happens.
I also should mention that my dogs are over here today and they usually are put away, but they can't be because of work people. So they're laying down now and they're being quiet. Okay. But we'll see what happens. Hey, Momo's appeared on the show at least once, so I can feel your pain. It's all right.
I think we should have a policy moving forward that anytime Mo speaks in the background, Jerry just leaves that in. Okay, I'm fine with that as long as, yeah, I'm fine with that. No qualifiers needed. It makes you like a real person like Ruth Lyons strove to be. Oh, I don't like that then. I strive to do the opposite and seem robotish and wooden.
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Chapter 2: What contributions did Ruth Lyons make to daytime television?
It was also a pretty interesting person. Yeah, like everything I read about her, it was just like, could she get any better? Like every time I read a new thing, it was like she was a super rad lady through and through. But she, like you said, she arrived at the beginnings of TV because, as we'll see, she started out on radio and then transferred to TV.
But it was, you know, there were no, you know, she kind of invented the formula because there were no formulas to follow. And she was like, I mean, not only a pioneer and just sort of being the first to do things and certainly the first woman to do these things, but just like all these great ideas. Like every time she had a new idea for something for the show, it was just like a super cool idea.
Yeah, for sure. And she not only was a TV pioneer, she was at the onset essentially of radio too. So she was there for the proliferation of radio as a mass medium and same for TV too. So just that in and of itself is pretty remarkable. But yeah, the fact that she was doing this as a woman and then also not like... I'll go out there and host. All male colleagues tell me what to do.
Like she was calling the shots. Oh, yeah. And she did it by building up her professional career just by being reliable, trustworthy, charming, interesting, but also like this is kind of how it's going to be. Although I never saw anything. So she was described as brash here or there. I never got the impression that she was one of those people who was just pushy and like, this is the way it is.
I never got that impression. And then similarly, she talks a lot. I read her, well, skimmed her memoirs. Highly readable, by the way. And she talks a lot about herself, obviously, it's her memoir, but she never quite crosses the line into like boasting. So it's really, that's a tough, like a tough tightrope to walk and she manages to do it. So yeah, she's just pretty great all across the board.
Yeah, and I think brash is a word that was used, and it's still used, to describe women in the workplace who, you know, call their own shots and behave essentially like men might. Yeah, you take no MacGuffins. Take no MacGuffin. Oh, man, why do you have to say that word again? So Ruth was born Ruth Reeves in 1905 in Cincinnati.
And as you will see, this is a very Cincinnati centric story, along with some other markets in the area. But that was really her home. And as you will see, she was a big Reds fan. Yeah. Even to the point of like getting people to stuff the ballot box for the Reds on the All-Star team, which is pretty cool. Yeah. And we should also say one more thing about the pioneer thing. I noticed some things.
I certainly wouldn't call us pioneers in podcasting. People have been doing it before us. But we were there at generally like the beginning of it, kind of, and certainly the spread and proliferation of it becoming a popular form of media. So I kind of can commiserate here or there with some of the points throughout her career, too. I thought that was kind of neat. Oh, yeah?
Yeah, I'll point them out as we go along. How about that? All right, so she was born in Cincinnati. She had a sister. Her parents were, you know, seemed like sort of middle-class family. Her dad was a railroad clerk and her mother was a homemaker. Had a very close family.
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Chapter 3: How did Ruth Lyons' early career in radio shape her television success?
And speaking of formative, how she was during her formative age kind of set the stage for the rest of her life, wherein she was a feminist in many, many ways. But at the same time, she was also totally comfortable with fulfilling traditional women's roles. What's cool is they don't seem to have ever particularly contradicted each other in her. Yeah.
And it also seems like it certainly wasn't schtick, but it seems like something that she was like, hey, I'm just like you. You know, she she was an every woman. And she she even sort of poo pooed sometimes like, you know, the movie stars with their fur coats and like they're basically unrelatable. And she I don't think she wanted to be relatable. I think she just was relatable.
Yeah, I think that's well put, man. So getting back to her bio, she started dating a guy named Johnny Lyons who lived down the street. I knew a guy named Johnny Lyons, by the way. Do you really? Is this the same guy? I knew him a long time ago. But when I read that, I was like, oh, yeah, Johnny Lyons, whatever happened to that dude? It's a good name, good solid name.
He lived down the street, and they ended up getting married about eight years after high school. And as we'll see, it didn't last very long. But in the meantime, she went to the University of Cincinnati. I think the Bearcats? Go Bearcats. Wildcats? Bearcats. Bearcats, thank you. And she was just there for one year. She made quite a splash while she was there the first year.
