Mary Margaret McBride

Missouri-born Mary Margaret McBride was a 1919 journalism graduate of the University of Missouri. She worked as a reporter for a Cleveland newspaper, then moved to New York and got a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Mail. In 1924 she began writing freelance, and her work appeared in many of the top magazines of the day. She also wrote a number of best-selling travel books, and in 1934 began her career as a radio broadcaster, hosting an advice show for women on a New York radio station using the pseudonym "Martha Deane," a grandmotherly type who projected kindness and a common-sense wit, and the broadcast proved tremendously popular. In 1935 she began another weekly radio program, this time using her own name, which consisted mainly of her views on the times and interviews with popular celebrities of the era, and this program also proved to be hugely popular--so much so, in fact, that it ran for several years on each of the three major radio networks, as they kept hiring her away from each other. In addition to her radio shows, she also wrote a syndicated newspaper column and continued to write magazine articles. In 1948 she tried her hand at hosting a television show using the same type of commentary/interview format that proved so successful on radio, but the show turned out to be a rather large flop and was canceled after three months. Her radio programs still proved to be tremendously popular, though, and in the last days of her life she hosted the show from her own living room. She died in West Shokan, New York, in 1976.