Talk:Rambling with Gambling

The Gambling show has a rather complicated lineage -- it had its roots in a Morning Gym Class series begun over WOR by the forgotten morning-radio pioneer Arthur Bagley in 1924. When Bagley's series was taken to WEAF by sponsor Metropolitan Life in early 1925 (where it would continue for over a decade), the slot was taken over by health crusader/publishing magnate Bernarr MacFadden, who broadcast under the sponsorship of his own Physical Culture Magazine. Gambling was a WOR staff engineer assigned to work on the MacFadden program, and ended up taking it over when MacFadden and WOR came to a parting of the ways in mid-1925 (few people in any field of endeavor were able to get along with MacFadden for any length of time, it would seem.) The gym-class format continued with sponsorship taken over by Colgate-Palmolive. In 1930, Gambling began a long association with Broadcast brand canned meats, which sponsored the series thruout the 1930s. Thruout this period, the show owed a great deal to the basic format created by Bagley -- vigorous exercises of the jumping-jack variety combined with cheery music and humorous patter. Dunning, in his entry on Gambling, contends that the "gym class" format had ended by the mid-1930s, but this is incorrect --as proven by a surviving recording from December 1937, in which Gambling conducts his morning exercises with considerable gusto, to the accompaniment of Vincent Sorey's orchestra. As far as I've been able to determine from my own research, the exercises were still part of the program into the early 1940s. As Dunning correctly notes, however, "Rambling with Gambling" was originally a separate show from the morning wake-up program, an afternoon talk feature which began in 1942, and was subsequently transferred to early morning as a lead-in for the regular Gambling show. So "Rambling" as a series actually only goes back to the early forties -- even though WOR's publicity people have long since folded the two series into one for their own official history. Paul Austin (talk) 13:18, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Extended substitute host?
When I was growing up in New York in the 1960s, i remember hearing the "Rambling with Gambling" program on WOR radio. I also remember that, for some time, the show had a different host and was called "Rambling with Roberts." I'd assumed that Gambling -- John A.? -- had left the station, and had been replaced.

Does anyone have any further information on this? I assume it'd be germane to the article, since the situation was important enough that the show's title had to be changed.71.183.3.99 (talk) 12:24, 17 December 2017 (UTC)