Radio Memories: Memorial Day

"Pa, I got somethin’ to say. Don’t know how to say it… Lotta things happened to me, since I been away. Can’t explain what they are exactly, but they happened."

So says the son struggling to put his thoughts into words, trying to understand who the war has made him become... life has the capacity to change us in ways that make us frequent strangers even to ourselves; thank God for the blessing of family, for how they help us renew and reconnect with that part of ourselves that never changes. As he becomes a man, after all, he remains a son.

While Memorial Day isn't a Canadian holiday, we pause nevertheless to remember the sacrifices made on our behalf, keeping those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and the families they left at home, in our prayers.

During the Second World War, in those close-but-still-so-far days before television, the families left behind would find comfort, information, and entertainment through their radios, primarily through the forgotten art form of radio drama: the theater for the mind.

There was not much effort made by the broadcast networks to preserve radio programming from the 1930s through to the 1950s, so we are quite lucky to have what little audio artifacts we do have, from that era. Some shows were fluff in their day, many haven't aged well beyond their time; yet, a treasured few survive as remarkable mirrors of fading memories, precious testaments to the shared experiences clinging to the periphery of our collective mind's eye. It's in the hope of clarifying, and preserving, the echoes of those cultural experiences that we resume our Sunday series of Radio Memories.

This week we listen to the echo of an episode first broadcast on February 2nd, 1946, entitled "Homecoming". It marked the post-war return to the air of an innovative anthology series, CBS' Columbia Workshop. The program came and went three times during its long unusual existence, before bowing out for good in the late 1950s. Throughout its run it served CBS as an audio laboratory, allowing them to try out story ideas, writing styles and production techniques considered too experimental for regular commercial radio. (We played an episode from the series' third and final 1957 incarnation last Easter)

This particular episode follows a small town family and the whirlwind of emotions that accompanes them as they welcome a son finally home from the war. Modest in scope, but rich in content, "Homecoming" is a wonderful portrait of what radio drama could accomplish, by holding up a mirror to memory.

Our Radio Memories offering from last year's Memorial Day can be heard here.

This year's previous Radio Memories:

You Are There: The Impeachment Trial Of President Andrew Johnson
Great Gildersleeve: 1947 Easter show
Lux Radio Theater: Hitler's Children
Biography In Sound: The Story Of Science Fiction
Mr President: Romance In The White House
Frontier Fighters: George Pickett
Destination Freedom: Citizen Toussaint [Toussaint L'Ouverture]
Ports Of Call: Haiti

For a list of our 2009 Radio Memories listings, go here.

Radio Memories: Learning To Hate

After 11 years abroad Gregor Athalwin Ziemer finally returned home to the US, the possessor of an accumulation of ugly memories and sick souvenirs.

From 1928 to 1939 Ziemer had been the headmaster of a Berlin-based school for the children of American diplomats and businessmen stationed in Germany. This vantage point gave him a unique look at the changes that befell the German school system after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1932-1933, and the type of children that emerged from the "Nazi education" methods initiated by Bernhard Rust, Minister of Education who, according to journalist John Gunther, had shortly before "lost his teacher's job -- because he was incompetent!" [Inside Europe, 1938 edition, pg 60]

Gregor Ziemer had an eyeful of the awful transformation taking place in Gemany's youth outside the small oasis of his American Colony School.

At the age of four German boys were to take their first oath to die for their Fuhrer, repeating it with greater solemnity in two more rituals at ages 10 and 14. Songs, textbooks, math lessons, even art projects, all involved preparing young minds for dark thoughts of conquest, war, and especially... hate:

In Hamburg, a teacher displayed to his class a pamphlet, The Jews in the U.S.A., with pictures of New York City's Mayor LaGuardia beside a gorilla, "Jewish Judge Marcus Pecora" (presumably meaning New York Justice Ferdinand Pecora—who is a gentile), the "Jewess" Madam Secretary Frances Perkins. At lesson's end, the teacher asked: "And what do you think of a country like that?" The class roared the Nazi Party battle cry: Judah verrecke! ("Death to the Jews!").

Gregor Ziemer dutifully chronicled his observations in a book released to great success in November 1941:
Education For Death: The Making Of A Nazi.
In addition to carefully documented accounts of horrors witnessed in the classroom, Ziemer also introduced his American audience to the Nazi's forced sterilization and euthanasia programs then underway. Visiting one "woman's hospital" in Berlin, Zimer reported seeing women operated upon, willingly or otherwise, by doctors performing as if working on some ghastly assembly line: patient after patient wheeled in, and promptly wheeled out, courtesy of that once-esteemed "German efficiency", now gone mad.
The message spread: a whole generation of German youth were being turned into soulless monsters. Which begged the question: how to undo such zealotry, absorbed at such an early age, and reinforced so pervasively? Ziemer's book could only offer advice outlined in principle, rather than detail:

"If we are to combat the spirit of German youth with our own spirit of Democracy, it will have to be ... a spirit as fiery in its concentration as Naziism is in German schools. . . . Hitler is making fanatics. We should at least make believers. . . .

