Category: Radio

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As Jane Airs; or, Going KUKU

My copy of Jane Woodfin’s novel Of Mikes and Men

“Jane Woodfin has worked for a West Coast radio station, in practically every known capacity, for more than twenty years—a period which almost spans the life of modern radio.” That is pretty much all I know about the wit that penned Of Mikes and Men, a narrative promising the “humorous inside story of early radio, when announcers doubled as soundmen and microphones went dead once a program.” I should not be quite so petty or perplexed—but the broadcast historian in me still doesn’t know quite what he’s reading.

At least, “humorous” is an entirely appropriate tag for Woodfin’s tale, that, tall or not, was published in 1951, when radio was still the source of mystery, romance, and adventure, but only in a programming sense. Otherwise, it was a big business, a well-oiled if somewhat past its prime machinery that bore little resemblance to the “anything goes”—or “nothing quite works”—broadcasting of the 1920s recalled by Woodfin.

Of Mikes and Men, which I picked up at a bookstore in Dryden, New York (aforementioned), opens like a prequel to Remember WENN. You know, the nostalgic sitcom set in a broadcasting studio, which aired on AMC during the mid-to late 1990s. Woodfin’s narrator, presumably the author, relates how she, penniless and none too skilled, got a job at a radio station in Portland, Oregon just after Wall Street laid that infamous “Egg.” Perusing the want ads, the young woman applied for the only position offered to female job searchers—that of “continuity writer” at station KUKU.

Not that she had any idea what a “continuity writer” was. She beat out a number of applicants and, being paid partly in cash, partly in the goods the station’s sponsors tried to peddle, was expected to deliver not only advertising copy and chatter (the so-called “continuity”) but also her own cooking program. That Jane, as her friend and neighbor points out, would be lost without a can opener, was something she kept to herself, until the audience, trying to follow her recipes, found out as much while gazing at the indigestible mess sticking to their pots and pans.

This is all rather jolly and preferable to leafing through I Hid It under the Sheets, the at times exasperatingly ungrammatical and disorganized reminiscences of journalist, sports writer, and radio listener Gerald Eskanezi, which I mentioned previously. At least, Woodfin knew how to turn a phrase and tell a story. So, why am I not just sitting back and enjoying that story?

For one, I am wondering just whose story it is. I mean, is it based on actual experiences? Is there anything between the covers that might tell me something factual about what it was like working in broadcasting before radio reached what is generally referred to as its “golden age”? Or is it a calculated, well timed antidote to the run-of-the-mill radio of the post-war years with whose Hucksterism Americans became so thoroughly disenchanted?

Playing it sly, Woodfin dedicates her book to those who presumable worked with her by stating:

To my dear friends and co-workers in early radio who will attempt in vain to find themselves in the pages of this book.  You aren’t here. I couldn’t put you in because you are normal.  But you may recognize some of the screwballs we both knew.

Station KUKU? I assumed Woodfin’s book to be an account of an early radio comedy of the same name. It was created by Raymond Knight, one of whose later Cuckoo programs you may find in the Internet Archive. According to the aforementioned Messrs. Gaver and Stanley, Knight began broadcasting on 1 January 1930 and distinguished himself by being one of the first radio satirists to poke fun at the medium. Groucho Marx reputedly thought him to be “the best comedian on the air.”

Turns out, Of Mikes and Men does not concern Mr. Knight, who broadcast from the East Coast. Nor have I come across any names that I recognize as referring to an actual radio pioneer. Still, leafing through Woodfin’s book, wondering whether Jane ever aired, I feel not unlike the earliest reader’s of Jane Eyre, who assumed the novel to be a biographical account of a governess in love with her master.

That Woodfin loved the radio, and knew it well, I do not doubt. I was just hoping for a bit of dirt I could trace to some of the real men and women behind those carbon mikes; but then I remembered my Aunt Ilse, the baby crier, bit my captious tongue, and let Woodfin keep hers firmly lodged in her unblushing cheek. Besides, those distinctions between fact and fiction, well nigh incomprehensible to today’s reality-TV audiences, went out of fashion in the days of the Spanish-American War . . .

