Adventures in Old Time Radio

Brian Rogers

Description

Before there was television, before there were computers, before there was the Internet with its audio and video streaming, before there were cell phones, iPods, and iPads, there was radio.

Beginning in the early 1920s, electrical waves—mysterious to many—could be sent from senders or transmitters into boxes called radios in people’s homes. Sometimes the boxes weren’t boxes at all. In radio’s earliest days, hobbyists built radios (called crystal sets) with wire and empty oatmeal boxes or similar materials.

By 1930, radios were becoming massive pieces of wooden furniture proudly residing in living rooms.

At first, the waves carried talks and music from transmitters in cities into radios nearby. But, in 1926, dependable chains or networks of radio stations were being put together with telephone wires, and people in many cities could listen to the same programs simultaneously.

In the 1930s, local vocalists and other performers were being replaced on the air by network shows that informed, entertained, and enlightened. During the Great Depression, free entertainment coming over the radio helped ease evenings spent fretting over lack of employment and unpaid bills.

Programs such as Fibber McGee and Molly and Jack Benny brought laughter into millions of homes. Suspense and similar shows inspired terror, and Dragnet and Your FBI in Peace and War brought mystery. As World War II neared, and all through the conflict, radio instantly brought into homes everywhere news of major and minor events.

Because of radio’s immediacy, we learned, the same day, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, when Allied soldiers landed in France, and when surrender agreements were signed with Germany and Japan.

In his book, Brian Rogers, in a collection of articles based on material he has researched and written for various radio hobby publications, introduces some of the events and personalities that made up the golden age of radio, roughly from 1930 to 1960, and the decade preceding when radio was taking its first electronic baby steps.

He also shares his personal story with old-time radio and how, with warmly glowing vacuum tubes, his own hand-me-down radio brought friends to a boy who thought he had no friends.

Sujets

• Adventures
• The Adventures
• Old Time
• Biography
• Autobiography
• Radio

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 22 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669878339
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Adventures in Old Time Radio
Revised Edition
Brian Rogers

 
Copyright © 2023 by Brian Rogers.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2023909544
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-7834-6

