BW - EP152—013: D-Day's 80th Anniversary—Portia Faces Life And Joyce Jordan, MD

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

That was the voice of Joan Banks Lovejoy who played the scheming Arline Harrison Manning on Portia Faces Life. During World War II she was all over New York radio. On Portia Faces Life, Lucille Wall starred as Portia Blake, a young woman lawyer who battled corruption in the small town of Parkerstown. The show debuted with a crisis on October 7th, 1940 and throughout its entire nearly eleven-year run, the crises never ended. The show moved to CBS in April of 1944 and on D-Day it was airing weekdays at 2PM. The run on CBS would be relatively brief, as on October 3rd, 1944 Portia Faces Life would move back to NBC. ____________ That was the voice of Fran Carlon, who at times starred as Joyce Jordan, MD. Jordan started as a girl intern at Heights Hospital, slowly progressing to a doctor, facing the difficulty of being an intelligent woman in a man’s world. Ken Roberts was the announcer. He’d been a radio staple since the mid-1920s, beginning first at WMCA in New York before becoming a CBS staff announcer. On D-Day, Ken was thirty-five years old. Here’s Ken talking with Chuck Schaden about those early days of Network radio. Himan Brown was often the director.