Tribute to a Father Long Gone

America huddled by the radio every episode, waiting to laugh, cry and second-guess the decisions made by members of the fictitious Barbour family. The Barbours dealt with it all! The NBC show was among the first to focus on subtle character development and the conflict that ensued made the show addictive.

To regular listeners, the Barbours became real and in many cases, part of their families. They named their babies after characters on the show, sent them Christmas cards and even wrote to ask advice.

The show spread a message of strong family values across the airwaves from 1932 to 1959 and it continues to have an impact through both personal memories and several hundred surviving vintage recordings.

The show was created by Carlton Morse. He hired Harlan Ware as a writer in 1944. Five years later, Ware and Michael Raffeto were penning every episode. This is the period that Ware's daughter, Ciji, a Growing Bolder Thought Leader and Radio Show guest will never forget. She couldn't. Many of the things that happened to her, ended up on the radio for all to hear!

"My antics as a little kid were often incorporated into 'the triplets'; the children of a character whose name I can't remember. My sister, older than I by 7 years, often saw parts of her life woven into one of the teenage girls."

Harlan Ware was under such tremendous pressure to deliver fresh, interesting and unusual concepts and issues for each episode that not only would he draw from his own family life, he'd come to rely on it! Ciji says it made writers out of the whole family!

"I'd come home from kindergarten or first grade and remember my dad asking rather plaintively, 'Did anything exciting happen at school today?' If I recounted some story (like falling off the second-graders rings when a first grader)--it was likely to end up in a script and he'd say, 'Marvelous! You've earned your dinner tonight!' I think part of the reason I'm a 'storyteller' today (I've published 5 historical novels---see Amazon/Ciji Ware) is because I got into the habit of observing my life with sort of a 'third eye' as potential grist for my father's mill (and later my own). His famous line in our family was, 'To a civilian, a poke in the eye is just a poke in the eye. To a writer, he gets to observe it turning red, then black, then green-and-yellow. To a writer, a poke in the eye is MATERIAL!' It made me look at even the worst events as 'drama.'"

"During the OMF years, I felt an obligation to come up with a tale to tell, or I'd feel his keen disappointment, bordering on panic. That show in those days was a 5-day-a-week monster, gobbling up material like a tree chipper eats branches! Poor guy! Only now, as an Internet blogger, do I appreciate what pressure he was under Monday-through-Friday! He used to say, 'My job is chiseling mist!' He'd point to his noggin and say, 'Everything we've got is something created from nothing, except what's up here...it all comes from here!' When he was succeeding as a writer, he'd say, 'The creative life is the only life worth living.'" 

She readily admits she shares her father's passion for creativity. In addition to novels, Ciji is the author of "Rightsizing Your Life" which has become a must read for members of the boomer generation. You can listen to her appearance on the Growing Bolder Radio Show by clicking here. She returned to talk about how to take advantage of this economic downturn, which you can listen to by clicking here. And all this came after a long and successful career, where else, on the radio!

"For 17 years I was the 'Health & Lifestyle/Consumer Reporter' for KABC's (LA) Morning Drive show...up at 4:45 AM, scrambling to read three papers (IF they were delivered as promised M-F); I'd get a news topic to spin off of (as a Commentator so I could give my opinion, along with the facts)...the only woman on the show. I would broadcast 'live' from right off my kitchen at 7:20am and 8:20am, then was often called in to ad-lib if something came up between trying to feed breakfast to my then very young son and get him off to the car pool. Jamie was 4 when I started and 21 when I left--and HE became grist for MY mill...

And every time an issue came up, Ciji had the funny feeling she'd been through it before. In a way she had, on "One Man's Family." During the show's 27-year-run, the Barbours aged, married, went to war, watched children and grandchildren grow up, and pondered the decisions made by their bewildering offspring. The show did have its share of intrigue and heartbreak, but the plot always centered around universal family matters and the differences that arose between generations. Sounds a lot like the Ware family. And it probably sounds a lot like yours.