From the current SUMMER 2025 Issue

The entertaining and inspirational adventures of SKY KING

FLYING THE FRIENDLY SKY

By Jeff Metcalfe

One might assume that the timing was perfect when Sky King debuted on ABC Radio in October 1946. World War II had ended the year before and with it came a greater appreciation of the possibilities of air travel. Now here was an adventure serial about a former Navy pilot turned Arizona rancher.

At the same time, there were signs that the show came around at exactly the wrong time. Juvenile adventure serials had been a fixture on radio for some fifteen years and there were signs that the formula might be wearing out its welcome. ABC Radio vice president Ed Boroff had long been hostile toward juvenile cliffhangers — what chance would a new one have?

As it turned out, Sky King was given every chance to succeed on radio, and ultimately it did. But Sky King really took off on television. The character of Schuyler King was created by Bob Burtt and Wilfred Moore, one of many juvenile aviation adventure heroes they brought to radio, including The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen, Captain Midnight and Hop Harrigan. Roy Winsor, who had written for radio serials (and later worked on television soap operas), crafted the first script.

Believe it or not, there was a real-life antecedent to this fictional aviator. Jack Cones had spent more than a decade as a law enforcement officer in Twentynine Palms, CA, before purchasing a Piper Cub plane in July 1946. He soon became known as the Flying Constable, patrolling the Mohave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park by air, in search of those who either needed help or were dodging crimes.

“People think of an officer as just going out and grabbing a thief or taking a gun from some bad actor,” Cones told the Arizona Daily Star in 1955. “But a job like mine means one must help people as much as control them, over many miles and in places hard to get at quick. In 1932, I became constable and wore out seven cars in the desert then learned I could do much more with a plane.”

It’s possible Burtt and Moore were familiar with Jack Cones’ story when they created the character of “America’s favorite flying cowboy.” In any case, Schuyler King had come home from the war and — with his plane, the Songbird — returned to life as an Arizona rancher in Arizona. Between raising his niece Penny (Beryl Vaughn) and nephew Clipper (Jack Bivans), King managed to squeeze in “exciting adventures [that] will take you from his Flying Crown Ranch to the far corners of the earth.”

On radio, the title role was played at various times by actors Roy Engel, Jack Lester, John Reed King and Earl Nightingale. The latter went on to host a syndicated radio talk show (Our Changing World) and become a famous motivational speaker. The show was sponsored by Swift Meats and later Peter Pan Peanut Butter. Commercials were delivered by announcer Myron Wallace, a veteran Chicago voice who later moved to New York and became Mike Wallace, host of 60 Minutes.

Wallace carried an upbeat energy throughout, whether reading public service announcements (including one promoting gun safety) or reminding listeners that Peter Pan is “delicious, it’s smooth, it’s loaded with energy. At mealtime, it’s a treat. For in between meals, it can’t be beat. Ask mom to get Peter Pan peanut butter.”

For its first year on the air, Sky King was on ABC as a 15-minute daily show — complete with breathless “Tune in tomorrow” endings — until ABC executives began to eliminate such shows from their lineup. For the rest of its eight-year run, Sky King was a 30-minute, self-contained adventure show heard two to three times a week.

Only a small number of Sky King radio shows are in circulation today, but they offer insight into what was to come when the show moved to television in 1952. The 1951 story “The Mark of El Diablo” offers a good example of the template the radio show established; in this case, the story involves a masked rider on a black stallion, who sets fires to drive off the ranchers in the area.

When henchman Zack Morley traps Sky and Clipper with gunfire, Penny saves the day by using the Songbird to create a smoke screen that allows our heroes to capture Morley. In the hope of getting Morley and his confederate to talk, King promises them “a jail without bars and without jailers” and drops them in the desert — a hundred miles from town — before flying away.

Later, El Diablo is unmasked, revealing him to be a rogue rancher. Sky delivers the story’s moral: “Like all criminals, he and his henchmen will carry for the next 30 years the mark of law and justice – a number in the state penitentiary.”

After five years on radio, it was decided that Sky King was ready to fly into the new medium of television. When the show debuted on the small screen in April 1952, the title role went to actor Kirby Grant. The 40-year-old Grant had studied violin and singing on scholarship at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago.

