Category: Radio

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"Ain’t dat sumpin’?"

“Don’t gimme no back talk, now. Do what I tell yo’ to do. I is de president o’ dis comp’ny.” That’s what Andy told his pal Amos when the blackface comedy team of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll was first heard on network radio back in 1929. The Presidency in question was that of the Fresh Air Taxi Company of America, Incorpulated; and its fictitious head was thick, black, and halfway in the clouds. Millions of Americans followed the adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy on their wireless sets each weekday, laughed at their then celebrated brand of English and their audacity to believe that, given their perceived and actual limitations of ethnicity, intellect, and education, they could succeed in their enterprise:

Yo’ see, Amos, no matteh whut bizness you is in, de business is gotta have a head man to tell ‘em whut to do and when to do it. So dat’s de way ‘tis wid us. I strains my brain an’ figgehs out whut you gotta do. Yo’ see de brain work is de most reportant thing.

They certainly were no role models, which is what made Amos ‘n’ Andy such a popular and commercial success: Andy Brown and Amos Jones did not inspire blacks to achieve nor cause whites to perspire at the thought that they might. The status quo was never at stake.

On the eve of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration, as Arthur Frank Wertheim reminds us in Radio Comedy, Amos, Andy, and the Kingfish all expressed their confidence (or the confidence of their financially secure creators) that “ev’rything goin’ be alright pretty quick” with Depression-stricken America. To which Amos added, “Tonight ‘fore I go to bed I’se gonna pray dat Mr. Roosevelt will even do more fo’ de country dan he’s promised to do.”

Amos and Andy never dared to pray for a black President. They were, after all, not the children of a utopian imagination. They were dreamed up before Martin Luther King Jr. had and expressed the dream “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

That dream, long deferred, is looking more like a reality today – the day of the  inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States – than  ever before. Now, that really is “sumpin’”!

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" . . . within the limits": Radio and the Code

“Will radio writing always be in demand? What will television do to radio writing? Why should anyone learn a new technique in writing when some unexpected development might wipe out the demand for this sort of work almost overnight? Is radio broadcasting basically sound? Will it endure and develop?” Such is the battery of questions with which readers eager for pointers on How to Write for Radio were being confronted upon opening one of the earliest books on the subject. The co-author of this 1931 manual, Katharine Seymour, was an accomplished radio playwright whose work was heard on prestigious programs such as Cavalcade of America. On this day, 12 January 1941, Seymour talked to announcer Graham McNamee about her experience entering the broadcasting business in the mid-1920s, back when it bore little resemblance to the confident, respected, and efficient medium it had become by the late 1930s, by which time Seymour had co-written another book on Practical Radio Writing.

Many such how-to guides followed throughout the 1940s, a testament to the vastness of the industry, its demand for written words and for talent familiar with the codes and regulations to which they were expected to adhere. In the 1920s, when Seymour tried to promote herself from typist to writer, she was told by her boss at WEAF, New York, that “no radio station will ever need more than one script writer,” to which shortsighted remark McNamee, himself one of the old-timers, responded with a resounding “Wow!”

The days of largely unchecked improvisation were over. Being obliged to keep their word, broadcasters had learned that the spoken word needed to become copy (that is, text) and that every dramatic dialogue had to be played by the book the FCC would otherwise throw at them.

One of the latest addition to my library, Albert R. Crews’s Professional Radio Writing (1946), acquainted readers with what was known as the NAB code. As the author, then production director at NBC, explained, the code was a measure of self-censorship undertaken by the National Association of Broadcasters and adopted on 11 July 1939 to outline the “handling of children’s programming, controversial public issues, educational programming, news, [and] religious broadcasts,” as well as to set down the “acceptable length of commercial copy and its content.”

In keeping with this code, the National Broadcasting Company developed its own guidelines for “continuity acceptance,” “continuity” being anything read on the air. Anyone learning how to write radio drama with the view of hearing it produced had to keep in mind, for instance, that “[w]hite slavery, sex perversion or the implication of it may not be treated in NBC programs” and that the “fact of marriage must never be used for the introduction of scenes of passion excessive or lustful in character, or which are clearly unessential to the plot development.”

