Jack Benny's Mystery Radio Appearance

It has famously been said that Jack Benny’s first appearance on radio was on Ed Sullivan’s show on March 29, 1932, and he opened his monologue with “Hello, folks. This is Jack Benny talking. ... There will now be a brief pause while you all say ‘Who cares?’”

Not only was that not Jack’s first time on radio—we provided an example in this post—but that wasn’t the first time he used that line on the air.

Buried in the Radio Guide out of Chicago for the week ending January 30, 1932 is this line that reader Tom Drinan caught on the air.

Jack Benny — Dec. 28th — 1:45 a. m.— WDAF:
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Benny speaking. There will now be a brief pause while you say, ‘Who cares?’ "

The broadcast Mr. Drinan caught is surrounded in some mystery. Here’s all we can discover.

WDAF was a radio station owned by the Kansas City Star. You would think that the paper would have a complete broadcast schedule, maybe a side-bar story on a special broadcast. But there’s nothing.

The station’s listings in the newspaper of Dec. 27, 1931 show the station signed off after an organ recital from the NBC red network by Jesse Crawford. The next programme was the following morning at 7 a.m. If the time was wrong, and the broadcast was at 1:45 p.m., WDAF was airing “Spanish Serenaders.”

We know Jack's general whereabouts at the time. He and “Mary Marlowe” (ie. Mary Livingstone) were in Kansas City, appearing that evening in the road company of Earl Carroll’s Vanities.

It’s possible the stars of the Vanities were grabbed after the last curtain-call to go to the radio station, but if that happened, you would think the newspaper owned by the station would have mentioned it.

The stage show was no mystery. Jack was master of ceremonies and received the usual favourable press. Mary gave “a comic recitation,” no doubt similar to the poems she would later do on radio.

And the cast of the Vanities found time on Dec. 29 to give a little show for patients at the General Hospital.