His Hollywood career began in 1939 when he won a Gateway to Hollywood contest. The prize was a movie contract under the screen name Robert Stanton, which Grant utilized for three films before appearing under a shortened version of his given name (Kirby Grant Hoon Jr.), starting with 1941’s Blondie Goes Latin.

During World War II, Grant served in the Army Infantry, stationed in the Pacific until 1944. He returned to movies (even getting to sing in Bud Abbott and Lou Costello’s In Society) before Universal selected him to replace Rod Cameron in a series of “B” Westerns. From 1949-1954, he made ten movies for Monogram in which he played a Mountie opposite Chinook the Wonder Dog.

“I didn’t really want to do the Westerns,” Grant told Western historian Rob Word in 1977. “I had just gotten out of [naval] service and I couldn’t afford to take a suspension. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

Still, his Western background made him a good choice to play Schuyler King on television. The show debuted as a Sunday afternoon affair over NBC in April 1952, with a pulse-racing opening: An announcer declared “Out of the clear blue of the Western sky comes… Sky King!”, with Songbird banking, then soaring straight at the camera, the flying equivalent of Champion or Trigger riding straight toward viewers. For television, Gloria Winters played Penny and Ron Hagerthy was Clipper. The twin-engine plane Songbird — which was every bit as important to Sky King as the actors — was played by a Cessna T-50 Bobcat, then later by a Cessna 310B.

Peter Pan, who sponsored the radio show, did the same for the television version. As was the case for countless juvenile adventure shows of the time, the company offered numerous premiums to their audience for the cost of a proof of purchase label (or the inner seal from a jar of Peter Pan) and no more than a quarter to cover shipping.

It didn’t hurt that Sky King would personally tell viewers about the exciting virtues of items like the Detecto-Microscope. (“See, here’s the Flying Crown brand, my secret code, a secret compartment and a secret map. The eyepiece glows in the dark so you can signal with it.”) As writer Stephen Kallis Jr. noted, “for sheer inventiveness, no radio series was as consistently creative in the matter of premiums as Sky King.” Today, numerous Sky King rings (like the Magni-Glow Writing Ring) still can be found on the collectibles market, along with the Sky King Signalscope and Spy-Detecto Writer.

When Peter Pan pulled out after nineteen episodes, Sky King was in danger of being grounded permanently. Luckily, ABC needed content and re-ran season one’s episodes in 1953 and 1954, first on Saturday mornings and then in prime time.

Sky King was revived thanks to a growing syndication market and new sponsorship from Nabisco. Hagerthy left the show to join the Army, but Grant and Winters reunited to film another 53 episodes that aired from 1956-59; the entire series was rerun Saturday mornings on CBS through 1966.

Grant repeatedly credited the show’s success to its portrayal of family. “I wanted so much to do a show that told the audience where Penny and Clipper came from originally,” Grant said in 1977. “And why [Sky] was never married, at least explain all this.”

Winters was 20 years old when she first played Penny but maintained a youthful innocence throughout the show’s run. In 1964, she wrote Penny’s Guide to Teen-age Charm and Popularity, an etiquette book that inspired a hit record years later, when the band Nada Surf used passages from it for their 1996 song “Popular.”

Grant recalled that getting the role of Sky King put him in the unusual position of being a genuine role model. “I did enjoy a drink,” he said in an interview, “but I never took one near kids. I never smoked near them and I watched my language. It all had the tendency to make me a better person of me. I tried to live up to the character I portrayed. If I never do anything else in my life, at least I know I’ve accomplished something good.”

In October 1985, he was driving to the Kennedy Space Center to watch a Challenger space shuttle launch. Regrettably, the day ended in tragedy when he attempted to pass a vehicle on the highway. When that car in turn cut in front of him (to pass a car in front of them, apparently), Grant swerved his car to avoid a collision. The car crossed the highway and landed into a ditch. Grant was thrown through the passenger window into three feet of water and died. He was 74.

The irony is that Grant was to be honored at the launch for his part in encouraging youngsters to investigate air and space travel through his work on Sky King. “I’ve had young people come up to me,” he recalled, “and say ‘I’m in military flying or a commercial pilot or somehow engaged in the aircraft industry because I watched your show.’ That makes me feel good to think I’ve done something very constructive.”

To hear Sky King on radio, tune in to Those Were the Days on August 23.

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