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METROPOLITAN FARM [OITOR
Herbert Tenzer jgives a $16,000 check for New York's Cancer Drive to Betty Lou McQuaide on Farmers' News Program.
The three Biers: sailor son Joe, Minnie and Joe, Sr., together after four years of war -caused separation.
BACK in the days when a radio was a crystal set and a pair of headphones, Joe Bier, baritone of the Premier Male Quartet, made his radio debut. That was on December 28, 1921, over the old Marconi station WDY in Roselle, New Jersey. WOR's Joe Bier is now in his twenty-sixth year of broadcasting and about to begin the tenth year of News of the Farm, the oldest farm program in the eastern area.
Joe frequently has to explain why a New York City radio station needs a farm editor. In the five boroughs of New York City there are 284 farms scattered over the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond. In WOR's listening area there is a total farm population of 470,832 persons.
Most of Bier's listeners are truck farmers and dairymen in New Jersey, Connecticut, New York and parts of Pennsylvania. News of the Farm, heard over WOR, Monday through Saturday, from 5:45 to 6:30 A. M., since March, 1938, brings them information that helps them to sell their produce.
Joe Bier was born in Brooklyn 59 years ago. As a boy he helped out at his sister's farm, in Flatbush. He attended St. Benedict's Parochial Scliool and St. Francis Xavier High School and College and then went to work for a firm of English glove importers. Joe says he began to sing at the age of six and hasn't stopped since. He sang in the boys' choir at school, later with the adult chorus, and studied with Carl Schegel of the Metropolitan. He admits that he probably has sung in every c'nurch in Manhattan and for 19 years was soloist at the Church 01 Our Lady of Lourdes. Joe was also singing
with the Premier Male Quartet, which on December 28,
1921, was the first quartet to sing over the microphone. His next radio broadcast was over WJZ on February 22,
1922, from the old Westinghouse Building in Newark. Radio concerts followed at regular intervals on WEAF, WMCA, WAHG' (Now WCBS), and Joe appeared on broadcasts with Vaughn de Leath, Milton Cross, Ted Husing and Norman Brokenshire. From 1926 to 1928 he was the chief announcer at WLWL in New York.
Joe continued his glove selling job and his church singing, and for awhile he worked with the Evening Journal on a series of promotion broadcasts which were heard over WHN and WMCA. Radio became more and more important in Joe's life and on September 15, 1930, Joe joined the WOR staff as an announcer and baritone soloist. Joe's singing these days is limited to occasional guest appearances on John Gambling's "Musical Clock" when the two WOR old-timers get together for a bit of fancy vocalizing.
Joe Bier gets up at three in the morning to make the trip from Woodhaven, Long Island, and get to the WOR studios in time for the farm program. He admits that at first it was hard to get used to his early bird schedule. "But after all," he says, "farmers have to get up bright and early. Why shouldn't a farm broadcaster do the same?"
Joe Bier's son, Joseph, Jr., has just been married after serving four years in the Pacific with the Navy.
Bier's hobbies are tennis and taking apart his radio set and putting it together again.