The Diamond Dramas Radio Program

Background: The Diamond Dramas are produced in 1926

Miracle Diamonds was the brand behind Sidney S. Fox's $35,000 investment in a series of twenty-six, fascinating histories of the most famous diamonds in the world, circa 1926 to 1927. Before you start thinking that Sidney S. Fox was a famous jeweler, let us disabuse you of that notion. Sidney S. Fox was an extremely wealthy man, make no mistake about it. But his fortune was based on the 'miracle salts' found in and around The Great Salt Lake of Utah. The miracle salts upon which he made his initial fortune were laxative salts. They were coined 'miracle diamonds,' due to their unique, diamond-like crystalline appearance.

The Freeman-Lang Studios was the syndicator for the original, 1926 production. The syndication first aired in the mountain time zone over radio station K-D-Y-L, Salt Lake, by prior agreement with Sidney S. Fox, the owner of the 'Miracle Diamonds' brand, and the producer of the series--and by 1934, the owner of radio station K-D-Y-L. The original syndication premiered over KDYL on January 18, 1934. The entire series aired, in sequence under Miracle Diamonds sponsorship.

Clearly, by the time the series had run through its first broadcast syndication, the logical observation made by many of the business people listening in, was "Why isn't this series being sponsored by a jewelry concern?"

Quite naturally it didn't take long for Sidney S. Fox to line up major jewelers throughout the country to bid on the syndication rights for a subsequent broadcast run--this time, sponsored by a fine jewelry concern. The first to sponsor the second airing of the series was a large, West Coast jewelry firm, The Licht Company and their various local affiliates. In the case of the run we've logged below, the sponsor was Davidson & Licht Jewelry Company, in concert with The Gruen Watch Company of Cincinnati. Licht apparently also owned or was affiliated with the Kay Jewelers chain, who sponsored later broadcasts of the series in other regions of the country. This begs the question as to how much Sidney S. Fox was asking for syndication rights for the series. One can't help but wonder why it took two major jewelers' concerns to sponsor that first 1935 run. One naturally expects that even in post-Depression America, any national jewelry firm would have had sufficient funds to sponsor this relatively brief series on their own.

In answer to that obvious question, we encountered an article on one of the newspaper pages promoting Diamond Dramas' 1935 run, stating that, of the previously recorded 514 millionaires in the U.S. prior to The Depression, only 22 remained millionaires after the onset of The Great Depression. That might best explain two major jewelers teaming up to sponsor a twenty-six installment series of 15-minute programs.

Diamond Dramas: Broadcast History

As noted above, the introduction of a radio program about diamonds during the aftermath of post-Depression America might seem counterintuitive. Indeed, it seemed even more counterintuitive to introduce the series as a promotional vehicle for laxative salts. These were, afterall, historical vignettes about the largest, most valuable diamonds in world history, as of 1926. When the series first aired in 1934 it did, indeed, seem tailored for sponsorship by a large jewelry chain.

Sidney S. Fox, who by 1935 had acquired pioneering radio station K-D-Y-L--and who still owned Miracle Diamonds, Incorporated, soon realized the value of his syndicated series as a promotional vehicle for a jeweler's firm. Soon after taking control of KDYL, Fox licensed the series to the Davidson and Licht Jewlery Company. The Gruen Watch Company had also expressed an interest in sponsoring the series, as they'd already begun a campaign sponsoring other Radio programming. The deal was struck and the series aired a second time, nationally, with considerably greater promotion and fanfare--the promotion and fanfare it deserved.

The 1935 run was broadcast from 50,000 watt KLX Radio in Oakland, a station owned by the Oakland Tribune--hence our rationale for employing the Tribune's spot ads and radio listings for provenancing our log below. Davidson & Licht had been a major advertiser for the Oakland Tribune for almost nine years. 1935 was the 16th anniversary of Davidson & Licht. The sponsorship of Diamond Dramas was therefore a natural centerpiece of a combined 16th anniversary promotional campaign that also included weekly, full-page ads, donations of various silver trophies and silver plate to local sports tournaments in the Oakland area, and prominent spot articles about Davidson & Licht's long association with the City of Oakland and the Oakland Tribune, itself.

For Davidson & Licht and the Oakland Tribune, the promotional spots and articles for all twenty-six episodes of the series were lavishly illustrated and detailed with each installment. As can be seen in the sidebar, all of the installments were promoted with a spot ad synopsizing the drama for the week, accompanied by a prominent article about that episode on the same page.

This was also a win-win situation for both the Oakland Tribune and their Radio station, KLX. The series was a popular local feature, heard from Oregon to Southern California and as far away as Salt Lake City. Gruen Watch Company of Cincinnati's involvement was apparently limited to the context of their promotional, on-air announcements. We have yet to hear any of the actual commercial announcements since the only circulating exemplars of Diamond Dramas were encoded direct from a set of the original electrical transcriptions--sans commercial spots, bumpers or station identification.

The fourteen and a half to fifteen-minute transcriptions themselves contain 90 seconds of music fill at the beginning for inserting a commercial message, an eleven-minute drama, then approximately two minutes of musical fill for an ending commercial message. This was a fairly common format for the 1930s and eleven minute programming was one of early Radio's most common formats, for both syndicated programs and live, locally produced, or chain-produced programs of the era.

We make a point of explaining the limited, eleven-minute format to underscore the tightly scripted, yet highly informative--and compelling--docudramas contained within each installment of the series. Given the longer history of many of these historic diamonds, a few of the more notorious histories extend to two or even three subsequent installments throughout the run.

Davidson & Licht chose to break up the original twenty-six episode run into two 'seasons' of thirteen installments each, separated by a Summer 1935 break of thirteen weeks. KLX aired Anita and Orosco, a 'novelty' guitar duo, in the Diamond Dramas timeslot.

