Kiddie Hour: Harry Slatko and His Colored Kiddie Broadcast Robinson, Bill "Bojangles" performer Challenge Dance 1936-08-23 First kiddie hour radio broadcast in WIP Radio on Sundays from 3:00 to 4:00 PM called the Harry Slatko and His Colored Kiddie Broadcast, sponsored amateur dance contests that helped to popularize tap dance. 3400 free seats were made available to the public. (Philadelphia Independent 23 and 30 August 1936 in Willis 142.) Amateur contests for those who were fourteen years old to adults were usually also held at the Lincoln Theatre for a dance lesson with Bill Robinson for the child who wrote the best one hundred-word letter which told what Bill Robinson-Shirley Temple film they liked best and why (Philadelphia Independent 30 August 1936). These contests appear to have begun in the late 1920s. Performing Arts Encyclopedia http://www.loc.gov/performingarts Willis, Cheryl M.: Tap Dance: Memories and Issues of African-American Women Who Performed between 1930-1950. Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University, 1991. (1991). Tap Dance America http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (biography) loc.music.tdabio.154 tda IHAS 151216 loc.music.tda.1139