In the treatment of crime, the “use of horrifying sound effects as such” was “forbidden.” According to the code, no character was to “be depicted in death agonies,” nor could the “death of any character be presented in any manner shocking to the sensibilities of the public.” The very “mention of intoxicants” had to “be held to a minimum” and “suggestive dialogue and double meaning” was “never [to] be used.”

Responding to the hullaballoo over CBS’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast, NBC also stipulated that

[f]ictional events shall not be presented in the form of authentic news announcements. Likewise, no program or commercial announcement will be allowed to be presented as a news broadcast using sound effects and terminology associated with news broadcasts. For example, the use of the word “Flash!” is reserved for the announcement of special news bulletins exclusively, and may not be used for any other purpose except in rare cases where by reason of the manner in which it is used no possible confusion may result.

Was it any wonder that, as Crews put it, there had been a “tendency on the part of many outstanding writers in [the US] to scoff at radio as a possible medium for their talents”? Such talent-repelling strictures notwithstanding, he found it “heartening” to note just

how many writers of importance radio has itself created. There are dozens of highly skilled dramatic writers who are, for the most part, completely unknown to the public, but who each day do distinguished work in their field. The anonymity of such writers is no measure of their skill or their success.

It is with the efforts of those mostly unheard of and almost entirely forgotten writers that I shall continue to concern myself in this journal; writers who skillfully interpreted the code and somehow managed to subvert it, or who at least found leeway for play “within the limits” set down for them; writers whose works, to take up one of Seymour’s questions, have endured in recordings even if American radio drama, as an art, has largely ceased to develop further.

Having lost their purpose as instruction manuals for an essentially defunct business, books like Professional Radio Writing nonetheless instruct us how to read the plays that went on the air, to account for their limitations and appreciate their qualities.

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Osage: No County for Old Men

“Life is very long.” That’s the opening line of August: Osage County, which isn’t exactly short, either. Nor is it short on family crisis, on anxiety, guilt, anger . . . and laughs. Pulitzer Prize or not, it’s honest-to-goodness melodrama, homemade (which is best). No wonder it is roping in the crowds. The British, too. Even those who’d expect a play set in Oklahoma to feature dancing cowboys and a rousing rendition of “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’” I’m one of those folks; and I still went. Couldn’t have had a better ride if I’d been in the surrey with the fringe on top, neither. On account of that nasty eye infection, I missed out on catching the ride on Broadway; but I sure was glad to catch up with it here, with most of the original cast in the house. And what a house!

Not the Lyttleton Theatre, which is just fine; the Weston’s house, I mean, which is somewhere out there in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Inside, it’s hotter than a blazing summer afternoon on a tin roof, with or without the cat. But crazy old Violet Weston ain’t one for pussyfooting around. Her husband, Bev, is the one who sets us up with that opening line; he’s saying it to the new help he’s hired to take care of Vi (“She’s the Indian who lives in my attic,” Vi later tells the assembled family). To care for her, and that old dark house, is “getting in the of [his] drinking.” Or so he says.

Bev’s a former literature teacher and an even more former poet. That’s why he’s quoting T. S. Eliot, “who bothered to write [that line] down.” I was a little worried about that line. I thought, if he is going on quoting people, I might want to look things up. And who’d stop the play for me! Or try to remember that one name or line or word and then get lose the plot. It’s not a modernist drama, fortunately; and we soon come to realize why Bev’s saying it, and what it means. For Bev, “very long” means too long. He’s had enough of life, of life with Vi, whose mouth is so foul she’s got mouth cancer, and whose mood can be even fouler, no matter how many of those over-prescribed pills she swallows (“Try to get ‘em away from me and I’ll eat you alive”).

