Tony Wons was born Anthony Snow, but for air purposes he reversed the letters of his surname and became known to millions of housewives as the top dispenser of romantic dialogue in early radio. He was self-made, forced to drop out of school at 13 to help support his widowed mother, who had lost her home. He did many odd jobs, and his program of self-improvement was relentless. He bought a set of drums which he played at dances and it vaudeville, and read widely in the fields of history, literature, and philosophy. His method was to read a page as many times as was necessary to capture the gist of it. Thus he memorized Shakespeareand around 1924 he mounted a campaign to get Shakespeare's plays on the air in Chicago.

At WLS, he was given 40 minutes to make his case on the air. He responded with a condensed version of The Merchant of Venice, playing eight roles. This drew heavy mail, resulting in Wons being offered a staff job at $25 a week. He quite his $75 job in a hardware plant and began a Shakespeare series that ran on WLS for three years. He was later heard on WLW, his intimate chats were drawing more than 100,000 pieces of fan mail one winter. _{John Dunning}