Romance of the Ranchos
September 7, 1941 – May 23, 1948 · 37 broadcasts
Southern California history, told from the deeds. From September 1941, CBS station KNX in Los Angeles ran a half-hour anthology built out of its sponsor's filing cabinets. Title Insurance and Trust held the chain-of-title records for most of Southern California -- many of them originals reaching back to the Spanish and Mexican land grants -- and the company's chief title searcher, E. Palmer Conner, had already turned them into a book. The radio series dramatized it: one or two of the old ranchos each week, from royal grant to subdivision. Frank Graham narrates as "the Wandering Vaquero," a roving storyteller who sets up each week's ground and then plays half the parts in the drama himself. The trick that makes it work is the pivot from then to now. A grant is made in 1784, a family holds it, a boundary is fought over, an American buys it cheap -- and then the script names the streets standing on that ground in 1941. Rancho San Rafael is Glendale. Rodeo de las Aguas is Beverly Hills. La Brea is the tar pits. Thirty-five programs survive from the first season, running to May 1942 and covering fifty-two ranchos, plus outlaws, water wars and the founding of the pueblo. The series itself kept going on KNX for years afterward -- the trade papers still place it there in 1947 -- but that later run is barely documented, and almost none of it survives. It is corporate-sponsored history and it romanticizes freely -- but it is drawn from the records, and it survives nearly complete.
Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
1941
1942
1948
Southern California history, told from the deeds. From September 1941, CBS station KNX in Los Angeles ran a half-hour anthology built out of its sponsor's filing cabinets. Title Insurance and Trust held the chain-of-title records for most of Southern California -- many of them originals reaching back to the Spanish and Mexican land grants -- and the company's chief title searcher, E. Palmer Conner, had already turned them into a book. The radio series dramatized it: one or two of the old ranchos each week, from royal grant to subdivision. Frank Graham narrates as "the Wandering Vaquero," a roving storyteller who sets up each week's ground and then plays half the parts in the drama himself. The trick that makes it work is the pivot from then to now. A grant is made in 1784, a family holds it, a boundary is fought over, an American buys it cheap -- and then the script names the streets standing on that ground in 1941. Rancho San Rafael is Glendale. Rodeo de las Aguas is Beverly Hills. La Brea is the tar pits. Thirty-five programs survive from the first season, running to May 1942 and covering fifty-two ranchos, plus outlaws, water wars and the founding of the pueblo. The series itself kept going on KNX for years afterward -- the trade papers still place it there in 1947 -- but that later run is barely documented, and almost none of it survives. It is corporate-sponsored history and it romanticizes freely -- but it is drawn from the records, and it survives nearly complete.