Well, Bev is not exactly dry, either; but he’s sober enough to plan and make his exit. Soon after making arrangements with the new help he’s taking himself out of the family picture . . . which is when the fun begins. There’s Vi’s tacky sister Mattie Fae (“Feel it. Sweat is just dripping down my back”); her husband, Charlie (“I don’t want to feel your back”); their bumbling, “complicated” son (“Honey, you have to be smart to be complicated,” Mattie Fae disagrees); Vi and Bev’s three middle-aged daughters, a pot-smoking fourteen-year-old granddaughter (“Look at her boobs,” Mattie Fae exclaims—and she is not the only one taking notice, as one of Vi’s daughters finds out when her fiancé starts “goofin’” with her; and then there’s Vi’s louse of a son-in-law, who likes them younger as well (“You’re a good, decent, funny, wonderful woman, and I love you,” the louse tells his soon-to-be ex-wife, “but you’re a pain in the ass”). Just wait until they all sit down for dinner.

If this sounds like last Thanksgiving to you, you might be squirming in your seat; but, for the rest of us, it comes as a relief to witness a family even more dysfunctional than our own. You couldn’t possibly cram more melodrama into a single play without making it, say, Polyester. But that would be Baltimore.

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" . . . from numberless and nameless agonies": The Bill of Rights Remembered

I might as well end this year’s regular programming here at broadcastellan with a bang. This one was sure made an impact, heard by as many as sixty million Americans—at once. Subtitled “A Dramatic Celebration of the American Bill of Rights, Including an Address by Franklin D. Roosevelt,” We Hold These Truths made radio history on this day, 15 December, in 1942. It also made the most of history in the making.

“No other single dramatic performance [. . . ] ever enjoyed so large an audience,” author Norman Corwin remarked in his notes on the published script. The program was “[w]ritten at the invitation of the US Office of Facts and Figures” to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the United States Bill of Rights, which came into effect on 15 December 1791,; but it was already in the works when the attack on Pearl Harbor took place.

“In fact,” Corwin later recalled (in Years of the Electric Ear), “I was on a train travelling from New York to Hollywood, still working on the script when the attack on Pearl Harbor took place.” Now that the United States had entered the war, the broadcast became a rallying cry, a reminder of the rights it is the duty of all those who possess them to protect.

“To many listening Americans,” Movie-Radio Guide summed up in its 3-9 January 1942 issue,

the big “Bill of Rights” program broadcast over the Nation’s networks Monday, Dec. 15, was an utterly unforgettable event. To the many personalities who joined their talents to produce the program it was likewise a memorable privilege. Coming as it did at a time when it could not have meant mere to the nation, the broadcast brought America figuratively to its feet. A transcription of the superb dramatic production [. . .] will be preserved in the archives at Washington.

The cast, as shown above, included Orson Welles, Rudy Vallee, Edward G. Robinson, Bob Burns, James Stewart, Walter Brennan, Edward Arnold, as well as (seated) Lionel Barrymore, Marjorie Main, and Walter Huston.

According to the Movie-Radio Guide, “[o]ne of the highlights of the presentation was the performance of James “Jimmy” Stewart.” So moved was he by the reading that, at the close of the broadcast, he “pulled off his earphones” and “let down his emotions, excusing himself from the studio and reportedly breaking into tears in private.” No wonder, Stewart was called upon to introduce President Roosevelt, who addressed the public from Washington, DC. Upon this experience, the humble actor remarked: “Imagine a corporal introducing a Commander in Chief of the armed forces!”

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Not Quite the "Voiceless Sinatra": Van Johnson (1916-2008) on the Air

I am not sure who came up with the moniker “the voiceless Sinatra,” which is attached to virtually every obituary of and tribute for Van Johnson, the Hollywood actor who died on 12 December 2008 at the age of 92. Apparently, the coining of the phrase dates back to the mid-1940s and was meant to capture the boy-next-door’s appeal to teen-aged moviegoers (audible in the 11 December 1945 Theater of Romance introduction to Love Affair). It is a misleading label nonetheless, considering that Johnson was heard in musicals and had many a voice-only part in the so-called theater of the mind. Back in 1985, I saw him on the New York stage, when he starred in La Cage Aux Folles, the first Broadway musical I ever saw. Johnson’s show business career was long and diverse, if slow in becoming distinguished.

