"A woman was running a series of juvenile stories in the Newark Sunday Call. So we asked her to read these over the air. Our studio was situated on the top of one of the factory buildings and to reach it one had to climb a fifteen-foot iron ladder which led through a hole in the roof. Well, it so happened that this lady was afraid to make the climb and we had to drag her up forcibly. She was so frightened that she fainted. Bill McNeary, a reporter on her paper asked, 'Now what do we do?'The Man in the Moon series was one of the best known programs on the air in radio's pioneering days. The show was even parodied -- WDY, RCA's short-lived station in Roselle Park, New Jersey, countered with a story series read by the "Man in the Room", who made his way into the studio (via sound effects) by crashing through a skylight window. The "Man in the Moon" poster is from an advertisement for Clark and Tilson on page 84 of the October, 1922 issue of The Radio Dealer, while the photograph of Bill McNeary appeared on page 42 of the August, 1930 Radio Digest.
"'It's your paper; so you do it,' I said to Bill, giving to him a sheet on which several of her stories were pasted.
"'Yeah,' said Bill, 'but what do we call it?'
"Just then through a window, we saw a big moon in the sky. 'I'll give you a name--The Man in the Moon,' I said. So McNeary read the story and became 'The Man in the Moon,' one of the most beloved characters of the early days of radio."
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