Jim Cox is an American retired professor who has written several books about radio in its golden years, otherwise known as Old Time Radio. As a researcher and compiler, Cox has written about the crime shows, audience participation shows, and soap operas that filled the airwaves from the 1930s to the early 1960s.
Background
Jim Cox was born in southeastern Kentucky, United States. He was raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Tampa, Florida. Cox was an avid radio listener as a youth. His initial recollections of radio are of his family gathered together in the living room listening to Fred Allen, Bergen and McCarthy, McGee and Molly, and others of that ilk while watching parents laughing themselves silly at jokes he didn't understand. Because there was seldom any money to spare, radio was their principal form of entertainment for several years. Jim was a frequent attendee at a plethora of live audience participation shows staged every day by WBT in Charlotte.
Education
Jim Cox graduated from high school in Florida, where he began writing. In an informal, nonprofessional manner, he penned a column on radio for a community newsletter that a group of adolescents produced. Simultaneously he was writing plays based on radio programs that were produced at his junior high school. Cox earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Vanderbilt University, a Master of Arts in Marketing, and a second Master of Arts in Management from Webster University.
Career
Jim Cox was a professor at McKendree College (now University) in Lebanon, Illinois. He is retired now. By the 1960s, Cox started to collect radio memorabilia, including old recordings and books. He kept looking for the book he wanted to read about Old Time Radio, but it was never published. Finally, he decided: "if it was ever to be it was up to me."
His first radio book, The Great Radio Soap Operas, deals with thirty-one classic dramas that were serialized from the 1930s until the beginning of the 1960s. Some of the shows chosen for the study include Our Gal Sunday, The Guiding Light. Young Doctor Malone, Just Phan Bill, Lorenzo Jones, and The Romance of Helen Trent, programs that foreshadowed the soap operas of television. Typical of Cox's other books on Old Time Radio, this one provides an introduction to the topic, a discussion of each program and how it fits into the larger picture of similar programs, and also a discussion of individual programs along with lists of production staff and actors.
Cox focuses on quiz shows and talk-variety programs with The Great Radio Audience Participation Shows: Seventeen Programs from the 1940s and 1950s. Here he examines such classics as Double or Nothing, Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, and You Bet Your Life. Say Goodnight, Gracie: The Last Years of Network Radio chronicles the decline of radio, using both secondary and primary sources, including interviews with those who worked in radio at the time. Cox also turns his attention to radio crime shows, both in Radio Crime Fighters: Over 300 Programs from the Golden Age and Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, an examination of a show that lasted almost two decades on radio, with 1.690 broadcasts. In Frank and Anne Hummert's Radio Factory: The Programs and Personalities of Broadcasting's Most Prolific Producers, Cox focuses on one production team during radio's heyday.
Cox explains his motivation in writing about Old Time Radio is not money as he is guided by personal interest but especially filling niches that no one else has touched or saturated. Searching material for his books, Jim Cox has visited and used the resources of the broadcasting museum in Chicago. He devoted two weeks to a research trip to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, where a vast repository of radio entertainment is housed. Traveling to major metropolitan areas, he often peruses the stacks in local libraries while seeking material.