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“[A]iring the secret despair of a great many million people”: On Being Too Late to Be John Crosby

Assuming the role of an old-time radio columnist is like being coy in a funeral parlor. I mean, you can go on dropping those long-forgotten names like so many mended handkerchiefs—but you shouldn’t expect anyone to take the hint and pick them up along with the rest of you. So, you pick yourself up instead, make an orderly pile of those disregarded squares, and wait for the next sneeze. If the cold shoulder you’ve gotten from leaning against that wall of silence is any indication, there’s a good one coming on. I envy John Crosby, who had a radio column at that just the right moment in the history of the medium, when the multitudes were still tuning in but were getting increasingly cross with the old Crosley—the giveaway programs, the soaps, and whatever dross wafted across. The late 1940s, in short. Crosby, whose Out of the Blue I snatched up when last I was at the Strand, “greatly enjoy[ed] those things of which [he] most heartily disapprove[d].” Luckily, there was not much on the dial to fill him with boundless admiration, a reaction less tolerable than a rash, since it had the nasty side effect of striking him “dumb.” As he observed in his Afterword “most critics,” including himself, are “incoherent” in their “admiration but afflicted with a formidable coherence when [they] disapprove.”

So, what did Mr. Crosby disapprove of, aside from the novels of Taylor Caldwell, which he bought and displayed to remind himself what not to read? Mr. District Attorney, for instance, which he found “vastly more irritating” than most of the crime dramas so prominent on the programming schedule of the national networks during the years between VJ-Day and the Korean War. He went so far as to opine that Mr. DA was the “most reprehensible piece of trash ever dramatized.” Even the voice of the lead was so obnoxious to him that he felt obliged to string together a few adjectives the aptness of which you may test by sampling here what Crosby was sounding off about):

A few of [those adjectives] are pompous, complacent, sonorous, humorless, dogmatic, unconvincing and—I don’t know how this one got in here—superfluous. Mr. DA, to put it more succinctly, sounds like a bad Shakespearean actor in an empty auditorium.

I know that sound, having made it often enough. Sure, a scolding tongue wags faster than one tied in a lover’s knot. And the pen, the keyboard, or whatever implement you use to churn the bile, is really giving your hands a workout when it is propelled by or pounded with utter contempt. I learned that when I wrote my first play—the only one I did not tire of before its completion. It concerns a pair of sisters who delight in being mean; but at least their targets still numbered among the living (until, that is, one of them hung himself in despair). I thoroughly enjoyed feeding them lines that I might not have had the chance or the nerve to administer otherwise. I have mellowed since then, although some remarks I made about Kevin Spacey incited one reader to accuse me of sounding like a “bitter old queen.” I may be a “queen,” I’d even admit to being “old.” But “bitter”?

Besides, what is the point of spitting in the face of old Mr. Keen (whom I loathe as much as Crosby despised Mr. District Attorney) when he is best left in the welcome peace that ensued after the cancellation of the incomprehensibly long-running mystery series named after him? I am the Tracer of a lost culture, or one to which too few have found back; and, so as not to get lost in the miasma of stale air shrouding the tomb of John’s Other Wife or some such dearly departed, it is best to open up about what I am truly keen on. That doesn’t mean I don’t envy Mr. Crosby . . .

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. . . under the Sheets: Catching Bill Stern at It

A recent addition to my library is I Hid It under the Sheets (2005), a personal account of New York Times reporter and sportswriter Gerald Eskenazi’s “Growing Up with Radio.” Charming and humorous, it is a rather undisciplined account of broadcasting in the pre-television era, likely to frustrate anyone fishing for facts. However impatient with chatty narratives, I do not number among such readers. I enjoy a good yarn, a point of view, an attitude. There is so little radio writing out there, which makes books like I Hid It a treat. After all, listening to recordings of old broadcasts can seem like a retreat, an act of isolating oneself from the world in the very process of connecting to it, however belatedly. You receive while being shut up, alone in your imaginings; any bookworm knows that feeling—but radioworms are exposing themselves to the spoken word, with voices entering their heads.

