Sometime between October 1 and October 5, 1921, a newspaper editor named William F. B. McNeary climbed a 15 ft ladder, entered the rooftop radio studio of station WJZ in Newark, New Jersey and read a bedtime story by writer Josephine Lawrence over the microphone as the "Man In The Moon". This was the beginning of the first radio series constructed specifically for children. Childhood has been tremendously different ever since.
Today 100 years later children have access to more hours of broadcast and streaming media than they could possibly consume in a lifetime. Yet it all started with one program over the radio. In reflection of this milestone, more histories of pioneering radio and television juvenile series will be explored in future blog posts and videos from the Children's Media Archive.