Anne Hummert

Anne Hummert (January 19, 1905, Baltimore, Maryland - July 05, 1996, New York City, New York) was the leading creator of daytime radio serials during the 1930s and 1940s, responsible for more than three dozen drama series.

Born Anne Schumacher in Baltimore, she attended Goucher College while working as a college correspondent for the "Baltimore Sun" and then took a job with the precursor of the "International Herald Tribune" in Paris. In France, she married reporter John Ashenhurst. The couple had one son and moved to Chicago. Unable to find a job in journalism, Anne Ashenhurst became an assistant to an advertising executive Frank Hummert. At the Blackett-Sample-Hummert agency, she rose in the ranks and became a full partner in 1933, earning $100,000 a year. Radio historian Jim Cox noted that when the two teamed to create daytime radio serials, they...:...intended to seize the housewives’ attention and alter the pattern of their daily existence... Radio as Americans experienced it during its golden age likely would have been vastly different had Frank and Anne Hummert not been on the scene to influence it so pervasively.

After their first major success, "Just Plain Bill", they followed with "Ma Perkins", "Backstage Wife" and "Young Widder Brown". Her marriage to John Ashenhurst ended in divorce, and Frank Hummert was single after the death of his wife, Adeline Hummert. Following their 1935 marriage, Frank and Anne Hummert moved to New York where they launched their company, Air Features, a radio production house. The Hummerts produced many radio drama series, including "Amanda of Honeymoon Hill", "Front Page Farrell", "John’s Other Wife", "Little Orphan Annie", "Mr. Chameleon", "Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons" and "Our Gal Sunday".

From their estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, Anne Hummert delivered a large weekly word count, outlining all of the plot twists for all of her programs. Scripters, known as "dialoguers," embellished her synopses to complete scripts for "Stella Dallas", "Young Widder Brown" and other soap operas.

Actress Mary Jane Higby observed, “Unquestionably, they had a profound influence on the whole literature of soap opera. They, more than anyone else, determined the shape it took.” According to Jim Cox, by the 1940s, the Hummerts controlled four- and-a-half hours of the national weekday broadcast schedule.

Anne Hummert was a multimillionaire when she died July 5, 1996 in her Fifth Avenue apartment at the age of 91.

References

*Cox, Jim. "Frank and Anne Hummert's Radio Factory: The Programs and Personalities of Broadcasting's Most Prolific Producers". McFarland Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-7864-1631-9

External links

* [http://www.shemadeit.org/meet/biography.aspx?m=124 The Paley Center for Media: Anne Hummert]
* [http://dspace.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/2152/417/1/meyersc89468.pdf "Admen and the Shaping of American Commercial Broadcasting, 1926-50" by Cynthia Barbara Meyers (2005)]
* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A03E1DD1639F932A15754C0A960958260 NY Times: Hummert's Death]