Once the 1935 broadcasts had run their course, it was nine years before Diamonds Dramas aired in syndication again. Beginning in March 1944, both Salt Lake City [KDYL] and San Antonio, Texas [KTSA] aired the complete, twenty-six episode run. Subsequent runs aired in Iowa and Massachusetts in 1945 for local sponsors.

Diamond Dramas: Fascination with history's famous gems.

There's no question that these vignettes about insanely valuable diamonds captured the interest of listeners in every market in which they aired. It's also interesting that the two periods during which the series aired were post-catastrophe eras--The Depression and World War II. Perhaps it was pure escapism or fantasy. Perhaps it was simply a calculated attempt by jewelers throughout the country to kick-start sales of their gems after a national economic down-turn. Whatever the rationale, the series remains the only series in Radio history to focus on the great diamonds of civilization--and their often violent and sordid, but invariably romantic histories.

Diamond Dramas leads off its series with The Great Mogul, the 787 carat rough diamond first discovered in 1650, at the Kollur Mine in the Golconda region of southern India. The Great Mogul Diamond reportedly became part of the spoils of war when India was invaded and Delhi sacked by the Persian ruler Nadir Shah. After Nadir Shah's assassination in 1747, the stone disappeared. The most popular legends as to its ultimate fate appear to be that it was either further cut to form the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, the lesser known Darya-ye-noor diamond, or most plausibly, the source of the equally famous Orlov diamond, which is reportedly similar in color and orginal cut to the fabled Great Mogul. The less romantic theory is that the giant stone was ultimately cut into hundreds of smaller diamonds worth far more in commerical value than the original source diamond.

As might be discerned from the hypothetical history of The Great Mogul, many of the subsequent diamond histories in the series represent similarly romantic, violent, adventurous, or ironic waypoints in the history of individual diamonds that could quite plausibly trace their own origins to The Great Mogul. The series also provides a historical vignette about the Koh-i-noor and the Orloff [Orlov], which might well have been cut from the original Great Mogul. Remember that this series was produced in 1926. At that time, accounts of each of these famous diamonds treated each of these diamonds as distinct, separate discoveries with their own unique histories.

Other great historical diamonds that interweave throughout the series are the famous blue Hope Diamond, the Regency and the Sancy.

Series Derivatives:

Notes on Provenances:

The most helpful provenances were newspaper listings.

You're welcome to compare our fully provenanced research with the Diamond Dramas log from the '1,500 expert researchers' at the OTRR. We've also provided a screen shot of their current log for comparison, HERE, to protect our own due diligence.

Diamond Dramas has circulated with made-up dates, titles and sequence numbers since the 'invention' of commercial otr in the early 1970s as a means to exploit vintage Radio--nothing more, nothing less. It was purely and utterly a means to generate income for the, then, handful of former vintage Radio enthusiasts who saw a way to cash in on what has become millions of dollars of otr commerce selling inaccurately catalogued vintage Radio recordings.

Diamond Dramas is a poster child for the rampant proliferation of misinformation throughout the vintage Radio collecting hobby, especially during the last seven years. Diamond Dramas was indeed revived as late as the late 1940s, as a means to promote Jewelers' interests. It was a natural and brilliant tie-in. But the sketchy, elaborately fictional dates for the previously circulating canon of Diamond Dramas were almost farcical. None were backed by provenances, none were ever substantiated until we undertook to set the record straight, and the commercial otr community, remaining in utter denial as it does, stubbornly continues to refuse to accept the correct dating, sequencing, titles--or the history--behind the production.

Here's the down-low in a nutshell for the commercial otr deniers:

• The entire canon of Diamond Dramas was actually recorded in 1926--fully 23 years before the OTRR cites their dates.
• Diamond Dramas first aired as early as January 1934.
• Diamond Dramas aired with provenanced announcements beginning on April 1, 1935.
• With a single exception, every title we placed in our log below came from a widely published series of twenty-six complete, fully detailed spot ads for the run advertised in the Oakland Tribune.
• If you're wondering how long the actual logging effort took--two hours from start to finish, and another day and a half to recreate all the spot ads, and write the article.

There are two of us at The Digital Deli Online. If two people could correct Diamond Dramas in two hours, how is it that the OTRR's widely touted 1,500 researchers haven't managed the same thing in seven years? Or, as must be obvious, they're simply misrepresenting the accuracy of their database.

There's entirely too much misinformation widely circulating regarding the wonderful Radio recordings from The Golden Age. It simply compounds the misinformation when a relatively small, but influential body of grandstanders continues to grossly misrepresent the information in their own "most accurate otr series database in the world." We've all been lied to enough over the past 10 years of this new century. We simply won't abide extending that pattern of deception to Radio History. Not on our watch, anyway.

What you see here, is what you get. Complete transparency. We have no 'credentials' whatsoever--in any way, shape, or form--in the 'otr community'--none. But here's how we did it--for better or worse. Here's how you can build on it yourselves--hopefully for the better. Here's the breadcrumbs--just follow the trail a bit further if you wish. No hobbled downloads. No misdirection. No posturing about our 'credentials.' No misrepresentations. No strings attached. We point you in the right direction and you're free to expand on it, extend it, use it however it best advances your efforts.

We ask one thing and one thing only--if you employ what we publish, attribute it, before we cite you on it.

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We don't pronounce our Golden Age Radio research as 'certified' anything. By the very definition, research is imperfect. We simply tell the truth. As is our continuing practice, we provide our fully provenanced research results--to the extent possible--right here on the page, for any of our peers to review--or refute--as the case may be. If you take issue with any of our findings, you're welcome to cite any better verifiable source(s) and we'll immediately review them and update our findings accordingly. As more verifiable provenances surface, we'll continue to update the following series log, as appropriate.

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