So, when you come across a fellow listener, you get anxious to exchange notes, no matter how different they are from yours or how removed the listener is culturally or historically. As a child, Eskenazi was passionate about radio; he went so far as to urinate on some kids who did not share his enthusiasm about certain superheroes or tune in to the same serials. Perhaps, I am safer at some remove.

My main reservation about reminiscences like I Hid It is that, instead of promoting radio drama, they insist on declaring it dead, accessible mainly through the filter of their reflections. Sure, Eskenazi listened to, say, Bill Stern back in the late 1940s; but, rather than having to rely on his or anyone else’s memory and recollections, we now enjoy access to thousands of recordings, most of whom are ignored in favor of such secondhand-me-downs.

It is only in the concluding chapter that Eskenazi acknowledges the existence of certain “sound bites and written dialogue of the old shows” on the Internet. Yet, the decision to “listen again” and to compare those cherished memories with extant recordings he declares to be a “dangerous turn,” one that he took only as he “came to the end of writing this book.”

Still, I let Eskenazi tell me about a past that I made my present. Of his tuning in, say, to Bill Stern and his colorful stories from the world of sports and the great outdoors, all of whom he believed to be truthful. Eskenazi vividly recalls Stern’s sensational account of an Alaskan trapper, a widower whose wife had died in childbirth. In search of milk for the infant, the trapper leaves his cottage, which was guarded by his dog. Returning after a long and arduous journey through the snow . . .

Wait, I thought, this is sounding very familiar. Some years ago, I was told just such a story while visiting a village in Snowdonia, not far to the north of me. And here is how George Borrow, in his 1854 travelogue Wild Wales, retold the legend of that place:

Beth Gelert is situated in a valley surrounded by huge hills [. . .]. The valley is said by some to derive its name of Beddgelert, which signifies the grave of Celert, from being the burial-place of Celert, a British saint of the sixth century [. . .] , but the popular and most universally received tradition is that it has its name from being the resting-place of a faithful dog [. . .]. Though the legend is known to most people, I shall take the liberty of relating it.

Llywelyn during his contests with the English had encamped with a few followers in the valley, and one day departed with his men on an expedition, leaving his infant son in a cradle in his tent, under the care of his hound Gelert [ . . .]. Whilst he was absent a wolf from the neighbouring mountains, in quest of prey, found its way into the tent, and was about to devour the child, when the watchful dog interfered, and after a desperate conflict, in which the tent was torn down, succeeded in destroying the monster. Llywelyn returning at evening found the tent on the ground, and the dog, covered with blood, sitting beside it. Imagining that the blood with which Gelert was besmeared was that of his own son devoured by the animal to whose care he had confided him, Llywelyn in a paroxysm of natural indignation forthwith transfixed the faithful creature with his spear. Scarcely, however, had he done so when his ears were startled by the cry of a child from beneath the fallen tent, and hastily removing the canvas he found the child in its cradle, quite uninjured, and the body of an enormous wolf, frightfully torn and mangled, lying near. His breast was now filled with conflicting emotions, joy for the preservation of his son, and grief for the fate of his dog, to whom he forthwith hastened. The poor animal was not quite dead, but presently expired, in the act of licking his master’s hand. Llywelyn mourned over him as over a brother, buried him with funeral honours in the valley, and erected a tomb over him as over a hero. From that time the valley was called Beth Gelert.

Neither Stern nor Eskenazi make mention of the Welsh origins of the tale. “Bill Stern had made the whole thing up,” Eskenazi remarked, only to share his disillusionment when, as a youngster, he heard the same story at school, where it was told to him as an “Indian” (is that, American Indian?) legend. Radio provided “avenues for education that were unsurpassed, if suspect,” Eskenazi concluded. Ain’t that a fact! Stern seems to have had no knowledge of Wales. As I overheard in this broadcast, he even refers to Ivor Novello as an “Englishman.”