She's the humor editor for the yearbook, and she wrote music for the school musical, and I think she became a tri-delt even. She was the one who coined the phrase delta, delta, delta, can I help you, help you, help you. I saw that coming a mile away. So, but she stopped. She dropped out after the first year. Her father became ill. He apparently lost a decent amount of money in the depression.
And so her family was kind of hard up and she's like, I'm really like nothing I'm doing here is actually going to further my career down the road. I might as well drop out and go find work and help support the family rather than being a drain on the family finances. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
She was also a musician and a songwriter, something she did kind of throughout her career, even though that was definitely like a side gig that like clearly something she loved doing. But when she was young, right after she dropped out of school, she got a job playing sheet music at the Willis Music Company, which was downtown Cincinnati.
And she kind of got hip to the local music scene and the radio scene and did other side jobs along the way, obviously, to make some money. But she was writing songs this whole time and, in fact, wrote a song that I wouldn't call it a hit. But her most popular song in 1946 was called Let's Light the Christmas Tree.
So she wrote a, you know, probably in the area as well, sort of a classic Christmas song. I mean, she took everything in the kitchen, including the sink, that's even remotely Christmassy and threw it at that one. There's bells that are pealing along with the choir. There's children's parts. All of the lyrics are real schmaltzy, like Christmassy stuff.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Ruth Lyons face as a woman in the broadcasting industry?
And then another fateful thing would happen when the host of a show called The Woman's Hour got sick. She filled in and started ad-libbing kind of right away, kind of Robin Williams style in Good Morning Vietnam. She threw the script out the window, did her own thing, and afterward got called into the manager's office where it's like something out of a movie.
She thought she was going to get in trouble, and they were like, you're a hit. And sadly, apparently this woman she replaced or filled in for was out for one day and she came back in and lost her job the next day because Ruth had made such a splash.
So she inadvertently took this poor woman's job and went on to not only host Woman's Hour, she added another one called Open House and then another one. So she's hosting three different radio programs. Third one's called The Woman's View on the News. And she was not only hosting those, she was also still working with the musical director and very quickly made a name for herself.
And again, this is where Johnny Lyons comes back in and exits almost as quickly because they got married in 1932. And shortly after that, Johnny was transferred to Cleveland. And Ruth was like, I'm just starting my career here and it's going really well. I'm going to stay in Cincinnati. Let's try this long distance.
And anyone who's familiar with Ohio geography, the drive from Cincinnati to Cleveland is not a short drive. It's just long enough to be like a long drive, you know? Okay. So I can imagine in the 1930s, it was even harder. And sad to say, it didn't quite work out. And they ended up staying married for about seven years.
But I have the distinct impression that they were basically consciously uncoupled long before then. Yeah, it seems like it, very sadly. She kept that name. Obviously, Ruth Lyons was the name she started her radio career with. So I think she kept it for name recognition from that point forward, even after getting remarried, as we'll see later.
And she didn't really talk about that first marriage a lot. It's not in her memoir. She did say when she was talking about her second marriage, I think in interviews later on, that she didn't think she would ever marry because she thought men would hate her success. So I don't know if that had anything to do with their marriage or if it was just a long-distance thing.
But at any rate, they got divorced, and maybe that is a decent time for a break. I'd say Ruth Lyons would approve. All right. We'll be right back with more on Ruth Lyons. We'll be right back. Why hasn't a woman formally participated in a Formula One race weekend in over a decade? Think about how many skills they have to develop at such a young age.
What can we learn from all of the new F1 romance novels suddenly popping up every year? He still smelled of podium champagne and expensive friction. And how did a 2023 event called Wagageddon change the paddock forever? That day is just seared into my memory.
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Chapter 5: What innovative formats did Ruth Lyons introduce to her shows?
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Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so we're back. We held the seance in the break, and we did verify that Ruth Lyons thought it was a great time for us to take a break. So that was great. And I said that she had made a name for herself pretty quickly on Cincinnati radio.
And one of the things that came along that really helps her with that, which I guess if you can ever be helped by a flood, she was. There was a huge flood in 1937. I saw that it was described as up to the streetlights, which is a pretty decent-sized flood. And it was a catastrophe for Cincinnati. And at the time, again, radio was like really just kind of starting out.
And this is one of the ways that it proved itself as a medium where you could help people thoroughly. She stayed on the air essentially for 48 hours reading bulletins, I think, from the local authorities on where to go for help or how to donate to the Red Cross or where to go get sandbags, that kind of stuff.
