Walter A. Maier
His family supported his goals by arranging for him to attend the Concordia Collegiate Institute in New York, an academy combining both high school and junior college in the fashion of a European Gymnasium.
Founded the year of Maier's birth, the Lutheran young people's organization known as the Walther League[8] was in need of a national director.
But after seeing the need of the patients and the vision of the Wheat Ridge staff, and without consulting his board, Maier ended up pledging the League's support for capital expansion of the hospital.
Editor Maier increased the size of the magazine, added features and pictures, wrote stirring editorials, and wrapped it all in a new, more appealing format.
Impressed by the solid message and zestful writing style of the articles signed only with the initials “W.A.M.”, Miss Eickhoff decided to join the Walther League and become a part of their vision.
The same Professor Maier who kept impeccably high standards in the classroom was also known for inviting entire classes of students – sometimes over 100 strong – into his home for meals and entertainment.
CBS accepted paid religious programs but would the charge full commercial rate of $4500 per half-hour to broadcast over its thirty-four city network.
With Maier as Speaker, The Lutheran Hour premiered on Thursday, October 2, 1930, at 10:00 (Eastern) or 7:00 (Pacific); immediately following CBS's hit mystery, The Shadow.
Within a few months, with the listening audience estimated at five million hearers, The Lutheran Hour was receiving more mail than such top secular shows as Amos ‘n’ Andy.
The Lutheran Hour was featured in over eight-hundred newspapers nationwide and regularly selected by both the New York Herald Tribune and Post as a recommended program for Thursdays.
He still had access to KFUO for local broadcasting; several times he was invited to speak on The Lutheran Hour of Faith and Fellowship, a Detroit-based program which broadcast on a seven station network in Michigan and Indiana; he could reach the public through Messenger editorials; and he taught scores of young seminarians Semitic languages and culture, and how to apply this knowledge to a better understanding of Scripture.
On Sunday, June 23, 1929, some 70,000 people attending the quadricentennial celebration of Luther's Catechism listened attentively to the event's featured speaker, Walter A. Maier.
[22] Soon after the Lutheran Hour went off the air, Maier presented one of his most significant essays, “The Jeffersonian Ideals of Religious Liberty,” before the Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
Time magazine featured articles on his “Seven Fatal Follies” and “Back to Luther!” addresses at Ocean Grove (July 27, 1931 and Sept. 4, 1933 respectively).
In the fall of 1932, he and Michigan Governor Wilber M. Brucker addressed 11,000 at the Motor City's State Fair Coliseum to honor the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth.
A superb orator, with the educational background to support his positions, Maier possessed the ability to communicate traditional Christianity in an untraditional manner, (as one magazine writer quipped, “the soapbox delivery of a Harvard script”).
To avoid the prohibitive costs associated with the first network season, Maier and the radio committee of The Detroit Lutheran Pastoral Conference decided to recommence operations on the newly formed Mutual Broadcasting System.
Broadcasting at 500,000 watts, or ten times the maximum output allowed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today, WLW could be heard anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains.
By the fourth season, the Lutheran Hour was reaching west of the Rockies again with the addition of nine stations of California's Don Lee Network and KFEL in Denver.
Jealous of its privilege, the council's general secretary was on record as having said in 1929, “in the future, no denomination or individual church will be able to secure any time whatever on the air unless they are willing to pay prohibitively high prices....” Having overcome the disadvantage of providing its own financing, the Lutheran Hour was now the largest religious broadcast in radio.
An agreement had been reached to add a 111-station Japanese Lutheran Hour to ongoing broadcasts in Spanish, Afrikaans, German, Chinese, Arabic, Slovak, Italian, Greek, Estonian, Latvian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, and others.
Mail count continued to exceed the rate which had produced 450,000 items in the previous season, culminating in a record of 17,000 letters received in one day.
Once a month this magazine addressed timely issues, secular and religious, within an illustrated format which averaged sixty-four pages in length.
explored subjects ranging from archaeology, literature and education, music and the fine arts, science and medicine, society and entertainment, business and labor.
His object was to provide thinking church people with spiritual insights into current topics, a perspective not addressed in secular periodicals.
The following excerpts are illustrative of the national reviews:[37] …sober, sensible, and fervent talks on religion…that have moved many people to serious thinking…–Boston Globe, January 23, 1932 …a clarity unusual in this day of foggy verbiage.
The work consisted of calendar leaflets for each day of the year with a Scripture text, and a 200-word devotional printed on one side and a prayer and hymn verse on the other.
The Lutheran Hour offered a tuition-free Correspondence Course entitled, “The Fundamentals of the Christian Faith.” The materials for this study series were also written by Maier – thirty lessons (with test sheets).
Maier's main interest lay in the fact that Nahum predicted the fall of the Assyrian empire at around 650 BC, some forty years before the event actually occurred.
Many modern higher-critical studies have assumed that Nahum must have been written after the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC, based upon the preconceived bias that prophecy is impossible or unscientific.
