The Mary Lee Taylor Program
September 21, 1939 – June 18, 1949 · 35 broadcasts
Pet Milk's homemaker program was the longest-running cooking show on network radio, on the air from 1933 to 1954 -- and by the time of these broadcasts it had quietly turned into something odder and better than a recipe hour. Each NBC Saturday morning opened with "The Story of the Week," a fifteen-minute serial about Jim and Sally Carter, a young couple who leave her home town for his new job and spend 1948-49 hunting a flat in the postwar housing squeeze, sharing a bathroom with the whole floor, talking a hostile landlady out of evicting them for having a baby, and generally holding a marriage together on very little money. Only then came "The Recipe of the Week" -- dictated slowly enough to write down, costed to the penny, and built around the sponsor's evaporated milk -- and a closing line of homespun philosophy called "Today's Recipe for Happiness." "Mary Lee Taylor" was a trade persona, invented at a St. Louis advertising agency by Erma Perham Proetz and performed on the air by Susan Cost. The oldest recording here is an accident of preservation: a fifteen-minute CBS edition from 1939 that survives only because it fell inside the famous WJSV Complete Broadcast Day.
Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
1939
1948
1949
Pet Milk's homemaker program was the longest-running cooking show on network radio, on the air from 1933 to 1954 -- and by the time of these broadcasts it had quietly turned into something odder and better than a recipe hour. Each NBC Saturday morning opened with "The Story of the Week," a fifteen-minute serial about Jim and Sally Carter, a young couple who leave her home town for his new job and spend 1948-49 hunting a flat in the postwar housing squeeze, sharing a bathroom with the whole floor, talking a hostile landlady out of evicting them for having a baby, and generally holding a marriage together on very little money. Only then came "The Recipe of the Week" -- dictated slowly enough to write down, costed to the penny, and built around the sponsor's evaporated milk -- and a closing line of homespun philosophy called "Today's Recipe for Happiness." "Mary Lee Taylor" was a trade persona, invented at a St. Louis advertising agency by Erma Perham Proetz and performed on the air by Susan Cost. The oldest recording here is an accident of preservation: a fifteen-minute CBS edition from 1939 that survives only because it fell inside the famous WJSV Complete Broadcast Day.