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Story to Order was a weekly Sunday morning radio program in the 1940s presenting unique stories for the whole family. It started as a local program on Boston’s WBZ from March 1944 to March 1945. Then in 1945, the special format and its proven success on WBZ prompted the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to broadcast it nationwide on 63 radio stations. At that time local radio stations were just beginning to get programming from joining a national network, and Story to Order was offered to them. It ran for five years on NBC from March 1945 to late in 1949.

The program was the brainchild of 26 year old Lydia Perera (1918-2008), a seasoned actress and storyteller. Rather than just telling stories in a radio program, her concept was to engage listeners in the process of story creation by challenging them to submit the most odd combination of three words or concepts that they could imagine on a penny postcard. Each week a winner’s words were selected and Lydia aired an original story with them as her Story to Order. This delighted listeners in an ever growing audience around the country.

Lydia, as she was known on the show, performed all characters in the stories with musical accompaniment and professional sound effects. Four actual radio broadcasts can still be accessed by typing this phrase in YouTube: “Story to Order a” (quotation marks necessary).The program had a devoted following and received 1000-1500 postcards weekly, totaling a quarter million over its lifetime. The audience was two-thirds children and one-third adults. When NBC took the program off the air at the end of 1949, it received thousands of postcards praising the program and begging for its return. A selection of this fan mail can be seen at the end of this article.