Many of his early roles were little more than featured bit parts designed to draw attention to the young hopeful on the MGM lot. As was the case with many a rising star, radio assisted in his promotion. Along with first-billed Edward Arnold and his co-star Fay Bainter, Johnson was given the opportunity to reprise his role in The War Against Mrs. Hadley for the in a Lux Radio Theater, in a broadcast commemorating the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1942). Introducing the players, host Cecil B. DeMille referred to Johnson as one of Hollywood’s “promising newcomers.”

Due to a severe accident, Johnson very nearly did not get a chance to make good on that promise. Barred from military action, he served his country on the home front, appearing in a string of wartime pictures, including The Human Comedy, A Guy Named Joe, and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. Last night, I saw him in The White Cliffs of Dover. In it, Johnson plays the hapless admirer of a young woman (Irene Dunne) who visits England shortly before the Great War, falls in love and stays. Johnson is seen in the opening scene, but has only one memorable moment thereafter when he gets to kiss his married sweetheart during a chance encounter. I suppose MGM had so many stars back then that it could afford such frivolous casting.

Throughout the Second World War, Johnson remained “one of the screen’s most rapidly rising young personalities,” as he was billed on the 2 November 1944 broadcast of Suspense. Since his fine performance in “The Singing Walls” is not available on the Internet Archive, where you will hear Preston Foster and Dane Clark instead (in a 2 September 1943 production of the play), I have temporarily made the recording available here..

Johnson returned to Suspense four times, namely for ”The Defense Rests” (6 October 1949), ”Salvage” (6 April 1950), ”Strange for a Killer” (15 March 1951), and “Around the World” (6 April 1953).

Aside from his numerous dramatic performances on the air, including the Theatre Guild’s non-musical presentation of State Fair (4 January 1953), Van Johnson was also heard singing “Pennies from Heaven” as a tribute to an ailing Bing Crosby on The Big Show (1 April 1951). “I haven’t been singing much since I’ve been in pictures,” the former “song-and-dance man” warned his hostess after performing in a scene from his upcoming picture Go for Broke (1951), “My voice might crack.” Well, whatever Bob Hope’s cracks, “Go for Croak” he did not. Van Johnson’s was not such bad record for someone allegedly “voiceless.”

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"Bleiben Sie wohl und halten Sie sich munter": A Visit at Kaltenmeyer’s

K A M M A N. I am sure a lot of readers of Radio Guide magazine would have found “Bruce ___, ‘Professor Kaltenmeyer” as easy a crossword puzzle clue as “Jane ___, comedienne” or “___ Wallington, announcer.”

From 1932 onwards, Bruce Kamman played the good-natured and much put upon teacher of the gang at Kaltenmeyer’s Kindergarten, a weekly comedy program that originiated from WMAQ, Chicago. Kaltenmeyer’s is one of those popular programs that have all but disappeared into thin air, the exception being the 12 December 1936 broadcast (which you may access on Jerry Haendiges’s invaluable “Same Time, Same Station” site). Reminiscent of and anticipating German schoolboy comedies like Heinrich Spoerl’s Feuerzangenbowle or Erich Kästner’s Das Fliegende Klassenzimmer (both 1933), Kaltenmeyer is a winsome trifle of a show. Each week, the Kindergarten opened with the catchy signature “Just for Fun”:

Kaltenmeyer’s starting,
Let’s all go to school.
In this kindergarten,
Where nonsense is the rule.

Indeed, much of it is nonsense, some of it song. Fibber McGee and Molly team Jim and Marian Jordan were featured on the program; until the fall of 1936, they were among the Professor’s international crowd of poopils. The 12 December 1936 broadcast (an excerpt of which was later rebroadcast on Recollections at Thirty) includes the somewhat incongruously wistful “Sweetheart, Let’s Grow Old Together” and offers at least one memorable pun involving the definition of the word “indisputable,” which one Kaltenmeyer’s rambunctious kids (adults all) manages to put into the following sentence: “Indisputable weather we’re having.”

