After graduation, the 22-year-old was hired as the principal at the high school in the small town of Plainville, Connecticut, reportedly the youngest person in the United States to ever hold such a position.

Creating the character "Seth Parker", a clergyman and backwoods philosopher based on his real-life grandfather, Hosea Phillips, Lord wrote stories for radio of rural New England humor that included the playing of old-time songs.

Lord and the radio show gained a wide audience and the September 1931 issue of The American Magazine had a feature article on him under the heading: "At 29 He Has Made a Million Friends".

[1] Much promotional material was released in advance of the adventure, including that Mr. Eugene Nohl would be bringing the "Hell Below", a diving shell to be used for undersea exploration.

Equipped with the necessary under-water photographic equipment donated by the Pathé film studios, the hype surrounding the voyage promised that Eugene Nohl would photograph "the sunken civilizations of the South Seas Islands, of its deep marine life and formations" and of course "search for sunken treasure and bring back film of shipwrecks".

Sponsored by the Frigidaire appliance company, in December 1933 the schooner Seth Parker set sail for the South Pacific via the Panama Canal.

Departing from Portland, Maine,[2] the ship docked at various ports along the eastern seaboard such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Jacksonville, Florida, from where they broadcast their short-wave radio program that was retransmitted by NBC.

However, the broadcasts revealed a bit of the frivolity behind the scenes of a voyage filled with wine, women and the kind of songs that were not found in any Seth Parker hymnal.

The ship's distress signal on February 11 was answered by HMAS Australia, which was carrying the Duke of Gloucester home to the United Kingdom.

The schooner was eventually sold and its new owner managed to sail it to Coconut Island in Kane'ohe Bay, O'ahu, Hawaii, where it was permanently anchored for use as a bar and movie theater by Fleischmann Yeast heir Christian Holmes II.

He switched from the kindly Seth Parker persona to a dark and ominous narrator's voice for his Gang Busters program, billed as "The Crime Fighters of American Broadcasting".

A law enforcement reality series using authentic case histories, during the 1930s the program was hosted by Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and featured various actors such as Art Carney.

The thirty-minute program ran on Wednesday nights at 10:00 p.m. on CBS radio and opened with the portentous sounds of machine gun fire, police whistles screaming and tires screeching, causing the phrase "coming on like gangbusters" to be coined.

Such was the influence of Lord that Sioussat was given a Washington D.C. office next to J. Edgar Hoover at the Justice Department, where she was allowed access to official information from files upon which the radio series was based.