[7] In 1931, when the show debuted, radio had yet to establish coast-to-coast networks so two separate casts performed—one in San Francisco starring Floy Margaret Hughes and the other in Chicago starring Shirley Bell as Annie, Stanley Andrews as "Daddy", and Allan Baruck (and later Mel Tormé) as Joe Corntassel.
They shunned the overt political themes of Gray's newspaper strips and concentrated instead on pitching Ovaltine, using almost seven minutes of each broadcast to do so.
This was followed the next year with a membership badge or pin that included a cipher disk - enciphering the letters A-Z to numbers 1-26.
[2] The theme song was sung by announcer Pierre Andre, as "Uncle Andy",[11] or Lawrence Salerno,[12] who was a WGN staff baritone who appeared on various musical programs on the station.
Jean Shepherd used the show as the basis for his short story "The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message, or The Asp Strikes Again."
In the story, first-person narrator Ralphie Parker is an avid listener of the program and eagerly awaits the arrival of his decoder ring to find out the secret messages in each episode.
When the ring arrives, he anxiously decodes the secret message in that day's episode, only to be disappointed when it turns out to be an Ovaltine commercial.
[3] In 1995, Shirley Bell Cole was heard in a reenactment of Little Orphan Annie on Chuck Schaden's Those Were the Days radio show.