When war with Germany soon came upon them, American audiences not yet familiar with the contents of Ziemer's book would be greeted with not just one, but two movie adaptations.

The first treatment of Ziemer's book was, interestingly, made into animated form, by no less than the Walt Disney studio, in early 1943. Fresh from the artistic heights reached in Fantasia (1940) and Bambi (1942), the film showcases a realistic style seldom explored in their other, more humorous cartoons. Their adapation is not without humor: the studio's funniest animator, Ward Kimball, handles some comedy relief material illustrating der fuhrer in a symbolic fairy tale (revealing, I suspect, how the war inevitably coarsened popular culture at the time), while two of the company's best "actors with a pencil", Ollie Johnston and Bill Tytla, handle the touching classroom sequence between young Hans (animated by Johnson, suggesting the same innocence he brought to his work on the young rabbit Thumper in Bambi) and the overbearing schoolteacher (an exuberant performance by Tytla, surpassing the energy he brought to puppeteer Stromboli's similar tirades in the 1939 Disney film Pinocchio). The cartoon ends on a visual virtual kick-to-the-stomach... one imagines how powerful an impact the climax must have made upon the minds of audiences at the time, many with fathers, husbands, brothers, uncles and friends in faraway battlefields facing off against the very enemy the film portrays so grimly...



The "Hitler's Children" mentioned in the Disney film's title is an allusion to RKO's 1943 live action adaptation of the book, enlivened by its producer Ed Golden with what he thought would be a more marketable title. His financial gamble ("who wants to see a film with 'Hitler' in the title?", ran the conventional wisdom of the day) paid off handsomely: filmed on a shoestring budget of $175,000, the film went on to gross millions. By October 1943 the film's success made news, and Time Magazine estimated its return as between $2 and $3 million dollars, making it a bigger box office hit than any previous RKO release, including King Kong. In his autobiography the film's director Edward Dimitrik later estimated that by the end of the war the total gross for Hitler's Children was closer to $7 million! (At .30 cents a ticket, in those days, even the lower estimates make for a lot of customers...)

We examine this other cinematic adaptation of Gregor Ziemer's Education For Death in what may seem an indirect way, as the subject of this week's Radio Memories, our occasional Sunday foray into the bygone art form of Radio Drama.

Before the arrival of television, radio offered its listeners a wide variety of dramatic programming, plays performed not for the eye, as with tv, but for the ear, or more specifically: a theater for the mind.

One of the highest-rated, and longest-lasting dramatic radio programs was The Lux Radio Theater, spanning two decades from 1934 up to 1955. Their gimmick was adapting popular movies into radio plays, either "old" classics or fresh releases then making the rounds of regional theatrical markets. (Films were rolled out area by area in those economically-strapped days, rather than every screen all at once, as has been the modern practice for some time.)

Tonight's Radio Memories offering features the Lux Radio Theater adaptation of RKO's live action version of Hitler's Children, broadcast from a Hollywood at war, on May 24, 1943.

The battlefields change, but the battles go on, as whole generations today are still taught to hate, challenging us in our time to find the same resolve demanded by Gregor Ziemer in 1941:

"Young Germany is awake and ready to die. Let young America and its parents, its instructors, and advisers be awake and ready to live."

Radio Memories: The Sound Of Teamwork

Back by popular demand: our Sunday offering of Radio Memories, a weekly recollection of the dearly-departed artistic medium of radio drama… the theater of the mind.

This week I need some laughs, so we’ll be tuning in to the delightful comedy series Fibber McGee and Molly.

Husband and wife vaudeville team Jim and Marian Jordan appeared on radio, in one capacity or another, from 1924 through 1959. Their run as the big dreamer Fibber McGee and long-suffering wife Molly was one of the highest-rated shows of its day, a fact I feel able to vouch for anecdotally, since every time I’ve chatted with seniors about their memories of old radio drama, they all fondly remember listening to this program, often citing it at the top of their list of favorites. If I condensed all their memories into one single remembrance, it would go like this:

“He would have a closet filled with junk”, they would explain to me, “and when it opened you would imagine all the crazy mess as it tumbled out. Your mind did all the work, you see.”

