Wilda Wilson Church produced and directed radio drama programming for KRE in its earliest days, the early 1920’s, and went on to produce shows for KGO and NBC’s Pacific Coast network. In 1955, San Francisco Examiner radio and television columnist Dwight Newton described Church as “the pioneer, the first to blaze a dramatic path on radio, the mother and matriarch of the millions of dramas that would fill the airwaves for the next thirty years”.
Born in Sidney, OH, she was an English teacher and dramatic instructor at the Cora L. Williams Institute, a private high school for girls in Berkeley, when she was recruited by KRE to produce radio drama in 1922.
Later, on KGO, she was responsible for a weekly program called KGO Players, which broke new ground by integrating the spoken word, music, and sound effects. This use of multiple audio sources presaged the sort of programming that filled the airwaves during radio’s “Golden Age”. Church was said to have produced more radio dramatic programs than any individual on the West Coast up to that time.
Her directing technique involved sitting in a room without visual contact with the studio. Preferring to experience the broadcast the way listeners would hear it, she used a telephone to provide direction to the performers in the studio.
Church was described in 1920s newspaper articles as “an authority on the correct use of our language”. It was also reported in 1924 that she would hold a heavy carbon microphone out the window of KGO’s Oakland studios to capture the sound of frogs and crickets, obviating the need for sound effects during radio dramas set in the evening hours.
Wilda Wilson Church died in 1958 at age 76.
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