A newly published book, “Alabama History on the Air,” is bringing a forgotten piece of Mobile broadcasting history back into print, drawing on more than five dozen radio scripts that once introduced Depression-era listeners to the state’s past. The volume rescues from family papers a body of work that has been unavailable to the public for the better part of a century, and it reconstructs a moment when radio was the newest mass medium in Alabama and Mobile was among the cities learning what the technology could do. For readers interested in both state history and the early days of broadcasting, the book offers two stories at once: the history the scripts told and the story of how they came to be broadcast.
Author and historian Robert M. Glennon compiled the book from 63 original radio scripts written and delivered by his relative, John F. Glennon, a Mobile businessman, lawyer and local historian who became known on-air as “The Old Narrator.” The scripts came from “Highlights in Alabama History,” a series that aired on Mobile’s first radio station starting February 7, 1930, just weeks after the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. The timing placed the series among the earliest sustained history programs anywhere on Southern radio, and it made John Glennon a familiar voice in Mobile households at a moment when the medium itself was still a novelty.
Radio in 1930 occupied a place in family life that no later medium has quite replicated. Sets were expensive, programming was live, and a locally produced series with a distinctive voice could become a shared civic experience in a way that syndicated programming rarely allows. “Highlights in Alabama History” was built for exactly that audience, offering short, digestible accounts of the people and events that shaped the state, delivered by a narrator whose name became part of his on-air identity.
From Real Estate Pitch to History Series
According to Glennon, the broadcasts began as a practical effort. As Mobile grew into a hub for shipyard, state docks and International Paper mill jobs, the Mobile Real Estate Board sponsored radio programs aimed at newcomers arriving from the heartland in search of work. Those early spots about Mobile’s climate and available properties evolved over the following decade into a broader retelling of Alabama history, airing up to three times a week through the early 1930s. The transition from real estate promotion to historical storytelling happened gradually, as the sponsors discovered that audiences responded to narratives about the past as readily as to pitches about houses, and that a program with genuine substance built goodwill for the sponsor as effectively as an advertisement.
The influx of newcomers that inspired the series was one of the defining migrations of the era. Agricultural hardship in the rural South and Midwest sent families toward industrial jobs on the coast, and Mobile’s economy, anchored by the state docks and the shipyards along the river, made the city a destination. New arrivals needed to learn a new city and, in many cases, a new region’s history, and the radio series served as an informal orientation, connecting listeners’ new home to the long story that had produced it.
With few other entertainment options available, Glennon said, many families gathered around their radios to hear the programs, drawing parallels between the hardships of early Alabama pioneers and their own difficult circumstances during the Depression. That resonance was no accident. A state settled through frontier hardship, economic collapse and recovery offered Depression-era listeners a usable past, a reminder that earlier generations had endured their own disasters and continued. The scripts’ popularity through the early 1930s suggests that the parallel was felt by the audience as strongly as it was intended by the narrator.
Stories From the Scripts
The book covers a range of Alabama history, including the Battle of Mobile Bay and the story of the Confederate submarine CSS Hunley, credited as the first submarine to sink an enemy ship in combat. The Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864 remains one of the most celebrated naval actions in American history, the engagement that closed the last major Gulf port to blockade runners and produced Adm. David Farragut’s famous order to damn the torpedoes. The Hunley’s story connects Mobile to Charleston and to one of maritime history’s most remarkable experiments, a hand-cranked submarine that accomplished something no vessel had done before, at the cost of its own crew.
It also recounts the life of Octavia LeVert, the Mobile socialite known as the “Belle of the South” for her lavish parties, whose reputation suffered locally after she entertained Union officers during the federal occupation of Mobile in April 1865. LeVert was among the most celebrated hostesses in the antebellum South, and her home drew visitors from across the country and Europe. The judgment she faced after the occupation captured the bitter social arithmetic of the war’s end in a captured Southern city, and her story as told in the scripts gave Depression-era listeners a portrait of Mobile society at its height and at its most divided.
The selection across the 63 scripts reflects the breadth of the original series, which moved through exploration, statehood, war and reconstruction at a pace suited to radio’s short attention window. John Glennon’s approach as “The Old Narrator” favored narrative momentum over academic apparatus, telling stories about people rather than delivering lectures about institutions. That style has aged well, and Robert Glennon’s presentation preserves the voice of the original broadcasts while giving modern readers the context to understand what the programs were and why they mattered to their audience.
Robert M. Glennon’s previous book, “Kudjo: The Last Slave Voyage to America,” told the story of Cudjo Kazoola Lewis, the last known survivor of the schooner Clotilda, which brought enslaved Africans into Mobile decades after such voyages had been outlawed in the United States. The Clotilda’s clandestine voyage in the years before the Civil War stands as the last known instance of the transatlantic slave trade reaching American shores, and its aftermath produced one of the most remarkable communities in Alabama. Lewis went on to help found Africatown at Plateau in north Mobile and became an advocate for the community before his death in 1935 at age 95.
Africatown remains a living community and a site of growing historical attention, as descendants of the Clotilda survivors have worked to preserve the story and archaeologists have searched the waters around Mobile for remains of the schooner itself. Glennon’s earlier treatment of Lewis’s life brought the story to readers through the words and recollections associated with Lewis himself, and the new book continues the author’s pattern of recovering first-person and near-contemporary accounts of Alabama’s past. Together the two books frame a career spent mining family and regional archives for material that formal histories have often passed over.
The survival of the scripts themselves is its own piece of the story. Radio programming of the early 1930s was rarely recorded, and the paper scripts that announcers read from were typically discarded once a series ended. That more than five dozen of these survived in the Glennon family’s possession is what makes the current book possible, and the family archive remains the sole source for a body of work that would otherwise exist only in period newspaper listings and the memories of listeners long gone.
Glennon said he has more than 100 additional original scripts from the radio series still in the family archive and expects to draw on them for future books. The remaining material suggests that the 63 scripts in the current volume represent only part of the series’ run, and that subsequent volumes could extend the narrative coverage into other corners of the state’s past. For historians of radio and of Alabama alike, the archive is a rare survival: a complete run of locally produced content from the earliest days of broadcasting in one Southern city, preserved in the handwriting and typewriting of its creator.
“Alabama History on the Air” is available at independent bookstores in Mobile and on the Eastern Shore. The book’s arrival gives local readers a chance to hear, on the page, the voice that entertained their grandparents and great-grandparents, and it restores a chapter of Mobile’s broadcasting history that might otherwise have been lost entirely. Eight decades after “The Old Narrator” first sat down before a microphone on the city’s first radio station, his account of Alabama’s past is once again available to anyone curious about how the state’s story was told to the generation that lived through the Great Depression.
For Mobile readers, the book also documents the birth of the city’s broadcast identity. The station that carried “Highlights in Alabama History” was the first in the market, and locally produced programs like Glennon’s established the pattern of Mobile radio serving as a civic voice, a role the city’s stations have played through wars, hurricanes and economic change ever since. The scripts capture the city at a pivot point, an industrial port absorbing new arrivals and finding its voice in a new medium, narrated by one of its own citizens. That intersection of local pride, new technology and Depression-era resilience gives “Alabama History on the Air” an appeal that reaches well beyond the historical facts its scripts convey, and it explains why the Glennon family’s archive is worth celebrating as more than a curiosity.