The ingenuity of sound effects maestros like Frank Pittman (who started the closet gag) and Virgil Reimer (who turned it into an art form all its own) would be tested by this running gag like never before, a test of their patience as much as it was of their imagination. A collection of boxes, cans and increasingly varied objects would be precariously perched on a makeshift mount best described as stairs; on cue the sound effects man would give the top shelf a calculated nudge, and one pile would fall upon the next, and the next, and the next, creating audio chaos. A weekly terror gripped the sound effects technician, however:

What if the delicately staged apparatus accidentally fell on its own, before the proper time??

I remember reading in Robert Mott’s memoir, Radio Sound Effects, that Virgil Reimer turned the closet sound effect into a visual gag as much as an audio one, creating a moment of surreal performance art on stage for the sake of the studio audience assembled for the broadcasts; the preposterously decorated stairs of bric-a-brac prepared for the closet gag would be given prominent space on display for the audience to see, and savor. And what a sight in must have been: the conclusion of the effect would frequently be greeted by the audience with approving applause in addition to laughter..!

This sharing of comedy glory was not at all a common approach to working with sound effects; quite often comedians would fret about being upstaged by the audience’s fascination with the prosaic work of the sound effects crew, opening fake doors, closing gimmicked windows, ringing phones and all the other busy work they had to do each program. Reportedly the more insecure comedians on other programs even hid their sound effects technicians behind a curtain, in order to hog all the live audience’s attention for themselves. I can sympathize with why they felt the threat; when I was 12 I got to attend a radio broadcast of Canada’s comedy show The Royal Canadian Air Farce, and the lone sound effects man off on stage left was as riveting to follow as the four comedians as they bobbed and weaved at their microphones on stage right. The sound effects man could pull out an eggbeater or some strange device to provide the son juste, and it would completely overshadow all the clever dialog and funny timing in evidence at the other end of the stage.

No such fragile egos or insecurities from Fibber McGee and Molly, aka Jim and Marion Jordan. Their biographies reveal a reassuringly normal married couple from the Midwest, who kept their success in perspective even when theirs was the top show in the ratings; they never “went Hollywood”. I have a fun old book on radio comedy published in 1945, “There’s Laughter In The Air”, by Jack Gaver and Dave Stanley, that suggests the Jordans kept themselves busy off-stage, so that the temptations that came with stardom would not dominate their lives:

The Jordans live now on a modest ranch near Encino, California, a few miles outside of Hollywood… Jordan served two terms as president of the Encino Chamber of Commerce. He owns a thousand acres of grazing land near Bakersfield, California, where he raises blooded Polled Angus cattle. He also owns a firm that makes sand-blasting machinery, and a bottling plant.

Not bad for “mere” comedians..!

An unsung hero of this series has to be its prolific writer/director, Don Quinn. In an era when radio comedians often leaned on teams of four or five writers, Quinn wrote each half-hour show by himself. (Well, almost: he relied on his wife to correct his terrible grammar...) From the same 1945 book quoted above, we who struggle with our writing skill can read with envy how he approached crafting each week's Tuesday night broadcast:

Quinn and the players usually get together Friday afternoons to discuss the next show. On Saturday he plays around with whatever idea is decided upon and then on Sunday really gets down to writing, usually from 9 pm through the night until dawn. The cast has first reading Monday, and it had better sound good to Quinn because if he doesn’t like what he’s written he’ll toss the whole thing in the wastebasket and sit up all Monday night fashioning a new script.
“I will not willingly sell a bad show,” he says.

But he's also quick to point out the real secret of the show's success... the shared sense of mission:

“The reason for the success of the Fibber McGee and Molly show – and I can call it successful because of the Hooper and Crossley surveys – is that everyone cooperates. There is no bickering. There are no jealousies. The sponsor gives us an almost free hand, even in the writing of the comedy commercial…”

The supporting actors included Harold Peary, whose character Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve made radio history by becoming the first spin-off show in 1941, eventually giving the original show a run for its money at the top of the ratings. (Gildy started our Radio Memories series last Christmas, which you can listen to here.)

Peary is gone by the time of the April 7th, 1942 broadcast I've selected as this week's offering, but in his place is a character performed by Bill Thompson, who cast a much longer cultural shadow, albeit through indirect means. His mushy-voiced henpecked husband character named Wallace Wimple, showing up after the middle commercial in this episode, is recognizable to audiences today, perhaps, due to the similar voice he lent to a long-running theatrical cartoon character. When radio drama began to be eclipsed by television, Thompson found steady work supplying voices for all kinds of cartoon characters, especially for Disney.