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"But some people ain’t me!": Arthur Laurents and "The Face" Behind Gypsy

Gypsy again? I guess that is what many theatergoers thought when, only five years after the previous revival, the show opened on Broadway for the fifth time since its debut back in 1959. I have seen three of those revivals and, not inclined to wield my thumb, shan’t ponder publicly whether or not this might be the definitive production. It better not be, since I hardly mind seeing the play interpreted a few other ways, if only to get a chance to catch the old routines with “new orchestrations.” Still, be it stagecraft, performance, or my own very gradual process of maturity, I have not seen the dramatic finale of Gypsy staged any more movingly than in the current production. To be sure, I am opening to Arthur Laurents’s book differently now that I have completed my doctoral study on American radio drama since seeing the 2003 revival starring Bernadette Peters. I am reading between—not into—Laurents’s celebrated lines to find the former radio playwright’s “Face.”

“May we entertain you?” Laurents’s career in radio began in 1939, when the Columbia Workshop produced his first original play, “Now Playing Tomorrow” (30 January 1939), a fantasy concerning the doubtful advantages of gazing into the future. With such a high-profile debut to his credit, the young writer had little difficulties selling scripts to various network programs, including Hollywood Playhouse (1937-40), The Adventures of the Thin Man (1941-50), and This Is Your FBI (1945-53). “Commercial pulp, all of it,” he commented sixty years later; yet unlike fellow playwright Arthur Miller (one of whose wartime radio dramas I discuss here), Laurents was not dismissive of, let alone bitter about, his radio days. He had actively pursued such a career, attending an evening class in radio writing at NYU. Laurents did not feel that he was “faced with the art vs. commerce dilemma”; besides, he was “too flattered” being “wanted, too thrilled at being paid for being happy.”

“Extra! Extra! Hey, look at the headline! / Historical news is being made!” Contributing to the war effort by writing plays for a number of dramatic propaganda series kept the draftee from facing combat overseas and secured him an income of up to $350 per script. The Army arranged for him to work on programs like Armed Service Force Presents (1943-1944), Assignment Home (1944-46), and the Peabody Award-winning documentary drama The Man Behind the Gun (1942-44).

Toward the end of the war, Laurents had found his voice as a radio playwright—a voice strong and convincing enough not to be muffled by spineless industry executives. Drawing on personal experiences, he managed to explore themes similar to those he tackled on Broadway, where he made his entrance with Home of the Brave (1945), a play dealing with anti-Semitism in the Army. While Washington looked closely at his scripts after he had been accused of communist affiliations, Laurents not only managed to get a controversial play about black soldiers on the air, it (“The Knife”) even earned him a citation.

Like Gypsy and West Side Story, Laurents’s radio plays are personal records; their author arrived at a code that made it possible for him to share his own story, the story of an outsider. There is a bit of Louise in many of them. “The Face,” a Writers’ War Board “best script of the month” for April 1945, is no exception. “Do you love a man for his face?” the play asks of us, exploring the experience of a disfigured soldier dreading his reintegration into post-war society, a society, he knows to place great importance on appearances.

“Small world, isn’t it?” Like many of Laurents’s early works for stage and screen, from Home of the Brave to his screenplay for Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), “The Face,” as I put it in Etherized Victorians, is a play of masked figures and figurative unmasking. Dreading the prejudices of post-war America, the disfigured Harold Ingalls and his fellow patients must learn to be strangers “joining forces”:

GOLDSTEIN.  When you get plastered . . . who do you go with?
INGALLS.  There used to be a fellow—but he was discharged last week.
GOLDSTEIN.  Was he—like us?
INGALLS.  Yeah.  So now I go alone.
GOLDSTEIN.  If—if I can get a pass . . . can—I go with you?
INGALLS.  Sure! You know it makes it good, when there are two of you.