It is Bruce Kamman’s voice, though, that adds “indisputable” charm to the nonsense. It is the kind of Sig Ruman-Frank Reichert voice—warm, avuncular, and too Jean Hersholt to be altogether ridiculously, let alone threateningly Teutonic. According to Francis M. Nevins’s The Sound of Detection, the Cincinnati-born Kamman, who entered radio as early as 1920, would continue his broadcasting career off mike, namely by producing and directing episodes of the Ellery Queen mystery-cum-celebrity quiz program.

Kamman’s days as Kaltenmeyer came to an end once the Germans began to wage war in Europe. In 1940, well before the United States entered the Second World War, Kaltenmeyer stopped saying “Auf Wiedersehen.” The character was removed from the Kindergarten, and what was left of the show folded soon thereafter.

I guess, when you make a career of sounding like Sig Ruman, you were expected to start shouting “Sieg Heil!” or hiss sinisterly and subsequently expire, rather than be permitted to send kindly greetings like “Bleiben Sie wohl und halten Sie sich munter” (“stay well and cheerful”) to the American people, whatever their heritage or dialect. Clearly “good old days” recalled in the theme song were over.

Now, let’s all go to back to the school that was radio and solve the puzzle . . .

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“I hold no animosity toward the Jews”: The Father Coughlin Factor

Listeners tuning in to station WHBI, Newark, New Jersey, on this day, 11 December, in 1938, were reminded that what they were about to hear was “in no sense a donated hour.” The broadcast was “paid for at full commercial rates”; and as long as they desired Father Coughlin into their homes, he would be “glad to speak fearlessly and courageously” from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, from whence he spread what was billed as a “message of Christianity and Americanism to Catholic and Protestant and religious Jew.”

As Siegel and Siegel point out in their aforementioned study Radio and the Jews (2007), Father Coughlin was at that time increasingly coming under attack. In the fall of 1938, some stations no longer carried his weekly radio addresses, which had once been heard by as many as forty-five million US Americans. While anxious to defend himself, Coughlin was not about to recant or withdraw.

In his 11 December broadcast, he expounded again on his favorite subject, “persecution and Communism,” by which he meant the persecution of American Christians by Communist Jews. It was his “desire as a non-Jew,” Coughlin insisted, to tell his audience, including “fellow Jewish citizens,” the “truth.”

The adjective “religious,” attached as was by Coughlin only to Jew, not to Catholic or Protestant, was significant in his defense of his special brand of anti-Semitism, a distinction between “good” and “bad” Jews that enabled him to denounce “atheistic Jews” as Communists. “Show me a man who disbelieves in God, and particularly who opposes the dissemination of knowledge concerning God, and I will show you an embryonic Communist.”

In his condemnation of the “insidious serpent” of atheism as manifested in Communism, however, Coughlin made no mention of non-practicing Catholics or non-believing Protestants. According to his preachings, the Jew, rather than the Catholic or Protestant, was that “embryonic” Communist. No other religions got as much as a mention.

Ostensibly to “inform” listeners “what thoughts millions of persons are entertaining,” Coughlin argued that, in “Europe particularly, Jews in great numbers have been identified with the Communist movement, with Communist slaughter and Christian persecution.”

He urged American Jews—the “Godless” among whom were conspiring to do away with “the last vestiges of Christmas practices from our schools”—to disassociate themselves from the Jews in Europe at the very moment in modern history when the Jews in Europe were most in need of support from the free world:

O, there comes a time in the life of every individual as well as in the life of every nation when righteousness and justice must take precedence over the bonds of race and blood.  Tolerance then becomes a heinous vice when it tolerates the theology of atheism, the patriotism of internationalism, and the justice of religious persecution.

While “graciously admit[ing] the contribution towards religion and culture accredited to Jews”; while claiming to have spent “many precious hours” in the “companionship of the prophets of Israel,” Coughlin got down at last to the nastiness that was his business. As he put it,

when the house of our civilization is wrapped in the lurid flames of destruction, this is not the time for idle eulogizing.  When the house is on fire, its tenants are not apt to gather in the drawing room to be thrilled by its paintings and raptured by its sculpture, its poetry, its tomes of music or its encyclopedia of science, which are there on exhibit.  When the house is on fire, as is the house of our civilization today, we dispense with gratifying urbanities and call in the fire department to save our possessions lest they be lost in the general conflagration.

