Margaret D. Wahl - Television Pioneer

I wrote this essay in March in homage to my mother, Margaret Dunham Wahl, whose 100th birthdate is coming up on June 2nd. It's also an attempt to clarify family lore about the television show she produced in 1950. The first photo was professionally scanned - the rest I photographed from an aging photo album. Enjoy!

Celebrating Margaret Wahl - Television Pioneer

Margaret Wahl on the set of WCAU-TV

            The Ides of March notwithstanding, March 15, 1950 was an auspicious day for our family and the new medium of television. At 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon in the WCAU-TV Channel 10 studios in Philadelphia, four years before Oprah Winfrey was born, the cameras rolled on a ground-breaking women’s talk show. The Television Women’s Club aired live as a 13-week pilot. Its mission was to bring intelligent programming into the living rooms of housewives in the post-war era.  The show’s Creator and Executive Producer was a thirty-six year-old Cheyney housewife and mother of four young children – my mother, Margaret Dunham Wahl.

History In a Black Scrapbook

            There are no video records of The Television Women’s Club -- live shows were not recorded in those days. Film was expensive and stations had no idea these might be historical records. Recorded shows were commonly taped over, including the first ten years of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. The Television Women’s Club is not yet in the archives of the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, a non-profit group dedicated to collecting and digitizing materials from the early days of radio and television. But I am in touch with this group about the show.

            Fortunately, the entire pilot season of the show has been preserved in an oversized family scrapbook created by my father. Last year I retrieved it from my sister Christine in Knoxville, Tennessee. The frayed leather volume is a little worse for wear -- over the half century it has survived an apartment fire, suffered water damage, and been moved several times among my five siblings. But inside is a treasure trove of television memories.

            The show name is embossed in gold lettering on front cover. The back cover bears the stamp of the store where the album was purchased: “A. Pomerantz & Company, Stationery, Printing 1525 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA.”  My father filled 57 pages with glossy 8X10 photos and newspaper clippings about the show.

            An article from March 9, 1950 describes how my mother conceived the show over an ironing board: “Wrinkled Husband’s Shirt Sparks Idea for Television.” One day while my mother was ironing my father’s white dress shirts, she bemoaned the lack of intelligent TV programming.  She is quoted as saying, “Women who find themselves working about the home all day deserve something better than the ‘bottom-of-the-barrel’ type of video programs presently screened during the afternoons.”

Television show inspired while ironing
(Margaret Wahl, seated)

            Daytime dramas were called “soap operas” since cleaning products such as Ivory Snow® and Tide® sponsored them. Soap operas started on radio in the 1930’s, but didn’t migrate to the small screen until 1953, when NBC’s long-running The Guiding Light first aired. Long before the use of consumer insights and demographics, my mother saw an opportunity to reach women viewers, many of them college educated like herself.

            How did she get the show on the air? In 1950 my father, Bob Wahl, was a dashing “Mad Men” style advertising executive, working as Director of Television at the large Philadelphia ad agency Gray & Rogers. One of their big clients was the Proctor Electric Company, makers of irons and toasters. Proctor wanted to expand their advertising into the emerging medium of television, and WCAU-TV was looking for a show to offer this sponsor. Hungry for programming for the growing female daytime audience, then WCAU station President Donald W. Thornburg was no doubt intrigued when he heard Mrs. Wahl’s talk show idea.

            With her husband beside her, my mother was able to convince Thornburg and Proctor Electric on her concept: bring relevant topics into the living rooms of modern homemakers. The contract for the show was inked on February 20, 1950. WCAU would pilot The Television Women’s Club, with Proctor Iron as sponsor. It would air in the 3:00-3:30 afternoon time slot on Wednesdays. Margaret Wahl was named Creator and Executive Producer. Representing the Proctor account, my father would be Director.

 Savvy Marketing Strategy

            The show title and format were no accident. The strategy was to build viewership from the 300,000 members of the Pennsylvania Federated Women’s Clubs.  The General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), was a well-respected international women’s organization based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1890, the GFWC provided women avenues to serve their communities, similar to the Rotary or Kiwanis clubs for men. The members of GFWC are credited for starting 75% of the public libraries in the U.S. Eleanor Roosevelt was one of its most famous members.

            Another clipping outlines the rationale for affiliation with Federated Women’s Clubs, “Aware of the natural pride women have in their sex, Mrs. Wahl realized that the best type of program would be one involving women, their problems and their accomplishments, and that the groups that cover this exclusively are the Women’s Clubs.”

Author Pearl Buck (right) and show
hostess Mrs. Robert W. Cornelison

            In return for GFWC support, local chapter members appeared on the show. Each week, a club President or other officer served as the on-air hostess. Chapter members made up the live studio audience. The hostess was allotted the first few minutes to showcase a service program of their chapter. Then she introduced the week’s featured guest, who delivered a prepared speech and answered questions at the end. This somewhat stilted talk show format later evolved to include celebrity hosts such as Ellen, Oprah and the women on The View.

The Television Women’s Club sought out women of accomplishment, often in traditionally male professions (see episode listing). The most famous guest was Pearl S. Buck, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning author. The first guest was Mrs. Lakshmi Nandon Manon, a UN diplomat promoting women’s rights. Other speakers included Dr. Catharine McFarland, an international cancer specialist, the editor of Parents Magazine, a Vice President of New York City’s East Side National Bank, a prominent horticulturalist, and Marjorie Dangerfield, one of the country’s leading sculptors.

While most guests were women, a few men also appeared. One coup was getting Alaska Territory Governor Ernest Greuning on the show. He and my parents were friends from their Alaska days, and he came to Philadelphia to promote the ongoing case for statehood. His bill finally won approval from Congress seven years later, and he became a U.S. Senator from the new state. As senator, Greuning is credited with initiating the national 911 emergency response system.

