Arthur Anderson began working before he was old enough to understand that radio’s first generation was becoming history around him. Born on Staten Island in 1922, he entered broadcasting as a child and by his early teens was already appearing professionally on programs such as Radio Kindergarten and Tony and Gus. In 1936 he joined Nila Mack’s Let’s Pretend, a children’s series that would remain part of his life for nearly two decades.

Let’s Pretend demanded more than cute child voices. Its young actors played fairy-tale heroes, villains, old men, animals and fantastic creatures in scripts that treated children as a real dramatic audience. Anderson learned early that the microphone rewarded transformation. A boy could become a giant or an elderly king if the voice, rhythm and imagination were right.

That training helped carry him into Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. Anderson appeared in the famous Broadway Caesar and then worked in Welles’s radio company on productions including Treasure Island, Julius Caesar and Sherlock Holmes. The contrast is remarkable: while still young, he was moving between children’s fantasy and one of the most ambitious theatrical companies in American broadcasting.

Anderson’s career did not end when childhood roles did. He continued on stage, film and television and later became the voice of Lucky the Leprechaun for Lucky Charms, a commercial role he held for almost three decades. Yet he also became something rarer: a witness who documented the culture that had trained him.

In 2004 he published Let’s Pretend and the Golden Age of Radio, preserving cast memories, production history and a record of a children’s program that otherwise risked being treated as a footnote beside adult prime-time shows. That act of preservation makes Anderson important to radio history twice, first as a performer and later as one of the people who explained what that work had actually been like.