Any acknowledgment that the “conflagration” threatened the Jews more than the Christians so shortly after Kristallnacht—the atrocities of which he gainsaid in his 20 November 1938 broadcast—are relegated to the attic that are the dependent clauses of Father Coughlin’s rhetoric, which, in its far from courageous concessions, is as disingenuous and invidious as the language of Bill O’Reilly today.

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"Samson, made captive, blind": Milton on the Wireless

BBC Radio 3 is in the middle of a Milton season, designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the poet’s birth. This week, John Milton’s works are the subject of The Essay; his views, their significance and influence, are discussed on this week’s Sunday Feature, while excerpts from his poetry are recited on Words and Music. On 14 December, a new production of Milton’s Samson Agonistes will be presented by Drama on 3.

The wireless gave birth to the career of many a Milton, from announcers Milton Cross and John Milton Kennedy to comic Milton Berle. Among its writers numbers Milton Geiger, a playwright whom Best Broadcasts anthologist Max Wylie singled out for his ability to bring “reality and movement to a property that is in every sense an allegory.” More than any of those Miltons on the air, John, the poet and essayist, is truly in his element in the so-called blind medium of radio. His struggle to combat metaphorical blindness while being afflicted with physical sightlessness—a challenge that became the subject of a radio play (previously discussed here) was frequently the theme of his poetry, from “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner Upon His Blindness” to Paradise Lost and, finally, Samson Agonistes:

“O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!” the captured Samson, blinded and bereft of his powers, laments:

Blind among enemies! O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased.
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm, the vilest here excel me:
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own—
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

As a political writer eager to get his word out, Milton might have embraced the swift spreading of ideas that wireless technology makes possible. He would have seen in broadcasting the dissemination of so much good mingled “almost inseparably” with so much evil, from which the good is “hardly to be discerned.” To him, though, discernment was not the result of a shutting out of anything potentially harmful or ostensibly bad, but of a taking in of it all and an informed judging of its qualities. He would have welcomed the chance to have his words reach the ears of the multitude in a single broadcast, and of hearing the voices of others in an open forum.

Yet was there ever such a forum on the air? As he did in his Areopagitica, Milton would have objected to the licensing and censorship that threaten and curtail the freedom of speech. Commercial broadcasting, he might have argued, is not unlike Samson, betrayed, imprisoned and abused: “in power of others, never in [its] own,” a “moving grave” awaiting death by television. Even when it was still capable of bringing down the house, radio, like Samson, went down in the process before ever entirely convincing anyone of the power and virtue of sightless vision.

So, if Samson is Radio, who is his Delilah? Would it be television, the sponsors, radio executives, or, perhaps, the Philistine public at large?

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The Black Sheep and the Baby: A Kind of Christmas Story

I was not the last person to see Ilse Hiss alive; but I would like to think that I was the last one she had wanted to see. Shortly before Thanksgiving, Tante Ilse had been hospitalized with pneumonia. I knew then that she would not come out of that room upright and walking. She knew it, too. During the last few years of her life, I had gotten very close to my great-aunt. I have no other relatives in America, and none elsewhere that would speak to me. Call me a black sheep, if you like. I’m sure my family calls me many other things besides. Anyway, this isn’t about me. This isn’t even about Tante Ilse; but I had no idea what is was all about when the nurse handed me that small parcel. My inheritance, I thought.

Tante Ilse had already left me plenty. Memories, mostly. Hours of impressions and recollections I had preserved on tape. Her ‘recording angel’ she once called me in what I assumed to be a rare moment of sentimentality. Then she winked at me, chuckled, and, in that year-round Octoberfest of an accent she had kept after nearly six decades of life in America, she added: “Aindshell? I brobaply don’t know der haff of it.”