“Together, wherever we go!” Rather than confronting his biological family, the mother and brother he’ll never quite “get away from,” Ingalls is eager to escape with his double, his secret sharer:

INGALLS.  You’re more of a brother than he is.
GOLDSTEIN.  Now that’s a real compliment.
INGALLS.  Oh you know what I mean.
GOLDSTEIN. Sure.
INGALLS.  Well, I’ll get my mother over with quick and then we’ll beat it into town and really tie one on.  You and me.
GOLDSTEIN.  Right!
INGALLS.  That’s the best way.
(Biz: Fade in MOTHER’s footsteps approaching slowly.)
INGALLS.  You and me.  That’s the— (He cuts as he hears the footsteps.  They are still off but coming closer, closer.)

Those footsteps are the sound of reality encroaching on oblivion and denial, of a past that Ingalls has to reconcile with his present. To move on, Ingalls needs the strength to let go of both by forging new relationships from or in spite of his state of effacement. “If Mama Was Married,” what might have happened to stripper-novelist Gypsy Rose Lee and her sister, June Havoc, who teamed up with a big name in radio? One stuck in infantilizing routines, the other in the rear of a cow costume, each fashioned a career out of a pipe dream of vicarious living.

When Ingalls is discharged, the Army psychiatrist reminds him that “every single day, people get slapped because of ignorance. They get slapped for religion, for color, for how they talk or what they look like.” She encourages him to “stand up to them and tell them they’re wrong!” The play ends with the wish that “this will be the beginning, the beginning of a world where the only thing that does matter is each man himself for what he is himself.”

“But I / At least gotta try [. . .].” While it may never be “Rose’s Turn,” the resilient Arthur Laurents—whose next project will be a revival of West Side Story—has long had a “wonderful dream” worth living, a vision of that “place for us, somewhere,” the voicing and realization of which is well worth the agony of uncovering the not always handsome face behind our masks . . .

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The House of [Broken] Glass

Fleischmanns is a small town. There’s a sign on the road just before you get to it that says POPULATED AREA. Fleischmanns is populated with five hundred people, no more, no less. To a stranger it looks like any other little village in the Catskill Mountains. To a native it’s a special place and every town he doesn’t live in is a nice place to visit but he wouldn’t want to live there—he wants to live in Fleischmanns.

This is how the aforementioned actress-playwright Gertrude Berg begins her reminiscences about the town in which her father opened a summer resort more than a century ago in a spot once known as Griffins Corners. That, incidentally, is also the name of the local pub where we had lunch on our stopover at that once thriving, affluent community. Fleischmanns. Who ever heard of a place that sounds like a time slot reserved for the sponsor of Rudy Vallee! When I read the name, I thought for a moment that Mrs. Berg, who knew all about commercial radio, had made it up; but when I discovered it on a map of the Hudson Valley shortly before our 1,300-mile trip through upstate New York a few weeks ago, I was determined to pay a visit.

Now, I am not prone to bouts of nostalgia, the state of pining for what never has been anything else but an intense longing to the indulgence in which entire industries are devoted. I much rather aspire to something that is, delve in what has been, or simply make up whatever suits me without getting all melancholy about it. Still, if there is any place in the Catskills that could make me melancholy, it would have to be the town of Fleischmanns.

I don’t quite know what I expected after I read the lengthy, detailed description in Berg’s charming Molly and Me; I only knew that I really wanted to go. After all, Berg’s serial The House of Glass owes much to the town and the hotel run by Berg’s father. The House of Glass (a single instalment of which, dating from 13 November 1935 and featuring famed contralto Madame Schumann-Heink, has been shared on the to me invaluable Internet Archives) was “Fleischmanns all over again—through a ribbon microphone” Berg remarks in her biography:

Barney Glass was my father. The hotel was full of guests, all of whom I had known. I used what I could remember of their stories, and where there were unhappy endings I added happy ones. The radio hotel always solved its problem with a laugh, and as far as reality was concerned all I had to do was change the names of the guests and I had my story line.

