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| Everett G. Mitchell |
Everett Mitchell is now believed to be the only living person who can recall and give an eye witness account of every important development in broadcast communication from its beginning in the early 1920s.
This man who has lived in DuPage County and Wheaton thirty years made his first appearance before a radio microphone in 1923, beginning a more than forty-four-year career in broadcasting that included both radio and television. From the beginning he saw radio and later television as a new means of communication opening the way to limitless benefits for every person in the American family ... children as well as women and men.
Mitchell knew the men who created radio. He helped some of them bring their dreams into full flower. But the youthful Mitchell knew them all, including:
Everett Mitchell’s roots go back to the early days of the nation. A family of Quakers, the Mitchells came to this country from England and settled in Maine. One of Mitchell’s forebears took an Indian woman for a wife and some of the family traditions of early music and poetry can be traced to that union. Mitchell’s grandfather spent the Civil War years riding from camp to camp keeping in touch with the Quaker boys in the Union Army.
Everett Mitchell is the son of a Quaker father and a Canadian born Methodist mother who were forced into poverty when his father, who because of his Quaker non-violence beliefs took no part in them, lost his train engineer’s job during the famous Pullman strike and subsequent blacklisting of those who worked on the struck railroads. His first years were spent on a small farm in Cook County just outside of Chicago, the eighth of nine children.
His path to national leadership began at age four when his older sister, Eva, began teaching him to sing the great hymns while they did the family dishes. By the time he was ten his voice was so remarkable that his Sunday School teacher paid for a year’s instruction from one of the excellent voice teachers on Chicago's west side. By the time he was fourteen, he was singing the invitation songs for the famous evangelist, Billy Sunday, who always called him "son." His last appearance with Billy Sunday was as a young man when the evangelist held his Chicago revival in a lake front tabernacle that seated sixteen thousand persons.
An accomplished soloist, Everett Mitchell did his
first radio broadcast the evening of November 4, 1923. He appeared on most of the early
Chicago radio stations. He was often invited to introduce his numbers. On November 15,
1925, he was appointed manager of the Chicago radio station, WENR.
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| As manager of
Radio Station WENR |
In the next two years, Everett Mitchell laid the foundation for today’s radio. At a time when radio programs were generally devoted to music and entertainment, the youthful manager of WENR developed a new program format that highlighted service, information and inspiration.
In his thirty months as manager of Station WENR, Mitchell established a long list of "firsts" in Chicago radio and some for the nation. He created the first holiday feature for children, "Letters to Santa Claus" that was copied widely. He did Chicago’s first remote broadcast done from a site without the aid of telephone wires that are now so common. He wrote and presented the first radio commercial in Chicago. It was for Bamby Bread.
On the evening of May 25, 1927, more than half of the Americans were for the first time clustered round radios, some of them crystal sets. They were hoping for some news of Charles Lindbergh who was attempting a solo flight from New York to Paris. Hour after hour passed without any word from the Lone Eagle. At ten p.m. Everett Mitchell stepped to the WENR microphone. He explained that despite the preparations that had been made with ships at sea to report, no word had been received, but that listeners should not despair. He then announced that WENR would observe a minute of silence in order that its listeners might pray in their own way for the young American over the Atlantic ocean. It was the first national radio prayer service. WENR received a record mail from listeners in thirty states.
In 1928 Mitchell created Chicago’s first educational (it may have been the first in the nation) program for children. Called "The Air Scouts" and broadcast each evening from WENR, the program invited children to enroll as members of the Air Scouts. They received a membership certificate and a lapel pin. More than thirty thousand children from coast to coast enrolled in the first six months, a record which still stands for children’s educational programs in Chicago. The program continued for sixteen years.
WENR had little if any sale value at the time Everett Mitchell became its manager. Thirty months later Samuel Insull and his utility associates paid one million dollars when there were other Chicago radio stations that could have been acquired for little more than paying up their bills. Insull bought WENR largely to secure the services of Everett Mitchell who worked as a member of Insull’s personal staff in addition to his radio station duties. He introduced Mr. Insull not only at Insull’s radio appearances but non-radio appearances s well.
As was the case with Billy Sunday, Samuel Insull always addressed Everett Mitchell as "son." There developed a warm and lasting friendship between the two men that was not dampened when in the Great Depression Mitchell lost his entire life savings in the collapse of one of Insull’s companies.
All this happened before the advent of network radio
broadcasting, an era that made Everett Mitchell a national leader just as he had been a
pace setter in Chicago broadcasting. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) made Chicago
its broadcasting hub in 1930. One of NBC’s first moves was to buy from a depression
impoverished Insull his radio station, WENR. Again Everett Mitchell figured heavily in the
purchase. Niles Trammell who was later president of NBC made the deal with Samuel Insull.
In 1969 while in retirement he wrote Mitchell and included this sentence: "Everett,
you were a great asset to the company ... getting you was worth more than what we paid
Insull for the station."
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| Mitchell was on the scene to observe the
miraculous changes in American agriculture in the 20th Century. |
In the months after NBC acquired WENR and Everett Mitchell, he was given the assignment of presenting The National Farm and Home Hour, the outstanding daytime service program in America at the time and for a decade and more after. Everett got the prestigious assignment because of the twenty announcers at NBC he was the only one who knew the difference between a strawstack and a haystack.
Farm and Home Hour was heard daily at noon from Chicago coast to coast. The program continued in different formats for three decades. Everett Mitchell had the opportunity to talk to five to ten million persons daily. The program became the most important trigger element in laying the groundwork for the U. S. food production miracle that has been unfolding and gathering additional momentum through the 1950’s, 60s and 70s.
There is another accomplishment in the Everett Mitchell broadcasting career. This man imparted to his fellow Americans a new insight into brotherhood known as the Beautiful Day spirit. In May of 1932, in the darkest hours of the Great Depression, Mitchell rebelled at accepting the pessimism that blanketed the entire nation like a heavy fog.
After listening to gloom on the train, "The Bankers’ Special," while commuting to his office, a series of thoughts crowded into Mitchell’s mind including an old nursery rhyme his mother had taught him. When he stepped to the Farm and Home Hour microphone that noon, he ad-libbed which was against NBC regulations, "It’s a beautiful day in Chicago. It is a great day to be alive, and I hope it is even more beautiful wherever you are."
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| Looking back on twenty-five years in radio. |
Although a note arrived during the program directing Mitchell to report to the president’s office when the program was over, by the time he reported the switchboard at NBC was swamped with calls for "the Beautiful Day man," many of them pleading with him to "say it again tomorrow because it makes me feel so good." He did say it the next day and until he retired more than thirty years later. President Roosevelt gave Mitchell wartime permission to continue to use his "Beautiful Day" introduction even when all radio references to the weather was banned.
Millions of Americans heard the Beautiful Day wish for three decades. Gradually, the nation caught on and today, it is a near universal practice among Americans of all callings to wish one another on parting, "a great day." No university taught the "Beautiful Day Spirit," no great corporation advocated it or used it as its slogan and no newspaper or broadcasting network urged our people to think in these terms of greater brotherhood. There was only Everett Mitchell for thirty years and more telling his listeners from coast to coast that "it is a great day to be alive and I hope it is even more beautiful wherever you are."
(In 1982 the story of the first five decades of broadcasting in the United States will be told in a new book to be entitled, Radio’s Beautiful Day. There will be a special DuPage Heritage Gallery Edition.)