James Alfred Schwalbach

Born in South Germantown in 1912, he was already writing, producing, and narrating his own educational safety spots while still in high school. He earned a B.S. in art education at UW–Madison in 1934, continued with a master's and supervision coursework, and in 1936—when Wayne Claxton left—WHA asked him for a program or two. He came back with a year's outline. Harold McCarty hired him.

Let's Draw, part of the Wisconsin School of the Air, ran from 1936 into the 1970s: music, sound, narration, a teacher's manual on the desk, and children drawing at theirs. By 1946–47 he was opening some 41,000 pieces of student art a year; by the late 1950s an estimated 120,000 classrooms were tuned in. Ohio State awarded the series educational-radio prizes, including for "The Wild Ride of Ichabod Crane." He chaired art at Whitewater from 1940 to 1945 and ran the training high school, then joined rural sociology at Madison and directed the Wisconsin Rural Art Program from 1945 to 1964, the circuit of shows that put farm painters in the same conversation as John Steuart Curry and Aaron Bohrod.

Wisconsin children who never met an art teacher met him on the radio. He died in Three Lakes in 1984. The raise is Germantown; the broadcast career is Madison's WHA.