Lum & Abner
How Two Arkansas Boys Talked Their Way onto National Radio
The story of how Lum & Abner got started says as much about the show's character as anything that ever aired. Chester Lauck and Norris Goff had grown up a few miles apart — Lauck born February 9, 1902, in Alleene, Arkansas, and Goff on May 30, 1906, in Cove — and both had moved with their families to the small town of Mena, Arkansas, population around 4,000, where they met in grade school. They drifted through the University of Arkansas, then separated — Goff switched to Oklahoma, Lauck tried the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago — and neither finished. Both came back to Mena, settled into steady work, and spent their spare time fooling around with comedy sketches.
They initially thought of themselves as blackface comedians, which was a common enough amateur route in that era. The invitation that changed things came through flood relief charity work: KTHS in Hot Springs wanted performers, and Lauck and Goff showed up with a sketch in Negro dialect. But Amos 'n' Andy was at the absolute peak of its popularity, and KTHS was drowning in blackface imitators. The station manager essentially pointed that out, and the two men reached back for something else — the voices of old men they'd known in the Arkansas hills. They logged the new skit as Lum and Abner, named almost offhandedly. Lauck picked "Lum" because it had a backwoodsy sound and he had never known anyone called that. Goff chose "Abner" because it struck him as a solid country name.
KTHS brought them back eight times as the mail response kept growing. By July 1931, they were confident enough to try Chicago. At the NBC audition in the Merchandise Mart, they were offered $150 a week. They held out for $350 — a genuine gamble for two men from a town of 4,000. Lauck later told Radio Guide what was at stake: "We knew if we didn't put it across with the original idea, we were sunk." The network took their terms, and on July 27, 1931, Lum & Abner went out as a 15-minute weekday program on NBC regional, often six days a week at 8 in the morning, sponsored by Quaker Oats. Goff knew the Quaker salesman personally, as it turned out — Quaker was looking for a summer replacement for another act and the connection helped. At the actual sponsor audition, Lauck and Goff asked the Quaker representatives to sit facing a wall and listen, afraid that seeing two young men playing elderly characters would wreck the illusion. They performed using a broomstick propped between them as a mock microphone.
The World They Built
Pine Ridge, Arkansas, was a fictional hamlet set on the fringes of the Ouachita Mountains, but it was based closely on a real place — Waters, Arkansas, a town of roughly 200 people with no electricity at the time Lauck and Goff were drawing on their memories. The show opened the same way every day: "And now, let's see what's going on down in Pine Ridge." From there, the listener stepped into a world that was mapped out in careful, consistent detail.
The center of Pine Ridge life was the Jot 'Em Down Store, run by Columbus "Lum" Edwards and Abner Peabody. Nearby was a post office and general store run by Dick Huddleston, a blacksmith shop belonging to Caleb Weehunt, Mose Moots's barbershop, a lodge hall above it — the only building in town with a second story — and Luke Spears's Lunch Room. The two main characters had clearly drawn personalities: Lum was the store's self-appointed executive, given to schemes and a certain stubborn confidence in his own judgment. Abner loved checkers and horse-trading. In one episode that listeners talked about for years, Abner set up a checker game against a fictitious opponent he also named Abner, lost the game, and then refused to speak to himself for days.
A recurring bit of business involved the party line. When the phone rang, Lum would say "I-grannies, Abner, I believe that's our ring," and Abner would answer "I-doggies, Lum, I believe you're right." It was a small, repeated thing, but the consistency of those catchphrases built up the texture of a real place over time. The secondary characters reinforced it. Lauck and Goff played virtually all of them themselves: Lauck took on Cedric Weehunt (the blacksmith's son), Snake Hogan (the town tough), and Grandpappy Spears, whose consuming interest was beating Abner at checkers. Goff handled Dick Huddleston, weak-kneed Mousy Gray, Doc Miller in the annual Christmas broadcast, and Squire Skimp — the show's recurring villain, a loan shark, insurance hustler, and con man who kept wandering back into Pine Ridge to cause trouble.
