Don McNeill and His Breakfast Club [With CD with Clips from Actual Shows] Hardcover - 2001

From the publisher

Before morning talk radio, before Garrison Keillor and Lake Wobegon, before Oprah, Jay, Rosie, and Dave, there was Don McNeill and his Breakfast Club. From his first broadcast in June 1933 until his sign-off in December 1967, Don McNeill presided as emcee over his creation, along the way cultivating as widespread an audience and as long-lived a show as any that flourished in the decades when radio was the dominant source of news and entertainment in American life. McNeill's genius was to insist on an unscripted show produced before a studio audience. In that format, his spontaneous wit and genial manner, coupled with his good-natured banter with the Breakfast Club cast and audience, meshed beautifully into an uplifting show of emotional immediacy. Listeners tuned in at 8 a.m. to hear the first of four calls to breakfast; they knew to expect the March Around the Breakfast Table and such other regular features as the Moment of Silent Prayer and Memory Time. Through a mix of comedy, music, interviews, and upbeat moral encouragement - all centered around the everyday fixture of the breakfast table - McNeill both entertained his listeners and welcomed them as participants in a morning r