And just that right there kind of showed Cincinnati that she was a trustworthy voice to be listened to. Yeah. And I don't know if it was that or just her overall butt kicking at the job, but she got a promotion. She got promoted to program director. This is a woman in the 1930s. So she's already sort of, you know, breaking new ground and breaking glass ceilings all over the place.
Yeah, just to point out, she had, by this time, Venus Flytrap's job, Johnny Fever's job, and Andy's job as well. That's right. So she didn't have Lonnie Anderson's job. That's the key there. Right. She had Lonnie Anderson and about 17 other people working for her. That's right. One of the other great things she did was work with kids. She started a Christmas fund.
It's kind of like a sort of an early version of Toys for Tots. It was in 1939. She put on a show at Cincinnati Children's Hospital and was like, these kids need more than this. And so she founded what was called the Christmas Fund. and raised about $1,000 from listeners in that first year. And that is a fund that is still going strong today, long after she has passed.
And I think they do it every year on her birthday. They start it up on October 4th. Yeah, and that was something she had a talent for, was getting people to donate money to causes that she thought were important. You said they raised $1,000 that first year in 1939. Four years later, they were up to raising $54,000. And this is 1940s money. So it was pretty substantial to help.
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Chapter 6: How did Ruth Lyons handle advertising and sponsorship on her shows?
She added a morning show called the WLW Consumers Foundation. And this one was like gangbusters with the company because it was great for advertisers in that they had a couple of hundred women test out products and then come back on the air and report what they found out. So advertisers always loved her. They kind of gussied it up.
She added music and then games and eventually changed that terrible name to Morning Matinee, much, much better name, and also had a game show called Collect Calls from Lowenthal's, which was a fur store. Right. And if you kind of go back and look at that, the morning matinee, in addition to, you know, having women test products and then come in and say like, well, this is what I thought of this.
Adding music and games, that kind of stuff, like all of a sudden it's starting to take like a morning show format. Yeah, for sure. You can start to see the contours of it just kind of coming into view here or there. And she, one of the things she did was she, we'll talk about this a little more later, but she was really good at just understanding that you need ad revenue to survive.
And that you're going to make more ad revenue and also keep your viewership if you are forthright and honest about your advertisers. And so one of the things she did was she would turn down, she negotiated the ability to say, nope, not them. I don't believe in their product because like her ads were all endorsement.
So for her, as a very ethical person, she didn't do any endorsements that she didn't personally believe in, which was a big deal, especially at the time, and also led her to tons of disagreements and head-butting with the ad sales department. But she would typically win because that's how powerful she had become, again, as a woman in broadcasting in the 40s. Yeah, absolutely.
I mentioned earlier she got married again. She married a guy named Herman Newman this time, who was a semantics professor. And he was a big liberal guy, progressive guy, which meant that he didn't mind her having a lot of career success. He was very supportive of her, which was awesome. And I think aligned with her political values as well, as we'll see with some of the things that she did.
They had one kid in 1944. It was a little bit of an unusual situation in that they announced the birth of young Candace, who they called Candy. Later on, people found out that she very sadly suffered a stillbirth at six months. and adopted an orphan newborn at the time that she had lost her own baby. So she didn't cover it up or anything, but she didn't come right out and say it.
But everyone knew the timeline of her pregnancy, so you could probably figure it out if you were paying attention. Right. Right. So, yes, and Candy became their beloved child. Like she was just, her parents absolutely adored her. And she would go on to kind of make appearances here or there on the radio show and then later on the TV show.
And I guess she made her first appearance at six weeks old on the mic. Very cute. For Morning Matinee. Yeah, her quote was goo. Goo goo. So she came up with another program, Ruth did. She said, hey, guys, I got a great idea. There are a lot of women out there who haven't and may never have the chance to have a really fancy luncheon at a nice hotel downtown.
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Chapter 7: What legacy did Ruth Lyons leave behind after her retirement?
I'm a radio person. I don't like these studio lights. They get really hot. I feel like I can be more myself without this camera in my face, especially with these interviews I'm doing with people. And she was flying by the seat of her pants and sort of off the cuff on the radio. And wanted to do that on TV. But that's a bigger problem for TV because of lighting and blocking and stuff like that.
So it was all a bit of a challenge. But, you know, she got on TV. And, of course, immediately executives started saying, like, you need to lose weight, lady. She said in her memoirs that she had gained a bunch of weight from all the delicious pies and cakes she ate at lunch at the Gibson every day. Sure. So, yeah.
