Frank E. Mullen

Frank E. Mullen was an American radio executive and agricultural journalist who created the National Farm and Home Hour, a daily NBC radio program that became a central institution of American agricultural extension broadcasting. Before joining NBC, Mullen produced daily farm programs in Pittsburgh for the agricultural publisher National Stockman and Farmer, drawing on his boyhood on a South Dakota farm and his habit of reading every farm bulletin he could find. The National Farm and Home Hour went on a national NBC hookup in 1928 with the cooperation of the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Grange, the Farmers' Union, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National 4-H Club, and the land grant colleges, and it helped raise the share of rural American homes with radio sets from about 20 percent to about 70 percent; Mullen himself went on to become a vice president and general manager of NBC.