Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

52 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 5 WHO'S WHO IN RADIO EDUCATION No. 11: Horold B. McCarty Harold B. McCarty, winner of the 1945 Award of the School Broadcast Conference, for “outstanding and meritorious service in educational radio,” has been engaged in educational broadcasting since 1929. It was in that year that he began announcing at WHA, the University of Wisconsin station, “just as a sideline while studying for a Master’s degree in speech,” he says. McCarty is now Director of the Division of Radio Education at the University of Wisconsin and Executive Director of the State Radio Council, a cooperative board under whose auspices Wisconsin is planning a state system of EM radio stations. Hoosier by birth (Clinton, March 30, 1901), McCarty is essentially Middle Western in I’esidence, schooling, and experience. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, with a B.S. in Business Administration, which he put to use as an office manager and advertising writer in Chicago before going to the University of Wisconsin in 1918 for an M.A. degree in speech and dramatics. “I have the best radio job in the country,” he affirms, and you know he is expressing his enthusiasm about radio education in his own state of Wisconsin and his belief in the future of educational broadcasting as it is being developed through the university-owned stations which are located in the Middle West. A year in the Overseas Operations Branch of the Office of Harold B. McCarty War Information, where he was engaged in efforts to give an interpretation of America abroad, convinced him, he says, of the soundness of broadcasting based on educational aims and conducted by public-service institutions and agencies. McCarty’s present position includes direction of Wisconsin’s Station WHA, identified as “The Oldest Station in The Nation” because the University began its broadcasting service in 1919. McCarty is also Director of the Wisconsin School of the Air, which he founded in 1931. Programs of the Wisconsin School of the Air, which reach more than 300,000 registered listeners weekly in the elementary schools of the State, have won thirteen national awards and citations at the Annual Exhibition of Educational Radio Programs conducted by the Institute for Ed ucation by Radio. One of the School of the Air features was also the winner of the 1943 George Foster Peabody award for excellence in radio education. Including adult programs and general features, WHA has received a total of 24 awards and citations at the American Exhibitions. The station was also the winner of Variety’s Showmanship award to the outstanding social-service station in 1938. In speaking of the recognition which has come to WHA since he began its direction in 1931, McCarty gives full credit to his fine staff of imaginative, enthusiastic workers and pays tribute to the loyalty and support of the Radio Committee, which represents the faculty of the University. McCarty is a member of the Federal Radio Education Committee, is past president (193537) of the National Association of Educational Broadca.sters, and is serving now as National Radio Chairman of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers. His experience in radio education includes a period of study of the British Broadcasting Corporation in England and Scotland under a fellowship from the General Education Board in 1935. Though he became identified with WHA in 1929, McCarty confesses that that was not his initial venture in radio. He had played the violin over a station in Peoria, Illinois, in 1923 and had directed an orchestra appearing in a stage show with a number of radio “stars” of the