The Hartford Historical Society recently shared a list of notable natives copied from Wikipedia. Among them are a passel of politicians, Horace Wells, who you should think of kindly when you go to the dentist, since he was a pioneer in anesthesia, and a name that especially caught my eye — Phillips Lord, “radio producer and motion picture star.”
I’d never heard of him but was curious. Even though I was born too late for the golden age of radio, I get dreamy about the medium, since I admire the way it transmitted stories over thin air and invited the listener’s imagination to join in.
It has been mostly replaced by invasive species filling up your brain. I speak of television which, according to a 2019 study in Britain, will suck up 78,705 hours of a typical viewer’s lifetime or, if my calculator is correct, almost nine years.
Screens are even more invasive, since they go places where a 65-inch, 4K behemoth with surround sound would be cumbersome, such as the beach.
Just the other day, I saw a dad with two extremely cute kids who barely watched them at a local lake with a vista, as they say, as wide as all outdoors.
His eyes were locked on his tiny phone. Occasionally he peeked over it.
But Phillips Lord came long before that. He was born in Hartford, at the parsonage of the Congregational Church, on July 13, 1902, the son of the Rev. A.J. Lord and Maude Phillips Lord.
He was to become a very big deal. A 1932 article in The Vermonter, the state magazine, didn’t hold back: “Vermont is proud to find another native son among the galaxies of stars now worshiped by the public.”
That article, reprinted in a 2007 Hartford Historical Society newsletter, is a hoot. Although the family moved to Connecticut when Phillips Lord was just 5 months old, his Vermont roots apparently never shook off: “Neither father nor son has wandered far from the dependable soil of New England.”
Lord was a go-getter. He went to college at Bowdoin in Maine. According to Wikipedia, “While still in college he established myriad businesses, including a book-selling operation, a shoe repair service and a taxi cab company.” After graduation, he persuaded the school board of Plainville, Conn., to hire him as high school principal at age 22.
But he soon became bored and sought his fortune in New York. He found it when he heard an early radio show with a character that he thought had an atrocious Maine accent. He visited several stations to make a case that he could do better. In the late 1920s, Lord created a program for WTIC in Hartford, Conn., in which he played Seth Parker, based on his grandfather, Hosea Phillips, from Ellsworth, Maine. It featured down-home humor, pious prayer and hymn singing.
Wholesome as a church service, it was a hit. The National Broadcasting Company signed him up for six shows a week. He published a hymnal that sold more than 200,000 copies. The Vermonter magazine story noted that “Catholics and Protestants alike are impressed by the religious atmosphere created by hymns, dialogue and story.”
Think for a moment, dear reader, how different notions of entertainment were then and now.
Lord had lots more in him. In 1933, he bought a schooner, which he renamed the Seth Parker, and outfitted it with radio equipment to broadcast shows from around the world. The cast and crew made it almost to Australia, where storms damaged the ship and ended the voyage. There were accusations that the calls for help were a publicity hoax, but the Australian government backed him up.
I spent happy hours looking into his history and career. Obscure websites tell the tale of his schooner (scuttled on Coconut Island in Hawaii) and the nerdy details of his broadcasting equipment. One columnist in Maine declared him “lost history,” but I was delighted to learn he is most remembered for a radio show, Gang Busters, which ran from 1935 to 1957. It was based on true-life crime stories, and opened with machine gun fire, alarms, marching boots and these stirring words: “Calling the police, calling the G-Men and all Americans to war on the underworld.”
You can hear it on YouTube even now. For years I’ve been saying something “came on like Gang Busters’’ without knowing its origin. I was happy to learn it, though I no longer come on like Gang Busters myself.
Lord, who died in 1975, had plenty more success, in radio, TV and movies and has a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But the writer of the article in The Vermonter didn’t want people to ever forget where it all began.
“Remember,’’ he said, “he is a native of Hartford. We claim him as another evidence that giants in the earth spring from our soil.”
Dan Mackie lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.