Judging from the available behind-the-scenes anecdotes, the McGee show was one where there was room for everyone to make a contribution; therefore I thought it would be ironic to pick an episode centered around an historical event where the opposite happened; an unfortunate occurrence that shows what inevitably befalls us when "experts" decide they know what's best, deliberately snubbing the potential input of people with practical experience but few officious credentials.

In early 1942 the Germans' Operation Drumbeat sank so much American shipping that it caused a gasoline and rubber shortage on the East Coast. Rationing went into effect for that region, and President Roosevelt's bloated New Deal-era bureaucracy so bungled its implementation that it spelled electoral doom for the Democrats in that year's mid-term elections. Shortages were exacerbated when the Japanese effectively cut off 90% of the US' rubber supply, through the conquest of Malaya in the outreaches of the Pacific. The alphabet soup of agencies had not gotten around yet to properly inaugurating the US's own synthetic replacements for rubber; the resulting shortage was severely damaging to the war effort.

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (whose son later served in the Clinton White House), grandly declared that one million tons of rubber could be salvaged from American garages, backyards and attics. Despite sotto-voce assurances to the contrary by such figures as Arthur Newhall, a former rubber manufacturer then working for the War Production Board (WPB), a very public and patriotic campaign was launched to collect the nation's scrap materials (as you can hear from this week's Fibber McGee and Molly show, embedded below), but unfortunately to little effect. As recounted by Thomas Fleming in "The New Dealer's War: FDR And The War Within World War II":

The drive was a fiasco. At the end of five frantic weeks, in which the president made a statement and Ickes ran around like an out-of-control windup toy, the nation had collected only 335,000 tons of scrap rubber. Ickes was reduced to trying to confiscate the rubber mats on the floors of the Interior Department buildings. The Public Buildings Administration blocked him, saying it would lead to an epidemic of broken hips when people started falling on the slippery marble floors. In a last gasp, Ickes was caught stealing a rubber mat from the White House. Compounding the petroleum czar’s folly was his apparent ignorance of the fact that rubber mats were made from recycled rubber and were useless in the production of tires.

[pages 141-142]

As a result of his investigations into the handling of the rubber shortages, a somewhat obscure Missouri Senator named Harry S Truman [ghost]wrote an article in American Mercury magazine provocatively entitled, "We Can Lose The War In Washington". As chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate the War Program, he was infuriated by the self-defeating maze of bungling bureaucracy erected by the White House. By his own party. A true team player, he put the nation's interests ahead of petty partisanship, and endured a lot of criticism for his integrity. This was the public's first real glimpse of the man who would soon inherit all this mess when he is propelled from the vice-presidency to the office of President of the United States of America in early 1945.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, and possibly losing the spirit that sparked this post. That's a sign that it's time to dim the lights and sharpen the mind, to the sounds of one of radio's most humble, and successful, teams: Fibber McGee and Molly.

A list of our previous Radio Memories offerings may be found here.

Memorial Day Monday

A couple of years ago an unbelievable encounter with towering ingratitude and astonishing ignorance left me in an extreme funk. Would that young man's cynical interpretation of World War II one day become the majority view? Is this really what our schools were teaching the next generation to believe? I couldn't sleep that night, so I got out of bed and made this video in order to channel energy that was being eaten up by depression into a more positive direction.

I wrote this introduction at the time: "As free citizens, one of our most important responsibilities is to know history. The plain truth is: we are in debt to those who have come before us.
Our current blessings have not sprung from the earth like a weed. They were planted, cultivated; toil, tears, blood and sweat nourished their soil. Being human, mistakes were made, yet being human, these were attended to, and the harvest was resumed.
We now live with the bounty of that harvest, and in our vanity and ingratitude we pretend that these treasures have always been a natural part of our existence, so natural indeed that we need do nothing for them to stand, unattended.
Yet the wind carries a whispering truth, that touches one soul here and one heart there, nudging us out of our reverie, and makes us not just look, but see, what we have to lose, should we grow to take our responsibilities too lightly."



Remembering: An aging D-Day veteran risks all in order to return to France despite his doctor's warnings that, in his condition, the trip with his wife, daughter and teenage grandson may be too arduous for him to survive:

"I have a heart condition so I may come back feet first," the 86-year-old Leesburg man said this week as he prepared to leave for Europe on Saturday, May 23. "But I told my doctor, 'It's inevitable. I have to go back.' What can you do? You live day to day."
...
"We go to schools over there [in France], and the little kids ask us: 'What did you do? What did you eat?' " Huebner said. "But over here, the kids say: 'World War II -- huh?' Even many teachers don't know about it."
...
That's why Huebner's 19-year-old grandson, Jeremy Huebner, plans to join his grandfather on the trip."I love history, and I thought this would be a chance of a lifetime, a life-changing experience," he said. "When he told me he was going back, I couldn't pass it up."