Alaska Gov. Greuning (right) and my parents,
all wearing lapel pins of the Alaska flower,
forget-me-nots.

            As Executive Producer, my mother scheduled the better known names in the second half of the pilot season. This allowed time for viewers to discover the show and favorable reviews to appear in the press. Pearl Buck’s spoke about a cause close to hear heart, “Education for Retarded Children” (as it was called in that era). Her daughter had been born with severe disabilities, and Mrs. Buck touted the methods at the progressive Vineland Training Center in New Jersey where her daughter lived.

            According to the scrapbook clippings, the station polled viewers to gauge the show’s impact. Results were favorable – the audience liked the show and the sponsors were happy. Working with an associate producer, my mother wrapped up the pilot with popular stage and screen stars. There was performance artist Cornelia Stabler, actress and fashionista Faye Emerson and finally the comedienne Ilka Chase, timed to coincide with her cover photo on TV Digest.      

Short-Lived Success

            The last episode aired on June 7, 1950. The final photo in the scrapbook shows my parents dressed up and beaming at an awards ceremony in July 1950. The Television Women’s Club earned a TeeVee award for excellence in daytime programming. TeeVee was the precursor of today’s Emmy awards.

            Despite its success, there is no record of the show continuing beyond its pilot season. There might have been a change of heart at WCAU-TV, but I assume it was due to changes in the lives of the Producer-Director team. Sometime after the pilot ended, my father landed a job at Doyle, Dane Bernbach, the top ad agency in New York. By February 1951, the family had moved to Greenwich, Connecticut and welcomed a fifth child. I came along two years later. Our mother’s career as a television producer was sidelined. Presumably her show couldn’t go on without her.

Ilka Chase (left) admires my parents' TeeVee award

A Pioneer at Heart

             My mother’s path to television was paved from a mix of Western cowgirl bravado and East Coast opportunity. She was born in 1914 on a 1000-acre wheat farm in Alberta, Canada. After graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology, she moved to New York City to make her mark on the world. She later met my father in Seattle, where she was Northwest Regional Director of the American Youth Hostel organization (AYH). She had worked for the AYH in New York. She taught school to indigenous Tlingit children in Alaska. In 1949, she worked freelance as the director of the Miss Greater Philadelphia Contest. She continued as chaperone for the winner, Miriam Lapuyavoker, at the 1949 Miss America Contest in Atlantic City, NJ.

            Besides raising our family of six children, my mother always considered herself a career woman. Childcare was not available or acceptable in her generation, yet my mother found ways to juggle parenting and work. In the season of her TV show, our sister Karen (now Ariel) was just turning two.  My older siblings remember staying with our grandmother, Margaret “Mia” Dunham, and Aunt Marian Elkinton, who both lived nearby.

            A year after I was born, three years after The Television Women’s Club, we settled for good in Stamford, Connecticut. My mother’s public life continued as a civic leader and later a non-profit executive. She was President of our PTA and followed local politics closely. She supported a young Connecticut state senator named Joe Lieberman, who had gone to Stamford High School with my older brother Rolly. In the 1960’s, she went back to work full-time. She helped young mothers, teens and domestic workers as Program Director of the Stamford YWCA.

            She was an ardent supporter of the Civil Rights movement and drilled into us the privilege of voting. She often joked that her Democratic vote was cancelled out by our dad’s predictably Republican vote. At the time of her death from breast cancer at age 68, she was an advocate for the elderly as Director of the Stamford Office on Aging.

            June 2, 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of my mother’s birth, so it’s a fitting year to honor her accomplishments. Born on a farm before women had the right to vote, she ignored the limits imposed on women of her time. She worked tirelessly all her life to be a catalyst for change, to inspire a better future for women. I know I carry much of her buoyant energy and spirit within me.

            Another moral of this story: don’t throw out those old scrapbooks. You never know what treasures they might contain.

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Speaker List - Television Women’s Club

March 15, 1950 - June 7, 1950

1)  March 15, 1950 - Mrs. Lakshmi Nandan Menon from India, United Nations Chief of Section, Status of Women. Topic: “The Declaration of Human Rights and its relation to peace”

2) March 22, 1950 - Dr. Catherine McFarland (Philadelphia) international achievements in cancer medicine

3) March 29, 1950 - Mrs. Clara Savage Littledale, Editor of Parents Magazine

4) April 5, 1950 - Miss Dorcas Campbell, VP, East Side National Bank, NYC Topic: “Women and Their Money”

5)  April 12, 1950 - Raymond P. Korbobo, Professor of Horticulture at Rutgers University. Topic: “Home landscaping”

6)  Marjorie McDonald - one of the country’s leading sculptors - Topic: “Sculpture in Action,” created a head of her artist husband, Louis Lundean, before the television audience

7)  April 26, 1950 - Pearl S. Buck - author, winner Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature. Topic: “America’s Forgotten Children, the Mentally Retarded”

8)  May 3, 1950 - Dr. Philip Cummings, news analyst, world traveler, and specialist on contemporary youth. Topic: “Education Around the World”

9)  May 10, 1950 - Ernest Greuning, Governor of the Territory of Alaska - “Why Alaska Needs Statehood”

10)   May 17, 1950 - Cornelia Stabler, popular monologist and performance artist. Two character sketches on the show: “Family Supper” and “Remembrance of Things Past”

11)   May 24, 1950 - Faye Emerson, actress and named one of America’s 10 best dressed women. Topic: “Choosing a Wardrobe”

12)   May 31, 1950 - Margaret Widdemer - Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Topic “Folk Music and Poetry”

13)   June 7, 1950 - Ilka Chase, author, fashion show emcee and comedienne. Topic: “Back Stage in Broadcasting”