Red Ryder lived in Painted Valley with his aunt the “Duchess”, his partner Buckskin, his Indian ward Little Beaver and his horse Thunder. The hero was first seen in a series of short stories by writer-cartoonist Fred Harman, who adapted it as a comic strip for the Los Angeles Times in 1938 before it finally became a series of thirty-minute radio shows.
- Radio brought the news directly into listeners’ living rooms. Among the major news stories broken on radio: the Scopes monkey trial, carried live by Chicago station WGN in 1925; the Hindenburg zeppelin disaster, covered by WLS Chicago in 1937; and Edward R. Murrow’s CBS reports on the Blitz of Britain, airing in 1940.