Fleischmanns has a museum devoted to memory. It was closed on the day we passed through. The library has a copy of Molly and Me. I took it from the shelf, flicked through it until I got to the chapter on the town, and left it on a little table, as if to remind anyone stopping by of those better days. I know that the Borscht Belt went bust some decades ago; but I sensed that we caught Fleischmanns with its pants down. Not the kind of clowning around that makes you laugh; more like a sad, half-forgotten soul stuck in a retirement home with a suitcase of ill-fitting clothes and a yellowed scrapbook filled with mementoes of a past few active minds could be stirred into recalling . . .

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“Jumping Niagara Falls”; or, She’s Pushy, for a Corpse

Among the fifty-eight movies I added to our video library while shopping in New York City is the 1948 film adaptation of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play Sorry, Wrong Number. Fletcher penned the adaptation as well, despite her previous remarks about the merits of her original script. “I wrote ‘Sorry, Wrong Number,’” she was quoted in a 1948 anthology of Plays from Radio, “because I wanted to write a show that was ‘pure medium,’ something that could be performed only on the air.” And yet, “Sorry” has been reworked for stage and television and turned into both film and novel. If the original play is “pure medium,” Anatole Litvak’s melodrama is a Sorry adulteration. Just how much of a narrative muddle it is becomes clear when the screenplay was returned to the airwaves as a presentation by the Lux Radio Theater on 9 January 1950.

The thrill of the original lies in what Matthew Solomon refers to as its “narrative isochrony,” that is, the congruence of elapsed airtime and the clock ticking away the last minutes in the life of the central character. Instead, Sorry is marred by too many flashbacks and too much background story for what is essentially our witnessing of the inevitable death of someone we cannot wait to shut up.

Fletcher invites us to rethink Mrs. Stevenson’s role of a victim and permits us to enjoy tuning in to the well-scheduled execution of a perfect monster. In her screenplay, however, the playwright attempted to elicit feelings for a woman we’d much rather strangle, to make us waver between sympathy and condemnation. Mrs. Stevenson now has a first name and presumably a heart, however weak.

Alfred Hitchcock might have agreed with this revision, considering that the audience experiences suspense more keenly if the character is sympathetic. Fletcher also adds a moment of doubt as to Mrs. Stevenson’s fate by suggesting that her executioner might also become her rescuer.

At the same time, though, the film, unlike the radio play, compromises its point of view, letting the camera glide through Mrs. Stevenson’s room and giving us eyes to see the world beyond instead of keeping us close to the invalid who is being given a pair of wobbly legs just strong enough to make us wonder about her condition and chances of survival. Film insists on showing, even if the most compelling sight is the emotional state as written in the face of a person reduced to being all ears.

At any rate, Mrs. Stevenson died, eventually and unsurprisingly. Or did she? While on our trip upstate, recalled in the current entries into this journal, I was reminded of “Jumping Niagara Falls,” the unlikely sequel to Fletcher’s rather conclusive thriller. In it, Mrs. Stevenson is out for revenge—from the grave as her husband Elbert goes off to the Falls with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. What’s left of Mrs. Stevenson is nothing more than what we get when we first encounter her—a voice, which insists on making itself heard on the telephone, the radio, and (or perhaps solely in) the mind of the man who masterminded her murder.

That voice, in the 1999 sequel (by Brian Smith and George Zarr) is Claire Bloom’s. To me, though, as to anyone loving radio, the voice of Mrs. Stevenson belongs to none other than the aforementioned “First Lady of Suspense.” Equipped with Moorehead’s larynx, Fletcher’s celebrated harridan might have us all over in a barrel.

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On the Effects of Beholding the Kaaterskill Falls

“Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Catskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.”

Thus opens a most curious tale related by the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, a New York historian whose papers have been passed on to us by one Washington Irving. As Mr. Irving comments in his preface to “Rip Van Winkle,” the story in question, the Knickerbocker records of Catskills lore have long since been “admitted into all historical collections as a book of unquestionable authority.”