Remembering: Some Illinois high school students are also getting a first-hand view of history, through a classroom project that sees them create video interviews with WWII veterans:

Ollie Prouty, 83, a 1944 graduate of Rock Island High School, described his adventures as a Navy signalman aboard the USS Asheville as the patrol frigate hunted German submarines in the North Atlantic.
More than 60 years after he stood on deck and used the red and white flags to communicate with other ships, he demonstrated his memory of the semaphore alphabet.
He described how his ship dodged a German torpedo, the pain of being away from his family and lighter moments such as gin rummy games with fellow sailors and watching movies on the ship’s fantail.
Asked by Tekiah Banks, 17, if he had anything special to bring him good luck, he replied, “I prayed a lot.”
“Instead of reading about history, you get it one-on-one,” Banks said.
“It will give us a better understanding as we read more on the war, and I think it helped me appreciate what our veterans have done for us.”
Jerraco Johnson, 17, noted that Prouty injected humor into his reminiscences.
“It will stick with me much longer than if I had just read about it,” he said.
Kailee Steger, 16, said the project helps personalize the war. “It puts a face on what you read about,” she added.

Remembering: The charity organization Honor Flight Chicago brings 79 WWII veterans to see the National World War II Memorial, in Washington DC. Time is running out for individual acts of appreciation such as these, as almost 1,000 WWII veterans pass away each and every day.


God Bless all who gave so much for us, may we never forget our responsibility to prove worthy of their sacrifice.

Radio Memories: The Sound Of Evil

We can see evil, but can it be said that human beings also possess an ability to sense evil? Does evil exude a stench, an aura, a feeling, detectable to a sixth sense seemingly combining many of the other five?

Roger L. Simon eloquently discussed how he felt he was in the presence of pure evil in his provocative “Talking Through My Hat” piece for PJTV last week, which I listened to this morning courtesy of the re-broadcast through Pajamas Media’s PJM Political podcast.

Roger’s piece reminded me of an occasion where I felt I was listening to evil, as I heard for the first and only time the cold, clinical voice of Stalin’s apologist, the nefarious New York Times Columnist Walter Duranty.

Every Sunday we take a break from current events in order to pull up a chair, dim the lights and partake of some Radio Memories, lingering echoes from a time before television, when radio was king.

In previous Radio Memories posts we’ve listened to many forms of radio drama, from situation comedy to western adventure, even news dramatizations. This week’s offering slides into game shows, as we feature the unique quiz program Information Please.

Panelist John Kieran, a sports columnist for several New York newspapers at the time, reviewed his long participation as the highly-rated program's resident sports expert in his 1964 memoir, “Not Under Oath”:

“Until [producer] Dan Golenpaul came along with his format for Information Please, the popular quiz shows on radio featured a glib master of ceremonies directing questions at volunteer victims on stage or persons picked at random from a studio audience. Anyone who answered correctly was suitably rewarded… But too often the exposure of the utter ignorance of the persons to whom comparatively simple questions were put was embarrassing. The Golenpaul scheme was to reverse that process. Have the public direct questions at persons who might be reasonably expected to give a good answer.” [chapter V, pgs 63-64]

There were two regular panelists on the quiz show: the aforementioned John Kieran, able to field questions on subjects as varied as Shakespeare, flowers, baseball, birds, and poetry; and literary giant Franklin P. Adams, to help fill in the gaps on theater, literature and songs. Infrequent panelist Oscar Levant handled musical questions, and was often requested to play his answer on his medium of choice, the piano.

The fourth seat on the panel was to be filled by a series of guests. Among the experts who made an appearance were Cabinet officials ("[W]e had Postmaster General James Farley who directed that his fee for appearing on the program be divided into three parts and turned over to Catholic, Protestant and Jewish charities and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes who did not", as Kieran puts it in his autobiography), state governors, US Senators and Congressmen (including future Vice President Alben Barkley); theatrical, literary and sports figures; novelists, columnists and famous-for-being-famous types such as energy spokesman Wendell Wilkie, who parlayed his memorable appearances on this and other radio programs of the period into an eventual (and unsuccessful) candidacy for US President on the Republican ticket in 1940.