For the first several years, female characters existed only as topics of conversation — mentioned, described, discussed in detail, but never voiced. Abner's wife Lizza-beth was a constant presence in stories Abner told about her; Lum's heartthrob Evalena gave her name to one of the show's theme songs. Aunt Charity Spears did hemstitching and quiltmaking. The technique was similar to the one Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll used on Amos 'n' Andy, and it worked for the same reason: the audience's imagination fills in what the audio leaves empty. When experienced radio people warned Lauck and Goff early on that nothing succeeded without a "sex angle" and urged them to hire actresses, the two men tried it. The women who auditioned could not capture the hill country dialect, and Lauck and Goff were not skilled at female mimicry themselves. The female voices stayed offstage. It was not until 1937 that actress Lurene Tuttle began adding women's voices to the show, eventually playing Ellie Conners — the orphan girl Lum and Abner adopted — along with many other female roles.
How the Stories Worked
Lauck and Goff wrote their own scripts until 1941, and a typical script took them two hours or less to finish. The storytelling mixed two modes: single-show incidents and longer serial plots that could run for weeks. Some storylines were compact — a mysterious stranger leaving a bag full of diamonds in the store safe, the question of what to do hanging over two episodes. Others grew more elaborate. One three-week plot wove together Lum's interest in the new town schoolteacher, the formation of the Jot 'Em Down Store and Library, and an escaped lion roaming the area. In 1942, the longest-running storyline in the show's history began when a woman walked into the store, asked Lum to watch her baby, and then disappeared. The story ran 40 chapters. It culminated in a full-page Radio Guide advertisement offering listeners $750 in war bonds for naming the baby.
The 1936 presidential campaign episode illustrates how directly the show could reach into its audience. Lum decided to run for president, and Lauck and Goff offered campaign buttons to listeners who wrote in. They expected to send out around 5,000 buttons. Requests came in for nearly 255,000. That same year, the real town of Waters, Arkansas — the model for Pine Ridge — went through an act of Congress and officially changed its name to Pine Ridge.
The show's sound was simple by design. The most recognizable sonic detail was a creaking screen door that opened whenever someone entered the Jot 'Em Down Store. Organists Sybil Chism Bock, Ralph Emerson, and Elsie Mae Emerson provided the music across different periods, and the show cycled through three theme songs: "Eleanor," composed by Jessie L. Deppen, ran from the start through approximately 1941; Sybil Bock's "Evalena" — named after Lum's heartthrob — carried the show from 1941 to 1946; and Ralph and Elsie Mae Emerson's "Down on the Old Party Line" took over from 1946 to 1953.
Twenty-Three Years, Eight Network Homes
The show's network history is a study in resilience. After the NBC regional start in 1931, the program ran as a sustained (unsponsored) NBC program through most of 1932 and into 1933, then picked up Ford Motors as a sponsor for a year on NBC out of WTAM in Cleveland. From 1934 to 1938 it ran on Mutual and then the Blue Network under Horlick's Malted Milk — along with The Lone Ranger, one of Mutual's most popular programs in that period. CBS carried it from 1938 to 1940 under Postum, and a 1941 summer run went out on the NBC Pacific Network for Alka-Seltzer. The Blue Network and then ABC carried the show from September 1941 through October 1947, mostly for Miles Laboratories and Alka-Seltzer — the longest single sponsor relationship of the run. CBS took it back for a year in 1947–48, still in the 15-minute serial format, sponsored by Alka-Seltzer. During the war, Armed Forces Radio carried the program to military personnel around the world.
Along the way, the show collected a few broadcasting firsts that tend to get lost in the sponsor reshuffling. In 1933 it became the first network program broadcast from Radio City in New York. It was the first radio program to conduct a marathon charity broadcast, and the first to attempt a transatlantic simulcast — Lauck performing from London, Goff from Chicago, the two of them holding a Pine Ridge conversation across the ocean.
