Diamond Dramas
The Idea Behind the Show
Diamond Dramas is one of the more unusual concepts in old-time radio: a syndicated anthology in which every episode centers on a single famous or historically notable diamond. Royalty, wealth, love, treachery, theft, deceit — the stories draw on the full range of human motive, with a precious stone at the center of each one. Episodes cover gems as storied as the Kohinoor, the Orloff, and the Pitt Diamond, alongside lesser-known stones whose histories proved just as tangled.
The man behind the series was Sidney S. Fox, a Salt Lake City broadcaster with an entrepreneurial streak. Fox had built a separate fortune on a laxative-salt product he marketed under the brand name "Miracle Diamonds" — and it was that diamond-shaped product identity that gave him the idea to build a radio series around famous diamonds. The connection between a laxative and gemstone lore sounds unlikely, but Fox's instinct that the theme had broad appeal turned out to be correct.
How It Got Made and Sold
Fox produced 26 episodes at a total cost of approximately $35,000 — a significant investment for a syndicated venture. At some point during the process he withdrew from the Miracle Diamonds Corporation and took the radio programs with him. He then marketed the series independently, eventually placing it with roughly 700 radio stations across the country. By the time the dust settled, Fox had recovered his original investment and reportedly cleared a $7,000 profit.
The series ran under commercial sponsorship from Davidson & Licht Jewelry Company and Gruen Watch, sponsors whose businesses aligned naturally with the diamond theme. Syndicated sponsorship of this kind — where a producer sold both the content and the advertising package to local stations — was a practical model for independent producers working outside the major network system, and Fox navigated it successfully.
Fox's radio work extended beyond Diamond Dramas. He was also involved with KDYL, a Salt Lake City station he helped reorganize around 1927 after being approached by his stepson Fred Provol. His papers, held at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections, include materials on KDYL, the Miracle Diamonds Corporation, and the Diamond Dramas series itself — one of the more complete archival records surviving for an independently produced old-time radio program.
What Survives
All 26 episodes are preserved. The series dates to somewhere in the 1930s–1940s, with some sources favoring the 1940s and others suggesting it may span both decades. Total running time across the surviving recordings runs approximately six hours and twenty minutes — a complete run, which is far from guaranteed for independently syndicated shows of this period.
Episode titles suggest the range of the series: "The Eugenie Diamond," "The Kohinoor Diamond," "The Orloff Diamond," and "The Pitt Diamond" promise the big historical stones; "The Smuggler," "The Mad King of Bavaria," and "The Kings Astrologer" suggest the kind of adventure and intrigue that kept the anthology format moving. The catalog entry "The Yellow Eye" sounds like something a bit darker, and "The Little Gift" is intriguing precisely because it doesn't announce its subject.
For anyone who wants to go deeper on the show's history, a detailed program log and a biography of Sidney S. Fox have been compiled by dedicated researchers, and the Archives West finding aid for the Fox papers at the University of Utah provides an archival foundation that few independent productions of this era can match.