We, the People was a singular mix of humor, pathos, tragedy, sentiment, Hollywood glamour, and old-fashioned melodrama. It was considered a human interest show, but it dealt with such bizarre occurrences that some of its stories would have fit into Ripley's Believe It or Not (Ripley, in fact, was one of its major competitors for stories).

It began as a sketch on The Rudy Vallee Hour in 1936 and became so popular that it quickly spun into a regular series. Time called it "anybody's and everybody's soapbox," where the strangest variety "of human odds and ends have said their pieces." Subjects ranged from the wife of slain gangster Dutch Schultz to the postmaster of Santa Claus, Ind. There was a young girl who wanted to overcome the restriction of her iron lung and dance again; the parents of a 12-year-old kidnap victim; a woman 119 years old who recalled her days in slavery before the Civil War. Along with the obscure came the famous: Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, hamming it up on their 20th anniversary; Joe Louis discussing prefight strategy; Eleanor Roosevelt and Lauritz Melchior."

But the best stories came from unknowns. Dr. Harvey Warren told how he'd founded the Suicide Club, whose membership consisted of 6,000 people who had all attempted suicide. Gus Lang- ley described his wrongful conviction, death sen- tence, and near-execution, his final reprieve coming 25 minutes before he was to sit in the electric chair. One of the most-discussed stories was that of "Mr. X,' a man of about 70 who had been living in the Mississippi State Hospital for about eight years with acute amnesia: his emotional plea for help drew more than 1,000 replies, including one from his brother and sister in Alabama. Then there was Mrs. Franklin McCall, who told how desperate poverty had driven her husband to kidnap a 5-year-old boy in Florida: the boy died; the husband waited on death row. And occasionally there was an O. Henry twist, as in the story of the man who had saved a woman from jumping off a bridge and now wanted to find her because she had also saved him-he too had come to the bridge to jump.