eBook
978-1-6698-7833-9
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 05/22/2023
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
853665
CONTENTS
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
About the Author
FOREWORD
When I was a kid growing up in the 1940s, my best friends lived in a wooden box beside my bed. Facing me on the box’s front were some round things that turned and clicked, a little window with a light in it and, in the middle of it all, the box’s name in capital letters: PHILCO.
Inside the box were the tubes, coils, resistors and other electronic goodies that made it a radio, a Philco cathedral model my parents had received as a wedding gift in 1934. The shape was known as “cathedral” because of its rounded top.
We had a big Sears Silvertone floor model radio in the living room, but my parents had just replaced “my” Philco next to their bed with a brand new RCA set in a red plastic case that soon became besmirched with round stains made by dad’s beer bottles.
My parents weren’t into coasters much.
The 1940s were a wonderful time for a kid with his own radio. I’d run home from school to meet my friends in an orderly fashion, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy; Captain Midnight; Hop Harrigan; The Green Hornet; The Lone Ranger. On Sundays came Roy Rogers. On Tuesday evenings Bob Hope.
My radio friends were loyal and dependable, far more so than some of the visible people I encountered. The visible people chided me because I stuttered badly. The younger ones laughed and the older ones— especially relatives—told me what a disappointment I was.
My friends in the radio didn’t do that, and I daily took succor and solace in their company.
Later, as I grew older, I realized there was a war on, and I learned the names of new friends: Murrow, Collingwood, Sevareid, Hottelet.
After the war I heard such news as the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Phillip of Greece, and the following year, the birth of their son Charles. You probably know what happened to him recently.
Other friends told me about sports: Harry Heilmann described Detroit Tigers baseball and Ty Tyson University of Michigan football.
This book is the product of a lifelong and continuing love of radio. Thanks for letting me share it with you.
CHAPTER 1
On May 6, 1937, the German airship Hindenburg blew up in Lakehurst, New Jersey; and, as it fell in flames, electronic journalism took a giant leap.
Herbert Morrison, a 31-year-old radio reporter from station WLS in Chicago, had traveled to Lakehurst, along with engineer Charles Nehlsen, to record a description of the Zeppelin’s arrival from Frankfurt, Germany.
The ship had already made ten successful round trips, and its arrival was expected to be routine.
The reporter and the engineer were not to broadcast the arrival live but to send a recording back to Chicago to test the feasibility of transcribing an event for future broadcast. As well, they thought the sound of a blimp docking might be an interesting addition to their sound effects library.
But the mooring suddenly went terribly awry as flames leapt from the zeppelin’s tail section and licked their way quickly forward.
“It’s burning, bursting into flames and is falling on the mooring mast and all the folks,” Morrison screamed into his microphone. “This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, the humanity and all the passengers.”
The National Broadcasting Company, the network with which WLS was affiliated, broke its rule against using prerecorded transcriptions on the air and later fed Morrison’s eye-witness reports to a fascinated nation.
That report, with the frenzy and emotion it portrayed, became a classic. I have a recording of it in my audio library. The terror conveyed still spans years and miles, and I feel it all over again whenever I hear it.
Morrison and WGN showed that radio, and later television and the internet, could credibly and effectively report an event simultaneously with its occurrence.
CHAPTER 2
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man who was our President during most of the Second World War, died suddenly April 12, 1945. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia.
The first President to effectively communicate using radio, he had become known for his “fireside chats” with the American people.
Our family learned of the President’s death from Florence, our neighbor girl, who ran from her house, tears streaming, to deliver the news as we returned from a shopping trip.
“President Roosevelt died,” she blurted between sobs. Victory in Europe would be less than a month away.
Most Americans learned of their President’s death through “we interrupt this program” radio bulletins. John Daly, who had broken the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, went on the air at the Columbia Broadcasting System, saying, “we interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS News. A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead.”
Less than two minutes earlier, International News Service teletype machines had clanged for attention and proclaimed “FDR DEAD.”
It had been 22 years since President Warren G. Harding had died in office in 1923, and there were no networks then. Radio news, if there was such a thing, meant an announcer grabbled a newspaper and read it on the air.
The earliest “chain broadcasting” wouldn’t take place for another two years.
In 1945, within two minutes of the 5:45 p.m. INS announcement, the sad message had been flashed to a nation.
The following day, the President’s body was returned to Washington by train. Arthur Godfrey, later one of CBS radio and television’s brightest stars, in 1945 had been a morning DJ on WJSV, the CBS affiliate in Washington. He was chosen to describe for the network the cortege as it wound slowly between Union Station and the White House.
What Godfrey said and the emotion his voice carried have become a hallmark recording in electronic journalism history.
Godfrey said, “the drums are wrapped in black crepe and muffled, as you can hear. The pace of the musicians is so slow. Behind them, these are Navy boys. And just now, coming past the Treasury, I can see the horses drawing the caisson. …And behind it is the car bearing the man on whose shoulders now falls the terrific burdens and responsibilities that were handled so well by the man to whose body we are paying our last respects now. God bless him … President Truman.”
His voice cracking with emotion, Godfrey then returned the broadcast to network headquarters.
CHAPTER 3
I’m fortunate my family didn’t get a TV until I was fifteen. By then I was hooked on radio and I’ve never been sorry. With my eyes closed the words coming through the Philco cathedral model next to my bed created mental images far larger and vivid, more clear and colorful, than those on the box with the picture tube in it.
My listening then revolved around play-by-play sports and kids’ adventure shows like Captain Midnight , Superman and Jack Armstrong .
My first sportscaster hero was named Edward Lloyd Tyson. He broadcast Detroit Tiger baseball games from 1927 until 1940, but I first remember him broadcasting University of Michigan football games in the 1940s.
He was known on the air as “Ty.”
He’d been born in Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania in 1888. As a youth, he pursued acting. A performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the nearby Pennsylvania town of Tyrone brought him in contact with bandleader Fred Waring who, shortly thereafter, in early 1921, brought his Pennsylvanians to Ann Arbor to play a J-Hop dance at the University of Michigan.
The band was a hit and received a request from Bill Holiday, radio station WWJ’s manager, to come to Detroit and play on the radio. Waring then learned that Holiday was looking for someone to help him with announcing tasks and he remembered Tyson, his friend from Pennsylvania.
Holiday wired Tyson and asked him to come to Detroit. Tyson’s reply? At once!
In those days of radio’s infancy, announcers performed in more than one are