The UMKC Libraries is excited to announce the Marr Sound Archives’ acquisition of the J. David Goldin Collection, one of the most comprehensive collections of radio programs in the world.
The donation consists of 27,000 reel-to-reel tapes,1,300 vinyl and lacquer discs, and 3,000 CDs, joining Mr. Goldin’s previous donation of 15,000 vinyl and lacquer discs, making the Marr Sound Archives the preeminent collection of broadcast radio history. The majority of the recordings span the 1920s-1950s, and include comedy, mystery, drama, music, children, religion, and news programs, as well as sports events and WWII coverage. The collection can be searched using the RadioGoldIndex, a database of over 123,000 radio programs that Mr. Goldin painstakingly compiled over many years in his spare time. Requests for recordings in the collection can be made to the Marr Sound Archives by emailing soundarchives@umkc.edu.
Goldin Collection Highlights
The collection covers an extraordinary array of radio shows and topics. A handful of examples showcase the rarity of some of the recordings.
- The collection contains very fragile glass lacquer discs, some of which were digitized using a specialized audio preservation technology in a grant-funded project, Sound Archives Preserves 1940s Radio Broadcasts.
- A 1941 recording of the radio show “We the People” captures a fairly rare artifact of Walt Disney speaking. In the broadcast radio clip Disney talks about creating the characters of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and performs the voice of Mickey Mouse. Disney’s first film venture, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, was incorporated here in Kansas City.
- A 1925 recording from WDAF is the earliest known recording of a radio broadcast out of Kansas City.
About J. David Goldin
Born in 1942, a child of World War II, Goldin became obsessed with radio while growing up in the Bronx. As a teen, he began collecting 78rpm records and became a ham radio operator. After earning a degree in radio production at New York University, Goldin went to work for KSEW, a 250-watt station on Baronoff Island, Alaska, then WVIP in Mt. Kisco, New York, and WHBI-FM in Newark, New Jersey. Goldin soon moved to the other side of the microphone and became an operating engineer for NBC, Mutual and CBS networks.
On the side, he began collecting 16″ discs of radio programs and formed Radio Yesteryear, a mail order record company. In 1968, Goldin began producing records of vintage radio programs. His first project, Themes Like Old Times, which segued together 90 radio themes was a resounding success. In 1970, Goldin launched his own record label, Radiola, specializing in reissues of programs from the golden age of radio. He won a Grammy in 1981 in the Spoken Word, Documentary or Drama Recording category for his reissue of Donovan’s Brain by Orson Welles. Goldin is one of the most important and prolific collectors of radio recordings in the world, and the donation of this collection makes the Marr Sound Archives an invaluable historic resource.
