Before Perry Mason had Raymond Burr’s face, the attorney had Bartlett Robinson’s voice. Born in New York City in 1912, Robinson entered professional entertainment during the 1930s and moved repeatedly between New York stage work and Los Angeles radio. He was part of the generation for whom coast-to-coast movement was not glamour but employment strategy.

In 1943 Robinson became the first actor to play Perry Mason in the long-running radio serial. The assignment came years before television would define the character visually. Radio’s Mason had to establish intelligence, impatience and courtroom authority through speech alone, giving Robinson a place at the beginning of one of broadcasting’s most durable legal characters.

Yet Perry Mason was only one continuing role in a career built around serial radio. Robinson appeared in Backstage Wife, Portia Faces Life, Valiant Lady, Young Doctor Malone and The Romance of Helen Trent. Daytime serials asked for a different kind of endurance than anthology drama. A performer had to maintain a character through shifting plots and years of broadcasts while making each day’s short installment feel immediate.

As dramatic radio moved west and then began to contract, Robinson became a regular supporting presence in series such as Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Have Gun, Will Travel and Gunsmoke. The move from serial leads to repertory character work was not a decline in craft. It required him to become less identifiable, shaping a new authority figure, suspect or professional from week to week.

Television then made that authority visible. Robinson appeared in more than one hundred television productions, frequently as officers, executives, doctors, judges and wealthy men. The screen type seems almost inevitable in retrospect, but radio had already taught him how to make institutional confidence audible long before viewers saw the face.