Then, in October 1948, the format changed. CBS moved Lum & Abner to a half-hour Sunday slot at 10 p.m., sponsored by Frigidaire, and the show became a comedy-variety program with an orchestra, a studio audience, and guest stars. It was the first time in the show's history that Lauck and Goff had performed in front of a live audience. Cast members during this period included ZaSu Pitts, Andy Devine, Cliff Arquette, Francis "Dink" Trout, and Opie Cates, who also led the orchestra after Felix Mills. Clarence Hartzell came on as Dr. Benjamin Franklin Withers, an addle-brained boarder at Lum's — a character that was closely modeled on the Uncle Fletcher role Hartzell had been playing on Vic and Sade. The production was smoother and drew more open laughs. But the half-hour version, for all its professional polish, did not have the same quality as the serial that had preceded it. That particular combination of soap opera continuity, small-town specificity, and two men playing an entire community by themselves was gone.
The show returned to CBS in a Wednesday-night 30-minute slot in late 1949 under Ford Motors, then went quiet for a few years before brief revivals — a 15-minute ABC run from February to May 1953, and finally a syndicated run from November 1953 to May 7, 1954, with Abner doing recorded commercials for local sponsors. Twenty-three years after KTHS in Hot Springs had first put them on the air, the Jot 'Em Down Store closed.
What They Were Actually Going For
Lauck and Goff pushed back whenever anyone tried to categorize the show as hillbilly comedy. They never took kindly to the word "hillbilly," believing it mocked Arkansans unfairly. The characters they played were not meant to be jokes at the expense of rural people. Lauck told Radio Guide in 1937: "We try to make our program amusing through the situations we build up rather than through the ignorance or obtuseness of any character." The premise, as they understood it, was that "the simple philosophy of the Arkansas hills, genuine and unadorned, is very interesting." The humor came from situation and character, not from making the people of Pine Ridge look foolish.
They had moved to Hollywood in January 1937 to be closer to the broadcast infrastructure, but kept making regular trips back to Mena for hunting, storytelling, and gathering new material. The real Dick Huddleston — the actual postmaster in the real Waters, Arkansas — had a sign made for his store identifying himself as the Dick Huddleston of Lum and Abner. Dick's daughter Ethel took notes in her father's store and mailed backwoods expressions and humorous incidents out to California. The show's roots in a real place and real people were part of what gave it texture that 23 years of network shuffles and format experiments couldn't entirely erode.
Pine Ridge Goes to the Movies
Beginning in 1940, Lauck and Goff carried their characters into a string of feature films: Dreaming Out Loud (1940), The Bashful Bachelor (1942), So This Is Washington (1943), Two Weeks to Live (1943), Goin' to Town (1944), and Partners in Time (1946). All six were produced with an unusual convention in the onscreen credits — Lauck and Goff appeared only as "Lum" and "Abner," not under their own names. The fiction was kept intact even in the small print at the end of the reel.
The films varied in ambition. The Bashful Bachelor worked from a story by Lauck and Goff themselves, with a screenplay by Chandler Sprague, and co-starred ZaSu Pitts — who would later turn up on the 1948 radio sitcom version. Two Weeks to Live leaned into farce, with Abner mistakenly diagnosed as terminally ill and talked into performing death-defying stunts to leave behind some money. So This Is Washington sent the pair to the capital with Abner's homemade licorice formula, which he wanted to pitch as a synthetic rubber substitute for the war effort; the picture earned a 1944 Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Recording, losing to This Land Is Mine. Lauck and Goff were reportedly required to live on the RKO lot during that production, with three hours of old-age makeup each morning.
The last screen attempt came a decade after the radio series ended. Lum and Abner Abroad (1956) was originally conceived as a three-part television pilot, filmed on location in Yugoslavia. The local crew was reportedly so inexperienced that director James V. Kern had to improvise technical shortcuts throughout the shoot. One night during filming, Goff and Lauck were trapped overnight in a freezing castle when the drawbridge failed to lower. By Goff's account, he suggested to Lauck somewhere in the cold hours that maybe it was time to quit show business. By morning, Lauck agreed. The footage was eventually acquired by Howco Productions, a South Carolina distributor with a customer base largely in the American South, and reassembled as a feature.