It took a lot of perseverance for listeners to send in questions that could outwit the regulars in their areas of expertise. Clever fans took to low blows such as asking the panelists the names of their Congressional representatives (only Kieran got his right), quotes from poems or books the panelists themselves had written (often forgotten by their authors), even the date of a wife's birthday (which was answered incorrectly!). Every once in a while the listeners would get their facts wrong; they were expected to provide the correct answers to their questions as well as the difficult questions themselves, and producer Golenpaul's screening process let in an occasional mistake, much to the consternation of the frustrated panel, and to the embarrassment of host Clifton Fadiman.

Coincidentally, one such error produces some genuine tension and hurt feelings in this week’s episode, which was originally broadcast July 4th, 1941… two short weeks after Hitler launched the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia on June 22.

Regulars Kieran and Adams are joined by noted world traveling journalist John Gunther, famous for his “Inside...” series of books chronicling global affairs continent by continent (my personal collection of them helpfully provides the "cover" for this week's embed); and the notorious Walter Duranty, at that time a well-respected foreign affairs columnist. It remained for later writers to expose Duranty’s perfidious dance with the truth in his reporting on Stalin’s embrace of mass starvation as government policy, and other malevolence enacted for "progressive" reasons.

The unscripted nature of the show gives us a rare oral history of the time period; not many discussion programs of that era have survived..! Sometimes guests would be asked for impromptu comments on current events, whether it was baiting baseball coach Leo Durocher to go on the record with his World Series predictions, or, as happens after the question at the 12:50 mark in this program, Walter Duranty's insider's opinion on the outcome of Operation Barbarossa.

If you’ve ever read about the fate of the kulaks, if you've heard about the ongoing controversy surrounding Duranty's reporting on it in the pages of the New York Times, you will probably be amazed to listen to the sound of Duranty's voice throughout this broadcast. It answers many of the questions you may have had, about what kind of a man could see all that he saw, know all that he knew, and yet still say what he did in his articles as a foreign correspondant writing about the "advances" of the Soviet system.

You can sense it in his voice: it is the sound of evil.

Previous Radio Memories posts:

The Aldrich Family: Cleaning The Furnace
Tom Mix, Terry and the Pirates VE Day broadcasts from May 8 1945
You Are There: The Capture Of John Wilkes Booth
Fort Laramie: War Correspondent
CBS Radio Workshop: Son Of Man
Great Gildersleeve: Easter Rabbits
Dimension X: Time And Time Again
An American In England: Women Of Britain
Cavalcade Of America: Bob Hope Reports
The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast
Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War
Escape: Vanishing Lady
Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

Radio Memories: Wartime England

“Don’t judge us by the lobbies of the few hotels in London… see us as we are.”

This entry in our weekly series of posts devoted to remembering the halcyon days of radio drama follows the above advice, first offered over 65 years ago by a young RAF pilot, as we remember a Great Britain at war, a nation seen through the eyes of… An American In England.

An American In England was an unusual summer 1942 CBS series actually broadcast from London, where it was to be re-broadcast domestically in the US through a technologically challenging, hit-or-miss short-wave radio arrangement with the BBC. (The show got off to a rocky start when lead actor Joseph Julian gave such a convincing performance of a man struggling to hear a telephone call in the opening moments of the series’ first episode, that a stateside technician assumed the dramatized technical difficulties he was hearing were genuine, and cut the live broadcast off the air..!)

The background: in 1942, at the beginning of the US' entry into World War II, popular American radio playwright Norman Corwin had been asked by CBS to spend four months doing research in Great Britain. His assignment: to write and direct a package of 10 radio plays, from London, based on his on-the-scene observations, that would allow American audiences to better appreciate the wartime struggles and day-to-day experiences of the besieged British people.

One of radio's most distinguished writers, Corwin used his poet's eye for detail to leave us a remarkable time capsule, an audio diary of daily life turning at an agonizingly slow pace for the better, assisted by a perseverance forged in the grueling test of faith from a few months before. Taking the forementioned RAF pilot's advice to get out and meet the people, Corwin found a nation short of food, stressed for labor, and crowded for space, by continental refugees dreaming of returning home as well as fresh US troops getting their first taste of war.

The focus of the episode of An American In England served up this Sunday is self-evident, I guess, given the title: “The Women Of Britain”. It was originally broadcast on Monday August 24th, 1942, a week after the failed Canadian landings at Dieppe the previous Wednesday, in the middle of fierce Japanese counter-attacks at Guadalcanal, and amid news of an increasingly demoralized government bureaucracy at home. Its examples of British tenacity, endurance and hope, therefore, could not have come at a better time... then, or now.