So there was one other thing that she had a complaint about with being on television. She said that the engineers are in complete control, which was a reversal of what she was used to in the radio studio. She said one even wore a beret with an exclamation point and everything. So she ends up because she's an overachiever. Clearly, we've established this at this point.
She was program director at WLWT. And so all of a sudden she has authority on television as well after she had already sort of asserted herself on the radio for quite a while at this point. But like I said earlier, she was inventing the model. She couldn't look to other shows to see what people were doing. Also, not a lot of people were watching. This was very early in the days of TV.
I think the whole station in 1946 was a bit of an experiment. So not a lot of families had TV sets in the early 1950s, which was kind of good. It was kind of like us in a way, starting out with podcasting, like we weren't very good for a while, but not a lot of people were listening to podcasts. So you had a lot of room to sort of grow and learn the craft, just like she did. Exactly.
That was definitely one of the things that came up that I was like, yeah, I can totally identify with that. That's certainly how we managed to kind of get along at the beginning, right? Yeah. One other thing I noticed at the time, TVs were so new.
This is the early 50s that she was making these TV shows that a lot of people had to stand around, often outside furniture stores, just like you see in movies, to like watch a TV show from one of the models on display in the front window. Mm-hmm. And that's just like podcasting. People used to stand outside of furniture stores to listen to podcasts.
You can make a really good case that Rooms to Go is at least as important in podcasting as Apple is. So she's crushing it on regional TV now, so much so that NBC is like, hey, we want to take you national. It would be the first national daytime talk show hosted by a woman, obviously, because it's 1951 at this point. And they did. They put it it was literally less than a year.
They put it on the across the country for 11 months, I think. And it seems like it basically stopped because she didn't want to move to New York. They said, hey, why don't you come to New York? Give it more of a sort of a national appeal because you're there in Cincinnati and nobody cares in 1951 about the show out of Cincinnati across the country.
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Chapter 8: How did Ruth Lyons influence future generations of talk show hosts?
I mean, that's a lot now. But, you know, her audience was growing because it was also broadcast on the radio. So she had even more people listening there. And they were reaching sort of across the Midwest with the radio by that point. And she was, like I said, she was always a sort of a beloved figure for advertisers. So she was making a ton of money for the company.
And tickets were selling out four years in advance to come to the studio audience. Right, yeah. One other thing I saw is that she mentioned that it was kind of common for school kids to go home during lunch and watch the show with their mother in the middle of the day.
And it turns out one of those little kids, and this is totally genuine, I'm not making a joke here, was David Letterman, who credits Ruth Lyons as introducing him to the entire concept of a talk show. And yeah, she was one of his inspirations.
that's awesome i thought so too she also inspired a lot of people to get color tvs because in 1957 it was one of the first uh shows in the region to air in color and people wanted to see everything in color they want to see ruth lines in color so they bought up so many color tv sets in cincinnati that it became known as color town usa for a while And she didn't love the switch to color.
They hired a makeup artist to, you know, kind of help her through that transition. And she didn't like that. She didn't like the foundation they put on her. So in a very Ruth Lyons way, she turned that into a bit and had the artist do makeover for her, like in front of the audience, and then have the audience vote about like which look they like better. Yeah. And they sided with her, of course.
Of course. So let's talk a little bit about the show format. You want to? Yeah, I mean, it was a straight up talk show. It was. So again, this is not like she's like, I want to do what Kathie Lee and Hoda do, or I want to do what Kathie Lee and Regis did. They based their stuff on her.
So one of the things that she did that definitely became a thing, especially in the next couple decades, 70s, 80s, the studio, the set looked like a living room. It was meant to be comfortable, like she was inviting the viewers and the people she was interviewing into her home. just to kind of make it that much more casual and laid back, right?
And she also, this is different that never got picked up, but her interview seat and the seat she normally sat in was a love seat that was also a rocking chair. Love those rockers. A rocker love seat, though, you don't see that very often. Even Rooms to Go only has a few of them. We have outdoor versions of those. They're called gliders. Okay, yes, sure.
Maybe that's why I was having trouble conceiving of what it was. It's a glider. Yeah, I love those gliders. But if you've ever seen a picture of Ruth, you know, there's not a ton of stuff out there, sadly, but a lot of times you might see her holding on stage a bouquet of flowers with a guest, and you might think, well, that's an odd thing to do, or maybe she's just giving flowers.
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