Lon Clark in Old Time Radio

Lon Clark
(1911 – 1998)

Nick Carter was a pretty typical dime-novel detective with plenty of gunplay, women of questionable morality, stiff drinks and hard knocks. When Nick Carter came to the Mutual Network airwaves and settled into a Sunday evening timeslot, the gumshoe became decidedly less hard-boiled. Playing at the dinner hour, the producers knew that Mom and Pop, the kiddies, and probably Grandma and Grandpa would all be listening together around the dinner table. "I never killed a man in all those years.", quipped star Lon Clark, "That's unusual." 

Nick Carter, Master Detective, which debuted in the spring of 1943, made Clark a star, but he had already established himself as a busy and popular resident of New York's "Radio Row". Lon Clark was born in Frost, Minnesota, 1912, and a prairie town that his Norwegian immigrant grandfather had helped to found. His father was killed in WWI, and after his mother remarried, they moved to a farm near Lakefield, Minnesota, where Lon learned the value of hard work.

Although he was a dedicated farm boy, Lon demonstrated considerable performing talent in high school, joining every student play and winning statewide contests in saxophone and oratory. After graduating, he hitchhiked to Minneapolis to join the MacPhail Center for Music. He had to work at whatever odd jobs he could find to pay his tuition, but he credits a private drama teacher who "adopted" a few of her students for opening his eyes to the power of poetry and dramatic technique. "Do you know how much it means to a teacher to have a student who really wants to learn?" she later told him.

Before leaving Minneapolis, Lon got his first taste of radio work while a soloist with the MacPhail Choir. In 1928, he sent a telegram back to the farm: "Dear mother, I'll be home late for Christmas because I'm singing in a Christmas program being broadcast on WCCO, Minneapolis." He was unable to afford to graduate from MacPhail, so he took a job with a drama company performing tent shows. The owner would hire a few actors and the tents "would move from town to town. They would stay in a town for a week and do a different play each night and then move on Sunday."

The director of the tent show company encouraged Lon to try his luck in Chicago's growing radio industry. The competition in Chicago was stiff, and one director told him that "Radio can do very well without you!" However, he received an offer to join the acting company at WLW Cincinnati, so it was off to Ohio where he also married Michelle Trudeau. In 1941, with Michelle six-months pregnant, the couple realized that Cincinnati held rather limited opportunities. A move to Hollywood opened the possibility of a film career, but Lon felt he could do better in live theater, so they moved to New York City.

Clark quickly established himself as a Radio-Row player and caught the attention of Norman Corwin. In an interview some years later, Lon said, "Everybody wanted to be on his show even though most of the time it was noncommercial. It had prestige." It did not pay all that well however, so when word came out that Mutual was bringing Nick Carter to the air, he joined around fifty other actors in auditions at the studios of WOR. After winning the part, he approached Corwin with the news and was encouraged to follow the money, "But if the show ever goes off the air... let me know and I'll have you back again" Corwin told him.

After establishing itself in its original timeslot, Mutual decided to bump Nick Carter to a different hour, the same Sunday hour when Jack Benny was on the air. Lon's first reaction was to warn Michelle that they needed to be especially careful in managing their savings. Amazingly, Nick Carter held its own against Jack Benny. It never beat Benny in the ratings, but it was the highest rated show to go against him.

In the Fifties, Lon went to work for the Hearst Newspapers as The Comics Weekly Man. He not only provided all the voices, except for the girls who were played by an actress hired as "Miss Honey", but he wrote the scripts, as well. He originally auditioned to simply read the part, but when he received the script he thought, this is a good writer, but he doesn't understand kids". He rewrote the script and took it back to the producer who informed him that he was not only the star of the show but its lead writer. One thing he did not do was take on-air credit, thinking "you don't want to say this is the Comic Weekly Man and I want to audition for Hamlet."

Lon Clark passed away on October 2, 1998, at St. Clare's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 86.

This collection includes:

• Volume 1-3: Lon Clark's guest appearances in various radio shows. 
• Volume 4 is his appearances in Faces of Love.
• Volume 5-8 is a collection of Lon Clark's Nick Carter broadcasts.