Previous Radio Memories posts:
Cavalcade Of America: Bob Hope Reports
The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast
Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War
Escape: Vanishing Lady
Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

Radio Memories: Hope And Morale

"For fighting men, this grimmest of wars is in one small way also the gayest. Never before have the folks who entertain the boys been so numerous or so notable; never have they worked so hard, traveled so far, risked so much.”

So Time Magazine begins its 2-page story from September 1943, as it chronicled the summer tour that saw Hollywood comedian Bob Hope entertaining the Allied troops fighting in Sicily as well as those serving across North Africa.

This Sunday we continue our weekly Radio Memories series with a post that takes us back to a radio broadcast originally aired on October 11, 1943. Entitled simply "Bob Hope Reports", it dramatizes the remarkable story-behind-the-story of that busy summer.

The episode is from an amazing series called The Cavalcade Of America, a radio program offering historical drama which had its own rather dramatic behind-the-scenes story; COA was the creation of its beleaguered sponsor, the Du Pont company, who had been undergoing a morale problem of their own as a result of charges of possible war profiteering from armaments manufactured back during the First World War.

Starting in 1935, with this series a major part of its new public face, the company took major steps to repair the negative public image as munitions-making “merchants of death" that dogged it during the anti-big business era of the New Deal. Cavalcade began each episode with the new Du Pont slogan, “Better Things For Better Living… Through Chemistry”, before launching into an adaptation of morale-boosting stories from American history.

During WWII the focus shifted towards the war effort, and going through Cavalcade’s wartime broadcasts, from 1942 through ’45, makes for fascinating listening today… one really gets the sense of how global in scope that conflict became, as their stories swing from, oh, the Aleutian Islands one week, to the jungles of Burma the next, to submarine patrol in the Atlantic, to the Phillipines… and to this week’s offering, following Bob Hope’s morale-boosting tour of the then-recent battlefields of Algeria and Sicily.

Of the hundred or so wartime Cavalcade Of America shows I've heard over my years of listening to old radio drama, this particular episode has stayed with me, and remains a personal favorite. I think it contains an effective example of how to boost one's own morale, through trying times: look for ways to be of service.

Previous Radio Memories posts:

The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast

Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War

Escape: Vanishing Lady

Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

Radio Memories: Time Marches On

Time marches on: it’s already Sunday! And that means it’s time for this week’s Radio Memories post, where we pause to look back as an aid to thinking about how to look ahead.

Time marches on: it wasn’t all that long ago when neither television or the internet, but radio, was king. Radio offered its listeners an art form of its own: radio drama, theater for the imagination.

Last Sunday's Radio Memories centered around the Edward R. Murrow news program Hear It Now, the first step on the treadmill that led to today’s 24/7 news cycle. I thought it would make an interesting contrast to go a bit further back in time this week, to another approach taken to delivering news over the radio: having current events dramatized as a radio play.

The program for this Sunday therefore is The March Of Time, an early outgrowth of Time magazine. Time, of course, is still being published today, but the radio series didn’t last beyond World War II. A few seasons into its fifteen year radio run Time would create a second series with the same title, destined for movie theater screens, where in that format it outlasted its radio counterpart by many years. (A quick aside: I am appalled at how inaccurate Wikipedia’s entries on old radio programming are proving to be. Last Sunday's Radio Memories post included my disagreements with their entry on Hear It Now; the Wikipedia entry for The March of Time has only one brief statement on the radio series, and yet gets half of it wrong. The series started in 1931 but ran until 1945, not 1935, as affirmed by Wikipedia.)

Each episode of The March Of Time would select stories from that week’s issue of Time Magazine, and dramatize them on the air. A handful of actors would rotate through the many roles each week's script demanded, often with very little rehearsal, as the magazine wanted its shows as up-to-date as possible. From major international figures like Adolf Hitler and President Roosevelt to "ordinary" citizens getting their 15 minutes of fame, The March Of Time makes for intriguing listening from our vantage point today; like a ticking bomb in slow motion, each week is a virtual countdown to the eruption of World War II.

Every so often, however, it is the stories in the margins of history rather than its main streams that seem to say the most about the paths we've traveled in seventy years. Particularly so for this week’s offering, originally aired February 10th, 1938. Among the stories of pirate submarines, arms races and Nazi purges, there’s a short account at the ten-minute mark that seemed fitting to reflect on, given what took place in Washington, DC, this past Tuesday.