Tante Ilse, as I said before, had been a baby crier; she had a talent for bawling that was very much in demand during the days before television, when radio was the nation’s home theater. “Vrom me, dey wanted only babies,” Tante Ilse summed up her unlikely—and largely undocumented—history in show business. “Alleright, babies I gave dem. Och, how dey endjoyed to hear me gurkle and coo. Only during Christmas I vas still. Den, de holy invent dook over; and he was not allowed to make much noiss.” So, when the nurse handed me that audiotape, I expected it to contain a sampling of her cries.

To my disappointment, there wasn’t as much as a whimper on it. Just talk and music, and a rather dismal poetry recital: an old radio program from one of New York’s small, independent stations. As tuned-in as I was to old-time radio back then, having made it the subject of my Master’s thesis, I did not recognize any of the voices. Why had my aunt given me this recording? And why had she not shared it with me before? I could not help thinking that Tante Ilse, prim and Protestant in spite of herself, was sending me a message she could only deliver from the grave.

Aside from Walt Whitman, whose poetry was haltingly recited, the only name mentioned on the program was that of the announcer, one frightfully British sounding Cecil Bridgewater, whom I had never heard of. I was none the wiser after my aunt’s funeral. The friends she made during her radio days had long passed on, and no one present could recall much of her early life, her leaving Germany after the Nazis had come into power, her struggle to earn a living in New York City, and her unlikely foray into broadcasting after she was overheard imitating a toddler at her neighborhood market. “You call this grying?” she had scoffed; and when she screamed back, a radio executive in line took note.

I had her account of all that on tape. I never got to ask, though, and never dared to ask, just what had prompted her to leave her home town, accompanied by her brother, Heini, a miserable failure of a man about whom I knew nothing other than that he had deserted his wife and unborn child for a new life in New York. My father never spoke of Opa Heini, who died in apparent shame and obscurity before reaching the age of sixty, other than referring to him as the “Deserteur.”

Anyway, I followed Tante Ilse’s example more than half a century later, for very personal reasons of my own; and as thorough as I was in my research of her odd career as a baby crier, I never insisted on getting her life story, assuming that, like an infant, she would speak when she was ready. What a lousy excuse for a historian I had been; and how I regretted not to have asked while I still had the chance.

But, back to the tape. This was a few years before we all got on the Internet, mind; and, having checked every book on the subject of broadcasting available to me, all I could think of was to consult the Manhattan telephone directory. Would you believe, there was a listing for C. Bridgewater.

So, shortly before Christmas Eve, I found myself in the Upper East Side apartment of one Cecil V. Bridgewater, aged 94. A dapper chap he was, with a keen memory, for the gift of which I very much envied him. I played the recording. Not only did he recognize his voice, he recalled the program, Poetry for Everyone, which he announced during the early 1940s. He had never heard of my aunt, though; and, as we listened, he kept eyeing me, as if wondering what I had really come to find out.

I was about to leave when he turned to me and said: “You know, about that fellow who read Whitman.” “Yes?” I asked, encouragingly.

“He was not much of an orator, was he?”

“No,” I agreed.

“He wasn’t a professional, either, just a college kid from Columbia who had volunteered to recite. The station had little money for voice talent. He was never asked back.”

“I’m not surprised,” I retorted, flippantly.

“The thing was, he wasn’t really reading for Everyone,” at which point the old man performed a little dance with his finger to put the last word in quotation marks.

“No?” I urged on.

“I think I can tell you,” he responded, confidentially. “He was reading it to someone in particular. Like a code, you know.”

Tante Ilse, I thought.

“And he got hold of the transcription, as well. You know, a recording of the broadcast. I can think of only one person, besides him, who could have kept it all those years.”

I sensed he was not referring to my aunt.

“When I walked out of the studio that night, I saw him again,” Mr. Bridgewater continued. “He was in the company of another young fellow and, well, they looked very much . . . absorbed in each other’s company.”

He looked at me, and gave me a knowing smile. “I remember it well because I was very suspicious.”

“Because they were both men?” I asked.

“No,” he said, rather irritated by the question, “because the other one was German.”

