American Trail
February 7, 1953 – May 2, 1953 · 13 broadcasts
The American Trail was a thirteen-chapter history series produced in 1953 by the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Veterans of Foreign Wars -- not a network show but a syndicated one, cut to transcription discs, funded by chapter bake sales and rummage sales, and mailed to local stations that slotted it wherever they could reach the schoolchildren it was made for. Each fifteen-minute chapter dramatizes a milestone in the American story, from the founding documents through westward expansion to the meaning of the flag, told through the dispatches of a fictitious New York reporter named Tom Farrell. Aimed squarely at fourth- through eighth-graders in the anxious opening years of the Cold War, the scripts are earnest, patriotic, and, by one archivist's description, as much civic sermon as history lesson. A few real public figures lend their voices as themselves -- Bing Crosby and his son Lindsay in the Gold Rush chapter, General James Doolittle in the aviation chapter, and President Eisenhower in a closing postscript to the finale. The dramatic cast, the 'nationally known radio and television actors' the launch promised, went unrecorded; all thirteen chapters survive.
Episode Spine
1953
The American Trail was a thirteen-chapter history series produced in 1953 by the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Veterans of Foreign Wars -- not a network show but a syndicated one, cut to transcription discs, funded by chapter bake sales and rummage sales, and mailed to local stations that slotted it wherever they could reach the schoolchildren it was made for. Each fifteen-minute chapter dramatizes a milestone in the American story, from the founding documents through westward expansion to the meaning of the flag, told through the dispatches of a fictitious New York reporter named Tom Farrell. Aimed squarely at fourth- through eighth-graders in the anxious opening years of the Cold War, the scripts are earnest, patriotic, and, by one archivist's description, as much civic sermon as history lesson. A few real public figures lend their voices as themselves -- Bing Crosby and his son Lindsay in the Gold Rush chapter, General James Doolittle in the aviation chapter, and President Eisenhower in a closing postscript to the finale. The dramatic cast, the 'nationally known radio and television actors' the launch promised, went unrecorded; all thirteen chapters survive.