The astonishing incident in the life of Rip Van Winkle need hardly be recounted here, famous as it has remained to this day. Besides, it has already been retold and dramatized on numerous occasions (such as this 30 November 1949 broadcast of the Family Theater), albeit not always with the respect and fidelity due to a chronicle of such historical significance. The producers of the 26 December 1948 presentation of “Rip Van Winkle,” starring an uncommonly tired Fred Allen, had the decency, at least, to prefix their bowdlerization with the disclaimer that “Any similarity to Washington Irving’s original is purely accidental.”

They ought to have called it Knickerbocker’s original, of course—but we should not expect such scholarly attention to detail from the purveyors of popular entertainments, especially when their tongues are so firmly lodged in their cheeks as to render them barely intelligible. Arch Oboler even went so far as to appropriate the legend for one of his propaganda performances, none too subtly titled “Rip Von Dinkel of Nuremberg.”

Earlier this week, while travelling through the ancient Catskill Mountains—which, truth be told, are not nearly as shadowy and mysterious as the Welsh countryside—we happened upon the Kaaterskill Falls, the very sight of the extraordinary episode in the life of the legendary idler. We retraced his steps, stumbling over the rocks and trees that nature has so liberally and carelessly strewn upon this secluded spot. The hike was tiring enough; but that could hardly account for the fatigue I have been experiencing ever since our return to Wales. A long forgotten lecture by a venerable physician appears to provide the answer.

One of Knickerbocker’s contemporaries, the now entirely forgotten Augustus Ohrenauf, had much to say about the effects of the Kaaterskill waters in a lecture entitled “Ansichten über das Betrachten von Wasserfällen,” which, soon after its publication in 1817, was haphazardly translated into English as “Falls Deductions.” Having perused the original treatise, I am now convinced that my fatigue, commonly known as “jet lag,” is due to that jet of water emanating from the Kaaterskill Falls.

According to Dr. Ohrenauf, it was the fall (and not the flagon of gin from a party of ghosts) that brought on Van Winkle’s decades-spanning slumber and all that befell him thereafter. Without any concern for etymological niceties, the good doctor insists that metaphorical expressions like “to fall asleep” (or the German “Augen fallen zu”) are directly related to the sensation of beholding cataracts and cascades. He argues further that the German expression of “einen Kater haben” (literally, having a tomcat, but meaning, “having a hangover”) is derived from that more than catnap-inducing Catskills ravine.

Entering the trail to the falls, we were instructed to sign a register (shown above), a precautionary measure, no doubt, to prevent visitors from getting lost in the woods due to the somnolent effects of the natural water feature they have set eyes on they are not likely to keep open for long. Dr. Ohrenauf thus advises sightseers to keep their ears peeled for the sounds of falling waters, lest they are prepared for a hazardous exposure to Lethean influences.

Meanwhile, I hope to stay awake for my subsequent entries in the broadcastellan journal, in which I shall continue to expound on the matter.

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Shoes Across the Table

Call it the Case of the Wayward Blogger. I am having a swell time here in sweltering Manhattan; and for once the eyes have it. Today, I vowed to make amends by returning to the aforementioned Partners & Crime bookstore in the West Village, where on the first Saturday of every month (July and August excepting) a capable group of players, musicians and sound effects artists recreate American radio thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s.

On tap this evening were Sam Spade’s muddled “SQP Caper” (originally broadcast on 7 November 1948) and the lively “Taps,” a comedy thriller involving a tap-dancing sister act catching crooks in a rather more sinister act. Outstanding in the cast were David Kester (below, far right and channelling Ned Sparks) and Karla Hendrick (center) who played both Spade’s secretary Effie and Edith “Candy” Kane in “Taps.”

If you count the balloons next to the sound effects table at which DeLisa White (pictured above) worked her earful magic by slamming doors, ringing bells, and keeping shoes a-tapping, you can figure out just how violent (and piercing) the offering for the evening was going to be, each popped rubber sac representing a gun just fired. Yet, to the delight of the audience—and without recourse to the willful misreading known as “camp”—the plays for the evening were light on heavy melodramatics.

