Back in radio's swaddling days (1923), the Procter & Gamble Co. stepped up to the microphone one day with a recipe for devil's-food cake ("take one-half cup of Crisco"). Enough housewives were glued to their earphones at that particular moment to report "program coming in fine." No one quite realized it, but commercial broadcasting was well under way.
Now, after 22 years as radio's best and best-satisfied customer, P & G is radio's biggest buyer of time ($11,014,000 in 1944). Last week Broadcasting magazine recalled P & G's radio success story. It was a story that clo.sely paralleled the whole history of...