At that moment, for the first time, I felt a kinship with that other black sheep beyond the fold, for mine was a story that my grandfather had lived. And I was grateful to his sister for giving me a chance to find him out at last by sharing what she could be sure would stir me to research. How brave of Tante Ilse to leave behind all she knew for the sake and safety of the likes of me, sheltering him in a cloak of silence, even as she cried like a newborn child:

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death. . . It is form and union and plan. . . . it is eternal life. . . . it is happiness.

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Cardboard Sentiment

I have yet to write a card this season; and considering that half of my greetings are to be flown overseas, I should really put pen to shiny paper any day now. In Germany, where I am from, it is tradition to wait until the last possible moment to post seasonal greetings, whatever the season. It is not customary there to display received mail for weeks on dusty end, certainly not prior to the event they are designed to commemorate. So, when is the right time to drop off those sentiments? The ever earlier reminders that are the shop windows can hardly be a guide in the matter.

“To save the postman a miserable Christmas, we follow the example of all unselfish people, and send out our cards early.” Thus noted the imaginary writer of The Diary of a Nobody (1892) in an entry dated . . . 22 December? The postal workers, no doubt, were less than pleased by the way in which the sentiment found implementation.

“Most of the cards had fingermarks, which I did not notice at night,” the same writer observed, a potential smudge on his reputation against which he resolved to guard henceforth by buying “all future cards in the daytime.” Another noted nobody determined not to purchase any cards at all. His name was Fibber McGee; and on this day 6 December, in 1949, he was found hard at work making his own holiday cards. To be sure, it was not his big idea to be creative or thoughtful that temporarily turned him into one-man Hallmark factory.

“Boy-o-boy,” Fibber told his wife, the doubtful Molly, “I sure wish I’d a-thought of this before. Look at the money I’d a-saved if I’d a-made my own Christmas cards every year.” Fibber did not merely paint the designs, including a beardless Santa Claus; he also dreamed up the accompanying sentiments. Among the rhymed excuses for his schlock art (words for which writer Don Quinn deserves and received some credit), are:

St. Nicholas had his beard cut off
as up on the roof his reindeers trample
because how can a guy with whiskers on
show little shavers a good example?

“I got a million ideas as good as this one,” Fibber boasted. “Well, I should hope so,” Molly replied.

For the Mayor of the town, Fibber paints the picture of a pork barrel with a hand in it; and for a friend who has been avoiding him for reasons soon to be apparent, he sketches a fish swimming through mistletoe, a symbolism explained in verse:

I hope the fish I hereby show
recalls the fin I loaned you last July.
And though he swims through mistletoe,
I ain’t gonna kiss that fin goodbye.

Ultimately, Fibber has to wash his hands of the whole Christmas card business, dirty as they are with paint and glue. Like the Nobody before him, and like millions of people everywhere, Fibber resorts to store-bought sentiments, even though the ones he has his hands on were pre-owned. The seller proved savvier than old Fibber. As Nobody’s experience with “fingermarks” suggests, even the purchase of new cards can be a challenge, especially when one has to face a shop

crowded with people, who seemed to take up the cards rather roughly, and, after a hurried glance at them, throw them down again. I remarked to one of the young persons serving, that carelessness appeared to be a disease with some purchasers. The observation was scarcely out of my mouth, when my thick coat-sleeve caught against a large pile of expensive cards in boxes one on top of the other, and threw them down. The manager came forward, looking very much annoyed, and picking up several cards from the ground, said to one of the assistants, with a palpable side-glance at me: ‘Put these amongst the sixpenny goods; they can’t be sold for a shilling now.’ The result was, I felt it my duty to buy some of these damaged cards.

I had to buy more and pay more than intended. Unfortunately I did not examine them all, and when I got home I discovered a vulgar card with a picture of a fat nurse with two babies, one black and the other white, and the words: ‘We wish Pa a Merry Christmas.’ I tore up the card and threw it away. Carrie said the great disadvantage of going out in Society and increasing the number of our friends was, that we should have to send out nearly two dozen cards this year.

May a joyous season be in your cards, fingermarks ‘n all!