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23. Chapter a Day
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
C 2 3 Chapter a Day Good books both old and new are read on a daily continued story basis. The legend goes like this: one day in the late 1920s WHA staff members in Sterling Hall were in a panic as broadcast time approached and the scheduled guest had not appeared, which sometimes happened. The announcer on duty reached into his satchel for a book he had checked out of the library and simply read it on the air to fill the time. Listener response as to what happened next in the book led to the development of what became a signature program for WHA, Chapter a Day. WHA had featured literature readings as early as the noontime educational broadcasts of 1922, when professors would appear on Fridays to read short passages from classical literature. However, these were one-time offerings and not the multiday serialization of entire books that characterizes the Chapter a Day program. The earliest document found with the Chapter a Day title is the daily broadcast rundown for July 25, 1932. No book title was listed that first day, but the name of Marianne Smith appears in the listing.1 It is likely that she was doing the reading: a woman of that name appears in the 1929 and 1931 Madison city directories as a University of Wisconsin student, and alumni records show she was a member of the class of 1932. The program aired for eight days, and the book may have been David’s Day by Denis George Mackail, a title that appears with some of the daily listings.2 Later that summer the schedule featured a series called A Story a Day, perhaps an error by the person compiling the program list or evidence of testing a different title for the series. It ran for four weeks with reader Helen Darrah.3 The program title at this early date seemed to alternate between Chapter a 292 Day and A Chapter a Day, but whether this was official or just a lack of precision by the person making out the daily schedule is not known. In the summer of 1932 the program aired at 3 p.m., and in the earliest years it was on in midafternoon in a slot held during the school year by the Wisconsin School of the Air or Wisconsin College of the Air programs. However, for most of its existence it has had a primary airing around midday for the convenience of lunchtime listeners. Its format has changed little: a reading from a book over the course of several weeks. The books usually are divided into a number of segments that is some multiple of five to allow for complete weeks of programming . Appropriate music is added at the end of the reading each day to fill the program out to the scheduled time. For most of its history the program has been thirty minutes long, but running times of fifteen and twenty minutes were also tried in the early days, and twenty-five minutes was the running time for a while in the 1980s to allow time for a National Public Radio newscast at the beginning of the hour. Nearly all the books are read by a single reader, rather than a cast. The program was done live during its early years, as WHA did not get its first transcription recorder until 1935, and it probably continued as a live program for some time thereafter. A list of books read on the program from the prewar years seems to bear this out. Many of them were not divided in multiples of five and began or ended in midweek. This might indicate that the program was indeed done live with the readers unsure exactly how many days the reading would take. It also appears that in its earliest years, some readings were done by University of Wisconsin students rather than by the full-time staff at WHA. Until 1939 the program was offered only during the summer, when School of the Air and College of the Air programs were not in production, and even then it was not offered continuously. Although the show aired in 1932, Chapter a Day was absent from the schedule during the summers of 1933 and 1934. It returned under that title again in June 1935, when Harold McCarty himself read the novel The Great Hunger by Norwegian author Johan Bøjer. Evidently, the 1932 experiment with the program...