Elinor Fox Kamen (1911-2006) Papers (K0944)

Elinor Fox Kamen was born on June 11, 1911. She was a lifelong resident of Kansas City, Missouri. She married Morris Fox in 1932 with whom she had a daughter. Following her husband’s death in 1939 Fox entered the field of radio broadcasting as a way to support herself and her daughter. At first she worked with a local radio station, KITE, to learn the basics of broadcasting. She went to work for station WHB, and hosted a show called The Little Red Schoolhouse. The program was a quiz show which featured students from local Kansas City schools, and it was sponsored by the Grollier Society, publishers of the Book of Knowledge from which the show’s questions were drawn. The next show Kamen wrote and produced for WHB was Women in the News. Kamen went out and interviewed a diverse group of women who were not the typical housewives of the era. Many women featured on the show were involved in working for the war effort, such as the women working on the assembly lines at North American Aviation. Others were famous women of the day like Gypsy Rose Lee who was performing in Kansas City when Kamen interviewed her. Kamen later left the field of radio broadcasting and started her own advertising agency. She married Morris Kamen in 1949 and later passed away on March 9, 2006.

The majority of the papers are comprised of scripts from Kamen’s Women in the News radio program. The scripts cover the months of March, April and May of 1942. The variety of women that Kamen interviewed for the program is evident. The scripts also show the work Kamen put into each program. Most contain handwritten corrections, with sections that are spliced together to create an individual program. There are a few materials related to Kamen’s earlier program The Little Red Schoolhouse. There is also a large quantity of mail from fans of Women in the News addressed to “Alice Gay”, the pseudonym that Kamen used on the program, and fan mail for “Eleanor Allen”, possibly a pseudonym used by Kamen on an advice program she did at station KITE. There are several individual scripts, one for a program called Trails of the Trappers, which was probably one of Kamen’s ideas for another radio program. The other scripts are for Army Mail Call Time, and feature letters written home by soldiers overseas. The materials provide insight into Kamen’s career in radio broadcasting, and the work of a female broadcaster in Kansas City during the 1930s and 1940s. 1940-1943.

15 folder.

INVENTORY 

See also William James Ryan (1940-    ) Papers (K0457) for an oral history of Elinor Fox Kamen and the article written by William Ryan,

Elinor Fox and WHB’s Wartime Programming 

Kansas City’s pioneer WHB is an example of how local radio could offer opportunities for innovative programming developed by an energetic career-minded woman in the late 1930s and how her responsibilities increased as men left for the military while the station adapted to a wartime mode. Placed in the context of WHB’s wartime programming, this paper uses oral history research with Elinor Fox Kamen to tell how she entered radio just before World War II, wrote, produced and announced her own new programming ideas during the war and then moved out of broadcasting after the war.

Submitted to the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication Midwest Journalism Conference, April 8-9, 1994, Columbia, Missouri.

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updated: Thursday, January 03, 2013
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