Lum and Abner

About Lum and Abner

198 complete radio episodes (40 hours) from 1933 to 1942, across 1 series:

• Lum and Abner: 198 episodes, 1933–1942

Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.

Lum and Abner on the radio

NBC, Mutual, CBS, ABC, 1931-1954. With Chester Lauck, Norris Goff, Lurene Tuttle.

• Chester Lauck and Norris Goff, two young men from Mena, Arkansas, created Lum and Abner for a statewide flood-relief broadcast on KTHS in Hot Springs on April 26, 1931.
• Lauck and Goff came up with the names Lum Edwards and Abner Peabody only seconds before they were introduced on the air.
• Lauck said he picked "Lum" because it sounded backwoodsy and he had never known anyone by that name; Goff picked "Abner" as a good solid country name.
• Lauck and Goff had first worked as blackface comedians. Because KTHS already had so many Amos 'n' Andy imitators, they switched to voices of the old men they knew in the Arkansas hills.
• Lauck and Goff were only in their late twenties when they started playing the two old codgers.
• At their NBC audition in Chicago, Lauck and Goff were offered $150 a week and held out for $350, a big gamble for two men from a town of about 4,000.
• Lum and Abner went out on NBC on July 27, 1931, as a 15-minute weekday program sponsored by Quaker Oats.
• At the sponsor audition, Lauck and Goff asked the Quaker men to sit facing the wall, afraid that seeing two young fellows would spoil the illusion. A broomstick stood in for a microphone.
• Lum and Abner ran the Jot 'Em Down Store in the made-up town of Pine Ridge, Arkansas.
• Lum was a bachelor with an eye for the ladies whose ego beat his common sense; Abner was a henpecked husband whose gullibility knew no bounds.
• Lum pronounced his last name "Eddards" and got annoyed whenever anyone brought up his full first name, Columbus.
• Their nemesis was Squire Skimp, who kept fleecing them out of their money-making ideas before they found a way to redeem themselves.

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