Wake Up Kentucky # 36

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Wake Up Kentucky #36  18 February 1946 Radio program dramatizing health, welfare, and economic issues the backdrop of the Straight Creek mine explosion in Bell County, Kentucky. December 26, 1945, Boxing Day. Between thirty-five and fifty miners of the Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company are trapped in an explosion at the Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company at Four Mile in Bell County Kentucky. A 15-minute weekly radio program produced by Louisville, Kentucky's WHAS and heard on eighteen other stations from 1945 to 1947. It was sponsored by the Committee for Kentucky and was part of that organization's efforts to raise awareness of the state's poor social and economic conditions and to encourage corrective actions on the part of individual citizens, and state and local government agencies. Conveying hard data through skits and monologues, the issues of concern dramatized on the programs were farming, education, housing, health care, manufacturing, natural resources, taxation, labor, mine safety, welfare and the state constitution.   WHAS won one of the national broadcasting Peabody Awards for the programs in 1946: (Honorable Mention) Radio station WHAS, in conjunction with the Committee for Kentucky, has added radio’s testimony to the validity of the biblical injunction, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” This series made known to Kentuckians the pleasant and unpleasant facts about their state, the ultimate aim being “the restoration of Kentucky’s greatness.” In recognition of a series and a pattern that may well lead to better conditions elsewhere, a special citation from the Peabody Board.

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.