(Radio Shack Catalog Archives)
Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates! I hope every radio in your Easter basket was a flavor that you like.
The picture above comes from the very entertaining Radio Shack Catalog Archive website. Contrary to the name, the “Flavoradio” wasn’t flavored and wasn’t even scented. But I wonder how many kids licked them just to see.
I can remember Radio Shack selling those AM-only “Flavoradios” well into the 1980s, when virtually no kids or teenagers wanted an AM radio. At the end, if I remember correctly, they were often given away for free if you clipped a coupon from the Sunday paper.
Speaking of Easter, Alert Listener Captain Jack from Munhall pointed out that although there seem to be 1 million Christmas songs, there are virtually no songs about Easter except for “Easter Parade.” I asked my social media followers to suggest some other Easter songs, and although several made a valiant effort, we mostly came up empty. A goose-egg, if you will.
Trivia Question: Regarding the song “Easter Parade,” as any fule kno, it was written by Irving Berlin. It debuted in a 1933 Broadway musical called “As Thousands Cheer” with Clifton Webb and Marilyn Miller. It became more famous in the 1942 film “Holiday Inn” starring Bing Crosby, then became the basis for the 1948 film “Easter Parade” starring Fred Astaire and Judy Garland.
There’s one line in the song that I suspect confuses modern listeners:
And you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure
I will award a solid brass figlagee with bronze oak leaf palms to anyone who knows what a “Rotogravure” refers to. #easterparade
Answer after the jump.
Trivia Answer: Rotogravure was invented in the late 19th century. It was a method of printing high-quality photos, especially in color, at very high speeds and in very large quantities and very low costs.
It was popularized by newspapers who printed up special Sunday magazines on high-quality paper, using the rotogravure process.
The Sunday magazines were often simply called “rotogravures” after the printing method. (Some newspapers that didn’t have a Sunday edition distributed their rotogravure sections on Saturdays.)
The Sunday magazine of the Pittsburgh Press was simply called “Roto” for many years, beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the early 1980s.
(Image from eBay)
Preparing a rotogravure plate was time-consuming, so it couldn’t easily be used for breaking news. Newspapers planned and printed their Sunday rotogravure sections well in advance of when they were distributed. Photos “in the rotogravure” typically appeared weeks or months after they were taken.
So, if you were in your Easter bonnet with “all of the frills upon it,” and the newspaper photographers snapped your photo on “Fifth Avenue,” it would be quite an honor to “find that you’re in the rotogravure” several months later.
Rotogravure printing is still used for packaging, where large quantities of color printing must be done at low cost. But other than the New York Times, almost no Sunday newspapers in the United States still have a special color magazine section; the Los Angeles Times discontinued theirs in 2012 and The Washington Post ended its award-winning magazine in November 2022. The last major Sunday newspaper magazine, Parade, ended on Dec. 31, 2023.
One Sunday newspaper magazine survived the death of the newspaper that created it; New York Magazine was originally the Sunday rotogravure section of the New York Herald Tribune, which merged with two other newspapers in 1966 to create the New York World Journal Tribune. The merged paper went out of business in 1967, but New York Magazine continues on to this day.