After Pine Ridge
The two men settled into very different second acts. Chester Lauck became a vice-president of public relations at Continental Oil Company (Conoco) in Houston, and continued to appear as Lum in television commercials for the company that ran during Whirlybirds (1957–60) and The Blue Angels (1960–61). He turned up as a guest challenger on To Tell the Truth on August 27, 1957, and on The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar in 1959. For a few years in the 1950s he owned a ranch fifteen miles west of Las Vegas — later purchased by Howard Hughes, and eventually preserved as Spring Mountain Ranch State Park. In 1963 he came home to Arkansas, settled in Hot Springs, opened his own public relations firm, and worked an active circuit as an after-dinner speaker until his death there on February 21, 1980.
Norris Goff kept a foot in performing. He turned up on The Andy Griffith Show as a local storekeeper and on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. as Gomer's grandfather, and made a solo appearance on The Jack Benny Program as the father of Andy Devine. He died June 7, 1978, in Palm Desert, California, at 72, and is buried at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City.
What's Left of Pine Ridge
The town that changed its name in 1936 became, over time, a small destination. The Lum and Abner Museum took shape inside two historic Pine Ridge buildings — the A. A. McKinzie General Store (1904) and the J. R. (Dick) Huddleston General Merchandise Store (1912), both added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 4, 1984. Ralph and Dorothy McClure had purchased the Huddleston Store in 1969 and built the museum up around it; it was formally dedicated in April 1972. Lon and Kathy Stucker took over operations in 1979 and ran it for more than four decades. In 2023 the Stuckers put the buildings up for sale, and the museum has stayed closed since. The post office that operated inside the Huddleston Store closed at the same time. A replica of the Jot 'Em Down Store still stands next to it on Highway 88.
The fan and scholarly infrastructure has outlasted the museum's open doors. The National Lum and Abner Society was founded in 1984 by Sam Brown, Tim Hollis, and Donnie Pitchford, and held twenty annual conventions in Pine Ridge and Mena between 1985 and 2005, drawing in veterans of the radio program and the films — Roswell Rogers, Clarence Hartzell, Jerry Hausner, Elmore Vincent, Wendell Niles, and many others. The Society's bimonthly newsletter, The Jot 'Em Down Journal, ran 133 issues from 1985 to 2007 and is now freely available in PDF and audio form. In 2011, Pitchford, Ethan C. Nobles of firstarkansasnews.net, and the Lauck family launched an authorized Lum and Abner weekly comic strip with a companion audio adaptation for each installment; the strip marked the show's 90th anniversary in 2021. On July 20, 2014, Lum and Abner showed up as cameo characters in a Dick Tracy crossover written by Mike Curtis and drawn by Joe Staton, with permission arranged through Chester H. Lauck Jr.
Serious historical work has accumulated as well. Randal L. Hall's Lum and Abner: Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) is the primary scholarly monograph on the series, and includes twenty-nine previously unpublished scripts from the show's earliest period. Hall's argument — that the show drew on a kind of "mountain exoticism" but used it to celebrate rural character rather than mock it — lines up closely with what Lauck and Goff said about their own work in 1937. The Chet Lauck Collection is preserved at the Center for Arkansas History and Culture at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
The show's influence ran ahead of it into television. Commentators have pointed to Lum & Abner as a forerunner of The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, and Green Acres — small-town, rural-coded comedies built around character rather than condescension. The formula, as the show's structure made clear, was roughly two parts comedy to one part soap opera, the same proportions that had made Amos 'n' Andy work. But where that show's two-man universe eventually ran into the limits of dialect comedy, Lauck and Goff kept adding to Pine Ridge, kept building out the cast, kept letting the storylines breathe over weeks and months. Entire sequences from 1935 onward survive across multiple consecutive chapters, with the 1935–1948 stretch unusually well preserved for a 15-minute daily serial of its era. Pine Ridge, Arkansas — the real one, the town that changed its name — is still there.