Halloween Radio

Halloween Joan Martin Kurtzeborn (October 31, 1900 – July 29, 1971) was an American broadcast announcer and radio disc jockey. She was one of the first radio disc jockeys in Chicago and an early innovator in what became known as morning radio. Historian Donna Halper credits Martin as the first woman to host her own morning radio show, with music scholar Maren Hancock calling Martin one of the first modern DJs. Halloween Joan Martin was born in El Paso, Texas, on Halloween in 1900 to a Canadian-born father, physician and dentist George Gordon Martin, and a Texas-born mother, Mabel Clare Kountz. She told the Associated Press that she went without a name for months until her parents chose the unusual birth-circumstance-inspired name. Martin grew up in Chicago with her brother Gordon, where she attended DePaul High School for Girls. She later matriculated at DePaul University, where she studied acting, as well as the liberal arts, graduating in 1926 with a PhB. After university, Martin joined the Chicago Herald and Examiner as a staff writer and columnist where she contributed to interior decorating content for the Prudence Penny column. Her editor also hosted a radio program on the same subject, and when they were unable to host one day, Martin was asked to substitute. Her appearance was well received, and she was subsequently given a 20-minute segment, which led to her first job offer in radio at KYW. Her entry to radio in 1929 came just eight years after Westinghouse established the first commercial radio station in 1921 in Pittsburgh, followed by KYW that same year, with commercial radio regularly transmitting music played on phonograph records. Non-commercial, amateur radio enthusiasts had been previously transmitting various types of live and recorded music since the 1910s. ​ Cultural critic Susan J. Douglas describes radio at that time as a "deeply sexist industry in which it was gospel that people did not like and would not trust the female voice over the air. "​ Nevertheless, women were heard, but only in gender-defined roles related to home economics.