Time, indeed, marches on…

Previous Radio Memories posts:

Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War
Escape: Vanishing Lady
Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

Radio Memories: Small Town Heroes

One of my minor New Year's Resolutions will be to continue the Radio Memories posts I began the week before Christmas. Once a week or so I'll dip into my collection and post one of my favorite old radio dramas, from the early days of radio, back when radio offered its faithful listeners the excitement of a theater for the imagination.

For this fan, many of the more interesting programming appeared in the 1950s, at the tail end of radio drama's dominance of North America's entertainment habits. One very short-lived series starred a real-life hero, who, like most legitimate heroes, handled his accomplishments with graceful modesty and deferential humility. I'm speaking about Will Rogers Junior, little known today except for being in the shadow of the lingering fame of his humorist father, who never met a man he didn't like.

Will Rogers Jr did many things that his more famous dad never did: Junior ran a newspaper, served in the US congress as a Representative from California, resigned his seat in Congress in order to join the US Army fighting in Western Europe as a tank commander under General Patton, where he earned a Bronze Star... and:

He helped save the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.

In November 1943 freshman Congressman Rogers introduced what became known as "the Rescue Resolution" into the House, urging the creation of an official U.S. agency to rescue Jewish refugees from the Nazi death camps discovered being erected across Eastern Europe. His objective was to create refugee camps in allied liberated territory in North Africa as well as neutral European countries. (Interestingly, his eventual congressional allies in this legislative effort included Maryland Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro Jr, father of today's Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.)

To make a long story short, the actions of this group of wartime legislators pushed a reluctant President Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board in January 1944. It was with the Board's assistance that noted Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenburg was able to save tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest, Hungary. The Board itself was said to have saved over 200,000 Jews in the last few months of the war. In and out of the public eye after World War II, Rogers never made a big deal of his part in getting these rescue efforts underway; "I didn't regard it as worthy of mention," he once said, with typical modesty.

After playing his father in the high-profile movie biography filmed in 1952, The Story Of Will Rogers, Rogers Jr turned his multi-talented mind to radio, where from July '53 through January '54 he starred as a composite of the public's memory of both him and his father in the rural drama Rogers Of The Gazette.

I can close my eyes and easily find myself transported into the show's fictional portrait of Illyria; it's been my good fortune to spend quite a lot of time in small towns like it, as a resident as well as a visitor. The show's theme music conjures up many pleasant personal memories of hunting for frogs in fields and ponds, in later years pausing to chat with folks in stores and offices, and being greeted with silent smiles by strangers crossing me on the sidewalk. I met many Maggie Buttons' and many Doc Clemens' (the other two main characters of the series) there, and more than a few Will Rogers', whose heroic pasts were kept secret from younger eyes and ears, until it was too late to offer anything but posthumous gestures of appreciation...

Christmas Radio Memories: Wednesday's Performance

How's this for an introduction: Our countdown to Christmas continues tonight with one of the most remarkable radio performances ever mounted during the 1940s.

There's a bittersweet touch to tonight's special two-hour Christmas Eve extravaganza. It's from a radio series that was never intended to be heard by civilian audiences; it was not carried over regular network radio, but created especially for the Armed Forces Radio Network, aimed at service men and women stationed around the world, away from home and family.

The show is called "Command Performance", and was normally a weekly half-hour series based around a deliberaly loose format where servicemen would write in requests for stars and subject matter, duly answered by virtually every star ever asked to participate... which they would do for free. The Christmas Command Performance broadcasts tended to pull out all the stops in order to raise the morale of the troops at this especially sensitive time, each year surpassing the previous offering, leading up to this Christmas Day broadcast from 1944, one of the most high-powered, star-filled broadcasts probably ever attempted. Featuring a "who's who" of radio, cinema and music, under the guiding hand of host Bob Hope, just coming into what became a lifetime habit of performing for US troops at Christmas time.

As you listen to the broadcast (here reproduced in two parts, hour one and hour two), think of the original target audience: lonely desk clerks in far-off bases, filling out forms far from home, sailors crowded around their radio, on convoy duty in the Atlantic or patrolling the Pacific, pilots tuning in to pass the time over their sometimes long flights from one base to another... from the Aleutians to Australia, London to Cairo, Sicily to Burma, alone or in groups, tuning in to get a refreshing and renewing piece of home. I wonder if there might become a 21st Century entertainment industry equally devoted to helping those fighting for freedom..

I know that two-hours is a long time; since it's Christmas Eve, chances are that you are spending the night with family, and therefore wouldn't be reading this post for a few days anyway... and if you're not with family, you probably have the time to spare, and might even welcome the distraction... just like those lonely, homesick men and women whose service and sacrifice are being honored in this broadcast.

Part 1:

Part 2: