Robert F. Schulkers

Robert F. Schulkers, Seckatary Hawkins by Gary A. O’Dell and Gregg Bogosian www.seckatary.com In the closing scene of Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch is seated in the bedroom of his sleeping son, Jem, quietly read- ing a book from his son’s collection. His eight year-old daughter Scout, the protagonist of the novel, came into the room, sat down next to her father and asked him to read to her from the book, leaning her head against his knee. Atticus turned back to the first page and began to read aloud. “H’rm,” he said. “The Gray Ghost, by Seckatary Hawkins. Chapter One…” The Gray Ghost, published in 1926, was one of a series of books for juveniles written by Robert Franc Schulkers, a resident of Covington, Kentucky, depicting the adventures of a group of young boys from the point of view of one of the members, Gregory Hawkins. First pub- lished in serial form by the Cincinnati Enquirer beginning in 1918, the Hawkins stories proved to be so popular with children that they were soon syndicated to newspapers across the country, and republished in book collections, comic strips, and in live radio broadcasts. At the peak of its popularity in the early thirties, children in millions of American households eagerly awaited delivery of the next installment in their local paper. The Seckatary Hawkins Club, established in 1923, by this time had enrolled more than a million members, equal in scale to the contemporary Mickey Mouse Club and Boy Scouts. While the adults of the nation struggled with the grim reality of the Great Depression, American children like eight year-old Nelle Harper Lee avidly followed the exploits of chubby Gregory Hawkins and his pals as the fictional youths coped with a variety of adventures and mysteries set along the riverfront of a small midwestern town in the late steamboat era. In rural Monroeville, Alabama, young Harper Lee secretly borrowed Seckatary Hawkins books from the collection of her brother Edwin, a member of the club. These books were the favorite stories of Lee and her best friend Truman S. Persons (Capote) and in later life helped inspire her writing about small town life and characters. Her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, contains several references to Seckatary Hawkins stories through- out the text. Lee sent a copy of the first edition of Mockingbird to Schulkers, inscribed, “To Robert F. Schulkers, who gave me so many happy hours with Seckatary Hawkins...” The Hawkins stories debuted during what has often been termed the first “Golden Age” in children’s literature, generally considered to span the period from about 1865-1930. During this period many classic tales for young readers were published, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Tom Sawyer (1876), Treasure Island (1883), The Jungle Book (1893), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), The Story of Dr. Doolittle (1920), and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). Such stories were written to capture the imagination of children and be entertaining, a marked departure from the moral didacticism that had long permeated literature for children. In the decades before the Civil War, most Americans saw childhood primarily as a time of preparation for adult life, and stories for children were nar- rowly focused upon teaching morality and rules of conduct. But in the last part of the nineteenth century, juvenile literature became more romantic. According to Anne S. MaCleod, a well-known scholar of the cultural history of children’s literature, “Fiction for children became warmer, more relaxed, and more amus- ing when authors ceased trying to improve children and undertook instead to celebrate them.” Romantic writers tended to develop a highly sentimental style of writing for and about children, one in which childhood was valued for its own sake rather than simply as a process of becoming adult. Much of the literature for children was in the form of serialized stories, rela- tively short episodes appearing in magazines for juveniles or a series of books comprising a continuing narrative of the life of a young person or group of chil- dren. Serials written specifically for youth appeared early in the nineteenth cen- tury and by the end of the Civil War there were more than sixty American period- icals devoted to children. By this time a distinct gender separation had developed in juvenile literature. Stories written for boys were suspenseful adventure tales set outside the home. Moral messages that encouraged development of character traits appropriate for manhood were still present, but were now secondary to the story line. Stories for girls, in contrast, were centered on home and family, intense domestic dramas that focused on character and relationships. It was not until the literature of the twentieth century, in the new era of women’s rights, that girls became involved in high-spirited adventures outside the home. Little wonder then, that books for boys consistently outsold those published for girls; young female readers were drawn to read boy’s books to satisfy their own longings for stories of travel and adventure.4 The most significant otlet for fiction for both adults and juvenile readers, from 1860 to World War One, was in newspapers. The growth in numbers and circulation for American newspapers during the latter nineteenth century was truly phenomenal; by 1899, there were nearly 19,000 weekly and daily papers being published and newspapers had become an indispensable part of American life. Most of these papers included syndicated fiction along with news stories and advertisements. According to one scholar, by the dawn of the twentieth century newspaper syndicates had “probably exposed a greater number of American read- ers to more works of fiction than did books and magazines of all kinds.” The Seckatary Hawkins tales of mystery and adventure were among the most successful and durable of the syndicated serials, offering original stories to young readers in the papers each Sunday for more than twenty-five years between the two world wars. With their sentimental portrayal of childhood as a golden time “when children were close to God and nature, and the real business of life was play,” these stories capture the essence of developments in juvenile literature that came to frui- tion in the opening decades of the century. Gregory Hawkins and his companions moved through a richly detailed landscape far removed from the confines of home and adult authority, the local riparian wilderness or the mysterious depths of a cave, engaged in adventures in which they solved mysteries and often coped with dangerous situations and dangerous persons. Yet young readers could draw moral and ethical lessons from these tales; the boys were portrayed as having an inherent goodness and mysteries were solved and problems resolved through the applica- tion of courage, honesty, loyalty and common sense. A recurring theme was the development of tension and conflict between opposing groups, represented on the one hand by Hawkins and his small-town friends and, typically, gangs of mean- spirited “bad” boys from the city that invaded their territory.creator of Seckatary Hawkins, Robert F. Schulkers, was born in 1890 in Covington, Kentucky, and grew up in the Eastside neighborhood just two blocks west of the Licking River. The Licking River waterfront was a dangerous place for a young boy. The banks were steep, and lined with mills, factories and slaughter- houses on both sides. Instead, Robert and his friends explored and played in the green woods along the riverbanks to the south, the area between Covington and Latonia that lay about a mile from home. Robert’s early education was provided by the brothers of the Society of Mary at St. Joseph’s parochial grade school, located on Twelfth Street near his home. As an adolescent, Schulkers often “hung around” the Covington office of the Commercial Tribune, one of the leading Cincinnati newspapers, fascinated just to watch the branch manager writing up local news. “It seemed wonderful to me,” he later recalled, “to think that I was actually seeing something before it came out in print. I think that I would have done anything to have been allowed to write something that I knew was going to be printed.” It would not be long before this cherished ambition was realized. In February 1904 thirteen year- old Robert wrote a short story for a contest sponsored by the Tribune for their Sunday children’s supplement. The best of the stories were published in three suc- cessive issues, and on March 13, young Schulkers’ first story, “His First Capture,” appeared in print. In this tale, a young man named Ned Burton is employed as a detective by a small town to track down and put a stop to the flood of counterfeit bills coming into the community. The thrill of seeing his name in print must have inspired him to further effort, for in early 1906, the Tribune published three stories in rapid succession in the children’s section under his by-line: “The Red Feather,” “The Serpent of Fire,” and “The Cave of the White Dragon.” Although Schulkers was not yet sixteen, he had progressed greatly in the writing craft in the two years since his first story, devel- oping three-dimensional characters and complex story lines and demonstrating a real gift for vernacular dialogue. All three were stories of mystery and adventure, and featured exotic locations. The content and style of Schulkers’ stories was very different from the usual bland and moralistic fare offered on the children’s pages of the Tribune. The dif- ference is apparent from the titles alone. His “Cave of the White Dragon” stands in striking contrast to stories such as “Nellie’s Tea Party” or “Mischievous Danny Goes to a Picnic,” typical of adult freelance writers such as Maud Walker, Helena Davis, and William Wallace, Jr., who were regular contributors of syndicated material for children to metropolitan newspapers during this period. Whereas the majority of juvenile content was obviously intended for very young children, Schulkers, employing themes of life and death, crime and punishment, slavery and freedom, was writing for a more mature audience, stories that could be read and appreciated by adolescents and adults alike. Robert Schulkers graduated from St. Joseph’s High School in 1906 and began his professional career in February 1911, when one of his father’s close friends, James Harry Pence, staff librarian at the Cincinnati Enquirer, arranged an intro- duction to the managing editor, William F. Wiley. Founded in 1841, the Enquirer had become nationally prominent and served as the primary source of news for many residents of the Midwestern region. Impressed with the young man, Wiley offered him a position on the paper as his personal secretary and stenographer. Despite these other duties, Schulkers still found time to write children’s stories for the Enquirer. His first was a short Christmas tale that appeared on December 24, 1911, in the section called “Little Corner for Little People.” The “Little Corner” was a regular feature of the Enquirer’s Sunday editions and carried a variety of fare intended for pre-adolescents. Schulkers regularly produced sto- ries for the “Little Corner”; no less than sixteen children’s tales appeared under his by-line in 1912 alone. In contrast to his literary creations for the Tribune, whose plots and themes were designed for young people of his own age, the majority of his contributions to the Enquirer were intended to appeal to a younger audience of pre-adolescent readers. Early in 1918, Schulker began thinking about the locations and events of his own childhood. Inspired by these memories, the tale that subsequently appeared in the Enquirer on February 3, “Johnny’s Snow Fortress,” marked the first appearance of Gregory Hawkins. The story portrayed a wintry clash in a long-standing rivalry between two gangs of boys from opposite sides of a river. The story proved to be a big hit with the Enquirer’s young readers, and so the Sunday editor, Howard N. Hildreth, asked Robert to write more about Hawkins as a regular weekly feature for the “Little Corner.” Schulkers had not originally intended for Hawkins and his friends to feature in more than the single “Snow Fortress” story, so he thought about how to frame the further adventures of these boys. The story had sprung from his own experiences as a child, a time that he remembered as “the most glorious boy- hood in America!” This would be an excellent way to capture the imaginations of his youthful readers; recreate the same setting, populate it with similar characters, and devise magnificent juvenile adventures that captured the glory of those times. The wooded west bank of the Licking River, south of Covington, had been a favorite playtime locale for Robert Schulkers and his boyhood pals. One day, he recalled, he suggested to his friends that they should form a club and hold regular meetings every day on the riverbank, an idea that was met with enthusiasm. Along the waterfront nearby was an old sunken houseboat that would make an ideal club- house. The father of one of the boys, who owned a team of horses, raised the water- logged boat from the water and settled it on a sturdy foundation of logs, a safe dis- tance from the water’s edge. Once the boat had dried out, the boys were able to hold their meetings “like the big men did at their big clubs.” At their very first meeting, the boys selected Schulkers to write down the minutes of their doings, and, being very young and a bit uncertain in his spelling, he became the club “Seckatary.” Inspired by these recollections, Schulkers began a chronicle of the further exploits of Hawkins and his friends, the next installment appearing in the Enquirer on February 17, 1918. Although the club was led by an elected “Captain,” Gregory Hawkins was given the duty of keeping the record of all their plans and activities, and became forever after “Seckatary” Hawkins and the alter ego of Robert Schulkers. Each weekly Enquirer installment was presented as an extract from the daily activ- ity reports faithfully recorded by Hawkins in a school copybook, each a first-person account written in a simplified youth vernacular and each with an appropriately compelling cliffhanger ending. Schulkers interwove his real experiences as a boy with adventures he wished he might have experienced. With “Seckatary Hawkins,” he departed from the simple pre-adolescent fare that had, thus far, characterized his literary creations at the Enquirer and, instead, created “grittier” adventure stories more akin to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, in the process appealing to a wider audience of older children as well as adults. The locale that Robert Schulkers created for the Seckatary Hawkins stories was a richly detailed landscape loaded with features that made it fascinating for generations of readers. Hawkins and the other boys in the club lived in a small town near a river, and they could escape the mundane world of home and school by a short walk down the river path to their clubhouse, a former houseboat, in the woods on the river bank. The community was based upon Schulkers’ Covington hometown, and the unnamed river was a composite of the Licking River that forms the eastern boundary of Covington, and the Kentucky River Palisades in the center of Kentucky. The clubhouse was on the western shore, close to the river’s edge, in a wooded area corresponding to the area south of Covington that was known as Wallace Woods in Schulkers’ youth. On the opposite shore was the tiny fictional village of Pelham, most likely modeled after the real-world village of Wilder, Kentucky, located just across the Licking River. Downstream from the “Fair and Square” clubhouse were several key features, including a wrecked and stranded steamboat and Seven Willows Island. Upstream was the larger town of Watertown (based loosely upon Cincinnati, Ohio), from which descended storm clouds of trouble in the form of various gangs of boys intent on assorted mischief. Most of the Hawkins stories take place close to the river within a few miles of the clubhouse. This landscape was undeveloped, largely devoid of houses, farms, villages or other forms of adult intrusion. Instead, it was a wilderness area of forests and hills and cliffs. The island was a particularly wild and isolated place, covered by a dense green canopy. Hawkins and his club mates had a fleet of canoes, and frequently used the river to move up and down through this forested landscape. While the Hawkins stories all revolve around plots filled with mystery and danger, the boys also enjoyed the many pleasures of this landscape, gathering and eating blackberries, pawpaws, beechnuts, walnuts, hickory nuts, and chestnuts, hunting and trapping in the woods, and fishing along the river. They often built campfires on the riverbank, and would cook the fish they caught. They had their favorite swimming holes, and would spend a few weeks nearly every summer camping down on Seven Willows Island or in other similarly remote locations. Most winters were cold and snowy, and the boys enjoyed skating on the frozen river and bobsledding on nearby hills. They sometimes rode through the woods on horses borrowed from the farms on which some of the boys lived. All in all it was a tapestry of an enviable life, appreciated not only by Schulkers’ young audi- ence but also by older readers who led much more complicated lives. As Hawkins and his friends walked down the wooded river path to their club- house after school or first thing on Saturday morning, the stories gave readers the impression that they were stepping across a boundary into a different world, a wilderness of verdant greenery and broadly flowing water, with hillsides pierced by mazes of dark and mysterious caverns. This was a world in which parents and other adults rarely appeared, were seldom even relevant, except in peripheral roles. An occasional steamboat would plow past, paddlewheels churning, often drawing the boys down to the riverbank to watch. In creating the river locale and its his- torical atmosphere, Schulkers took considerable liberties with American geogra- phy. Several story passages indicate that St. Louis was upstream from Watertown and New Orleans was downstream, which corresponds with the course of the Mississippi River. But the fictional river was far narrower than the Mississippi from bank to bank and carried less traffic, and the terrain of the river corridor was, by Schulkers’ own admission, based on the Licking and Kentucky rivers. While the clubhouse was the most important locale of the stories, the nearby cliff and cave complex was also significant. On the western shore immediately south of the clubhouse was a high hill surrounded by cliffs. On the side facing the river, these cliffs dropped straight into the water and on the inland sides, there were wooded ravines at the base of the cliffs. A rocky footpath, the “cliff path,” began a short distance from the clubhouse and proceeded steeply up to the summit. High in the cliffs along this path was the primary entrance to “Cliff Cave,” a complex with multiple entrances that featured prominently in many stories. Although there are no caves of significance in the vicinity of Cincinnati and northern Kentucky, in the Bluegrass region in central Kentucky, caverns and deep pits are numerous in the limestone cliffs and highlands of the Palisades section of the Kentucky River, a deeply entrenched gorge that extends more than a hundred miles from Frankfort to Boonesborough. Schulkers first became acquainted with this region in 1915, when he married Julia Buckley Darnell. She had grown up in Covington, but her fam- ily was originally from Woodford County. Schulkers traveled to the region many times, exploring the local caves and cliffs, and was so fascinated by the limestone caves of Kentucky that most of the Hawkins stories feature a cave as a setting for some of the boys’ adventures. These were exotic locales for many dramatic action scenes, since many young readers perceived the caves as dark, mysterious, danger- ous and scary. Much of the appeal of the Hawkins’s books derives from the way Schulkers wove these extraordinary settings into the narrative. The Seckatary Hawkins series was a phenomenal success. Illustrated with clean line drawings by Carll B. Williams, director of the Enquirer’s art department, the stories resonated with the paper’s young readers. Beginning with the February 17, 1918 story, Schulkers delivered an unbroken string of weekly Hawkins story install- ments that lasted until April 26, 1942, a quarter-century span in which more than 1,200 original adventure tales were published. Schulkers initially found time to pro- duce several additional serials for young readers, including the “Boathouse Boys” and the popular “Mile-a-Minute Milo” stories during 1922-1923, but thereafter devoted his entire attention to the adventures of Seckatary Hawkins and friends. Most of the Hawkins chronicles consisted of relatively long stories in serial form that ran for half a year or more, occasionally interspersed with shorter tales. Sunday editors at other papers were dismayed by the astounding popu- larity of the Hawkins stories, and at first attempted to seduce young readers away from the Enquirer by publishing imitations. More and more papers, how- ever, began to inquire about carrying the feature; the Enquirer, which wished to keep Schulkers’ work exclusive, initially refused these overtures. In August 1923, Robert Schulkers and Julia took a business vacation, visiting thirteen cities in two weeks on a driving tour and selling the series to nine papers. Afterward, he signed with the Metropolitan Newspaper Syndicate to handle the marketing of Seckatary Hawkins, so that by the peak of the Hawkins fad in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the series was carried by more than one hundred newspapers across the country, reaching more than ten million households. The series was so popular that the Enquirer was deluged with requests from parents for back issues of the Sunday supplement with Hawkins stories. Since the paper was unable to meet this demand, in midsummer of 1921 editor Wiley sug- gested that Schulkers compile a book consisting of previously published stories. By this time, nearly two hundred Hawkins episodes had appeared in the paper, but most were relatively short series that did not comprise a cohesive story arc of book length. The ideal candidate was found in Schulkers’ most recent serial. In autumn of 1920, Schulkers was preparing to take his family—Julia, his wife, and children Robert Jr., and Ruth—on an extended vacation to Havana, Cuba, during which he planned to take a break from writing. His editor, however, suggested that he “take the character with me and see what exciting adventures he could find in a new environment.” Schulkers pounded out the first two chapters at his desk in Cincinnati before departing by passenger liner from Key West, Florida, in November. While in Havana, he wrote six more chapters and completed the remainder of the series upon his return to Ohio. The first installment was pub- lished in the Enquirer on November 21 and the final chapter appeared on June 26,1921. The Cuba story had all the right elements for a compelling mystery tale: an exotic location with a lost pirate hoard and a treasure map. In Schulkers’ opin- ion, of all the Hawkins stories to date, this was the best suited as “a most interest- ing book for boys and girls.” Seckatary Hawkins in Cuba, published in November 1921 by the Stewart Kidd Company of Cincinnati and illustrated by Williams,was an immediate success, the first of eleven books of collected Hawkins serials published over the next decade under the pseudonym “Seckatary Hawkins.’” Readers eagerly anticipated every episode before it appeared in the Sunday papers, “the sort of thing one carefully spread out on the floor and studied on hands and knees.” For many younger readers, “Seck” and his friends were all real, not fictional, and so was the clubhouse on the riverbank. Scarcely a day went by in which the Enquirer did not receive a letter from some hopeful child inquir- ing as to where the clubhouse was located and how they might join the club and share in the adventures. In response to this deluge, in 1923 editor Wiley sug- gested that the paper create an actual Hawkins club and issue honorary mem- berships with certificates and badges. Thus the “Seckatary Hawkins Club” was born in March of that year, an idea which quickly spread to most of the papers in which the Hawkins serials were syndicated. Each child who joined the club was required to sign a pledge that consisted of about a dozen promises and regula- tions, which, according to Schulkers, were “calculated to fortify juvenile idealism and consolidate parental approval.” These were later simplified to a single prom- ise to “always be fair and square, possessed with strength of character, honest with God and my friends, and in later life a good citizen.” The response was nearly overwhelming as children across the country rushed to fill out membership applications. By August 1930, the Cincinnati Enquirer alone had enrolled more than 150,000 children; the Pittsburgh Press reported an enroll- ment of 50,000; and the Milwaukee Journal had nearly 200,000 children on the club roster. Regional newspapers spon-sored most of the clubs, with local chap- ters led by adult volunteers. At the peak of its popularity, the Seckatary Hawkins club boasted more than a million mem- bers with branches in all forty-eight United States as well as international chapters in every Canadian province and in South America, Cuba, British West Africa, Ireland, Egypt, Japan, and China. In 1924, nine year-old silent film star Jackie Coogan was so enthralled by the adventures of Seckatary Hawkins that, while on a coast-to-coast char- ity fundraiser by train, he visited the Cincinnati offices of the Enquirer where Robert Schulkers personally enrolled him into the club and gave him an auto- graphed set of books. The story of Stoner’s Boy was among the most popular tales for many young readers and was Harper Lee’s favorite. The serial began in the papers in 1920 and continued with a sequel in 1922, both released in book form in 1926 as Stoner’s Boy and The Gray Ghost. Stoner’s Boy, whose name is never revealed, was leader of a gang of juvenile criminals from Watertown and was also known as the Gray Ghost since he kept his head covered with a wide-brimmed gray hat and a gray handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Stoner’s Boy established a hideout near the clubhouse, inside Cliff Cave, to elude pursuit and capture and in which to store his growing stocks of loot. He stole a large “South American bat” from a steamboat in Watertown, which was shipping it to a zoo, and planned to release it in the cave to scare away any visi- tors. This plan went horribly awry when Hawkins and some of his friends chased Stoner’s Boy into the cave and shined a bright light upon him. Stoner’s Boy has just released the bat, and is tugging at a rope, tied to a peg, which will allow him to swing across a deep chasm and escape. As he worked furiously to release the end of the rope, there suddenly came a great shadow swooping across the ray of light. “What was it?” asked Jerry in a terrified whisper. “Good heaven!” exclaimed Robby Hood, “look at that!” The thing had come back across the light again. It was a bat, the largest bat I had ever seen. It may have seemed larger in that bright light, but I could have sworn the wings stretched out as wide as I could stretch out my arms. We were all frightened. “Get back into the shadow behind the light,” ordered Robby. Just then as we did so Stoner freed the end of the rope and grasped it in both hands and swung himself across the pit. Just as he reached the middle we saw the big black thing swoop down from somewhere in the dark above our heads. It seemed to strike Stoner’s face and the wings seemed to close around his head. We heard Stoner scream—oh, he gave an awful scream! The next second only the rope was hanging there in the bright ray of the lamp. “Good Lord!” I shouted, “where is he?” Robby was crawling over to the pit. I went down on hands and knees and crawled beside him. He was peeping down over the edge of the pit. “He fell,” whispered Robby to me. “Listen.” By that time all of us boys were lying flat on the stoney floor and peeping over the edge of the pit. But we saw nothing and heard only the rumbling waters of Cave River as it wound its crooked way through the tunnel of the cave—down, way down, below. This dramatic incident is considered by many readers as the most memorable moment in all of the Seckatary Hawkins stories, along with the striking illustration of Stoner’s Boy swinging across the deep pit just before the bat struck him in the face. Unknown at the time to Hawkins and readers alike, Stoner’s Boy survived the fall by landing in the deep waters of an underground river below the shaft. He reappeared in a new serial about sixteen months later, still bent upon mischief, but ultimately repented and went down the river to begin a new life in New Orleans. Schulkers was quick to perceive the many potential advantages to be gained by offering Seckatary Hawkins through a variety of media other than the news- paper series and book collections. A monthly periodical, the Seckatary Hawkins Magazine, began initial publication in Cincinnati in 1924, and carried club news, letters from club members, and, of course, a Hawkins serial story. The magazine was prominently displayed at Cincinnati’s Provident Bank and lead- ing emporiums such as Pogue’s and Shillito’s and, each month, “hundreds of parents, urged by their frantic kids to please pick up a copy, converged upon the stores.” Seckatary Hawkins Magazine was soon offered in other cities where clubs had been organized, and continued publication until 1929.22 Commercial radio broadcasting was also emerging in America at the same time the Hawkins newspaper series was becoming enormously successful. In 1921, there were only a handful of commercial radio stations, and a larger number of amateur broad- casters. One of Cincinnati’s first commercial broadcasters was Powel Crosley, Jr., who began broadcasting under the call letters WLW in 1922. In June of that year Crosley invited Schulkers to read his “Mile-a-Minute Milo” stories on the air, thereby becoming the first storyteller to broadcast in Cincinnati. In 1923 “Seckatary Hawkins” came to the airwaves for the first time, debuting as a regular half-hour radio program on Saturday nights. The live broadcasts were scripted by Schulkers, and included reports of Seckatary Hawkins Club activities, contests, recognition of members’ birthdays, and a Hawkins story narrated by Schulkers. The stories were tied to the series currently being run in the papers, and served to further promote club membership and newspaper circulation. When the growing Crosley media empire acquired Cincinnati’s WSAI in 1928, the company gave the Seckatary Hawkins Club a Tuesday evening spot on this station as well. Other papers that ran the syndicated series also began to sponsor their own ver- sions of the show, broadcasting club meetings tailored to local needs. The broadcasts were so popular that in 1930 the radio show was given a daily spot in the WLW schedule. Schulkers, who up to this time had simply provided a dramatic reading of the story, now began to act out the parts, providing imper- sonations of at least seventeen distinct characters, aided at times by his young daughter Judy Schulkers for the female roles. “Seckatary Hawkins” then became a national radio feature from 1932-1933, sponsored by Ralston Whole Wheat Company and produced by NBC in its studio at the Chicago Merchandise Mart. Broadcast live, the parts were played by a cast of child actors, with Schulkers often providing the voice for adult roles such as that of kindly old “Doc” Waters. The last of the original Hawkins books, The Ghost of Lake Tapaho, was published in 1932 as part of a radio promotion in which children r