The Coca-Cola Top Notchers Radio Program

Background

From the earliest days of widely broadcast Radio, Coca-Cola was a prolific sponsor of Radio programming. Arguably America's most widely advertised product by 1930, Coca-Cola advertising had become ubiquitous across both North and South America and internationally. In the U.S. especially, Coca-Cola's distinctive white script logo could be seen on roadside signs, sides of barns, on billboards throughout metropolitan centers, in neon within city centers, and certainly on or within the windows of virtually every drugstore, soda fountain, and grocery store of the era.

As Radio emerged as a potent messaging vehicle for advertisers, Coca-Cola undertook an almost unbroken campaign over Radio spanning the entire era of the Golden Age of Radio:

• 1929 The Coca-Cola Program
• 1930 The Musical Comedy Hour
• 1930 Coca-Cola Top Notchers
• 1934 The Pause That Refreshes On the Air
• 1935 Refreshment Time with Singin' Sam
• 1937 The Song Shop
• 1940 The Pause That Refreshes with Andre Kostelanetz
• 1941 Coca-Cola Spotlight Bands
• 1943 Songs by Morton Downey [The Coke Club]
• 1947 The Coca-Cola Spotlight Revue
• 1948 Claudia
• 1948 Predict A Hit
• 1948 The Summer Spotlight Revue
• 1948 The Coca-Cola Summer Show
• 1949 The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show
• 1951 The Mario Lanza Show
• 1952 Coke Time with Eddie Fisher

While the above list is not intended to be comprehensive, it represents the mostly variety genre of programming that Coca-Cola continued to sponsor throughout the era.

Coca-Cola and NBC bring Coca-Cola's Top Notchers to the air

Coca-Cola's Top Notchers was an unlikely--albeit inspired--marriage of variety bedfellows: a high-quality variety program combined with Sports interviews by Grantland Rice and Graham McNamee. A late night offering, Coca-Cola Top Notchers was clearly targeted to the adult audiences of the era. Late night Radio of the 1930s was full of dance music, 15 to 30-minute orchestral interludes, news wrap-ups, and other Sports programming.

Presenting a combination of quality dance music and variety numbers gave adult listeners some of the era's finest musical performers to the air for one-hundred fourteen broadcasts. Sports fans also tuned in to hear two of America's greatest sportswriters and commentators interviewing the greatest athletes of an era marked by incredible athletic endeavors.

Opening with what would become Coca-Cola's signature musical accompaniment for the following fifty years, The Coca-Cola Waltz was initially performed by Leonard Joy and his "Coca-Cola Top Notchers," a 31-piece all-strings orchestra. Host, Coca-Cola spokersperson, and commentator Graham McNamee would announce the program for the evening. McNamee introduced "a half-hour devoted to popular music and unusual news of sports by Grantland Rice." McNamee was the first to introduce to Radio what would become another Coca-Cola signature over the entire subsequent history of the beverage--"The Pause That Refreshes." Up until the death of Coca-Cola founder Asa Griggs Candler in March 1929, Candler's slogan of choice, "Delicious and Refreshing," had become Coca-Cola's advertising mantra. After Candler's death, Coca-Cola's "The Pause That Refreshes" soon became one of the 20th century's most widely recited and remembered slogans. The "Delicious and Refreshing" slogan persisted in the background of Coca-Cola's promotions of Top Notchers during its entire run, but slowly began changing from Delicious and Refreshing and "Makes A Pause Refreshing" to the now ubiquitous The Pause That Refreshes.

The musical performance portions of the program comprised a wide variety of popular music, operatic pieces, collegiate fight songs, and dance music of the era. Len Joy conducted the Coca-Cola Top Notchers Orchestra for the first half of the canon, succeeded by Gus Haenschen at the baton for the remainder of the canon. Over the course of the series opera stars James Melton [tenor], Olga Albani [contralto], Phil Dewey [baritone] and Lewis James [tenor] gave voice to the vocal pieces.

Grantland Rice's interviewees comprised mostly Sports figures of the era, the remainder comprised of humorists, Entertainment personalities, aviatrices, explorers and adventurers of the era. Notable among the interviewees were two with 'Gentleman Jim' Corbett, who'd pass away within three years. Rice also interviewed Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Eddie Rickenbacker, Amelia Earhart, Connie Mack, Walter Johnson, Bobby Jones, Gil Dobie, and Knute Rockne, among many others. Within a year, Knute Rockne would pass away and within six years Amelia Earhart would be lost over Howland Island.

If nothing other than a priceless time capsule of the sports and popular culture celebrities of the era, Coca-Cola Top Notchers qualifies as an historically important canon from The Golden Age. Produced and recorded out of New York, the circulating exemplars show very sophisticated production values for the era. The Coca-Cola messaging spots were tastefully integrated into the format. The transitions were well engineered as well. The pace of the half-hour program was also very tight and well directed. Most programs managed to cram as many as nine musical pieces into the program's alloted half-hour--in addition to Grantland Rice's five to eight minute interviews. That's pretty crisp direction by any measure, let alone for 1930.

As one of the first three Radio outings by Coca-Cola, its Top Notchers was as good as its namesake. Coca-Cola-sponsored programming endured in the same well engineered and produced manner for the following twenty-five years, almost continually airing variety programming throughout the Golden Age. Coca-Cola's well-earned reputation as an advertising powerhouse was nowhere better demonstrated than in its Radio programming. And as history shows, its relentless messaging over all media allowed Coca-Cola to maintain its supremacy over Pepsi-Cola, 7-Up, Canada Dry, Moxie, Nehi, Dr Pepper and all the other contenders for America's favorite beverage well into the 1990s.

Series Derivatives:

Notes on Provenances:

The most helpful provenances were newspaper listings.

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