Now, this is too hot a night for research and I’m off to enjoy a few ice-cold gin and tonics in a moment; but I am not sure just when “Taps” originally aired. Supposedly, its broadcast date coincided with the date of the reenactment (7 June), even though the program states 2008 as the obviously erroneous year of production. The notes also state that “Taps” was performed as part of the anthology series Suspense; but there is no such play in the program’s twenty-year spanning history.

The Beech-Nut gum commercial so zestfully delivered might be a clue as to the date of the broadcast. I shall have to investigate . . .

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You Are There: Crane Collapse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side

I am not cut out to be a reporter; but since this just happened around the corner, in my old Manhattan neighborhood, where Yorkville meets Harlem, I thought I’d go out to snap this shot. Not that some of the more professional photographers were treated with respect. Two were chased away by an apparently high ranking police officer (one beyond donning a uniform). Ever since I got a ticket and was summoned to court for allegedly sleeping on a New York City park bench (I was struggling to stay awake reading Henry James) and dared to complain about the treatment I received, I am still more wary of the police in the at times insensitively carried out acts of policing our lives. They rarely make me feel protected. Not that the evacuation currently under way is particularly comforting to those living on the block.

Buildings go up at a remarkable speed here in the city; and some constructions sites are as dangerous as they look. You Are There, of course, refers to a radio program that promised to take listeners on location by dramatizing rather more momentous events of the past, from the Last Day of Pompeii to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I am far more at ease looking backward, at my own pace. Still, as I walk through Manhattan on this latest visit visit of my former home, I shall take my camera along and share my impressions here. As long as there’s a radio connection somewhere . . .

Speaking of Henry James: look what they have done to Washington Square. You’d think the place had inspired Death on the Nile.

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“Elephant” Business; or, Monkeying with a Marx Brothers Script

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I’m sure many of us are exclaiming these days whenever we approach a filling station. As of today, a gallon of unleaded goes for well over $8 here in the UK. Now, I have not driven a car since the Reagan era, but that does not stop me from taking note and commiserating with the one in charge of chauffeuring me about. Back in 1932-33, the Standard Oil Companies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana, together with the Colonial Beacon Oil Company were spending some of their revenue to send in the clowns to entertain a Depression-stricken public that, for the most part, was going nowhere fast. The clowns were none other than Groucho and Chico Marx, who were heard each week in a radio comedy titled Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel.

On this day, 22 May, in 1933, their vehicle ground to a halt after having sputtered along for six months on the air. Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel did not return for a second season, a cancellation that, as Michael Barson reminds us in his foreword to the published scripts for the series, Groucho Marx attributed to the soaring profits the sponsor enjoyed as a result of the broadcasts, which presumably made Esso feel “guilty” for “taking the money.” It might have been that the puns had all the sophistication of a program geared toward those too young to drive. Contemplating their activities during what was then thought of as a summer break, Chico dreams of going “away on a ranch,” … if only he had the money:

Since the final broadcast is the only one preserved both in print and as a recording, it offers some insights into the changes that were made to a script before it aired. Not that each revision constitutes an improvement.

“Three of your elephants are loose on the boat,” someone alerts Groucho (as attorney at law Waldorf T. Flywheel, at that instant a stowaway mistaken for a famous explorer). “The elephants are loose?” Flywheel replies. “Well, am I responsible for their morals?”

In the sketch that aired on 22 May, Groucho is told instead that “three of [his] monkeys are loose on the boat.” “Monkeys are loose?” Groucho retorts. “Well, get a monkey wrench and tighten them up.”

Sponsors are like elephants. Those straitlaced folks never forget to tighten a “loose” line, no matter how many Esso references you may be able to spin out of a lasso. So, was it the double entendres that proved too much for the oil companies, who subsequently refused to pump in the money for a second season of monkeyshines? To NBC, at least, the show appeared to be far less sustainable than the resources the deserting sponsor was touting as superior.

Given the raw material, penned by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman, the cancellation was not such a loss to those tuning in at home. If you ask me, the Marx Brothers, who depended on visuals for much of their clowning, might as well have monkeywrenched the entire project.