Category: Radio

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The Devil Wears Praha . . . Out

Just where did it go—or go wrong—he wonders, as he passes the could-be-anywhere shopping complex to wend his way back after a Mexican meal and a surprisingly good Long Island Iced Tea to the too embarrassingly froufrou and French-sounding to mention hotel they had booked online and chosen for its stylish if less than regionally authentic interiors? Old Praha, I mean, the Eastern European attracting Western European capital I am currently visiting and liberally dispensing.

Earlier today, the East-West clash played itself out before my eyes—however inflamed after beholding hordes of garishly clad Irish soccer fans in town to cheer on what nationalism defines for them as their team in a game against rather than “with” the Czechs—at the local toy museum, where we stopped on our way from the overcrowded Palace. On display in said cultural depository are the Barbie dolls pictured above, lifting their skeletal arms and wriggling their barren hips opposite more traditional playthings of Bohemian manufacture.

To be sure, military toys were not wanting among those mass-produced goods encouraging youngsters to consume . . . mass-produced goods, even though some history lessons might be required for those at play to determine just which garb makes friend sartorially distinguishable from foe.

Sixty years ago, the aforementioned radio playwright and journalist Norman Corwin visited this town on his One World Flight across the globe in the aftermath of the Second World War to report about conditions in Czechoslovakia.

“From Moscow to Prague is a distance of about twelve hundred miles,” Corwin commenced his audio tour. “The land beneath” him, he remarked, looked

as green and innocent as though it had never heard the names of old wars, nor the rumor of new ones. Yet not long ago, over every inch of the distance we were consuming so quickly and comfortably, armies had fought, blood had mixed in the streams and rivers, villages had been sacked, cities bombed. A dead man for every foot of the way.

Corwin expressed himself

naturally anxious to see what betrayal and occupation, and the trials of reconstruction, had done to Czechoslovakia, whether its people were happy and confident, whether they were still friendly to the United States, the country which had done so much to create their republic; how they felt about Russia; whether they were, as we’ve been told along the way, a bridge between East and West; whether they were in a mood to embrace the concept of One World.

Shortly after Corwin’s reportage, the Czechs had little opportunity to realign themselves with the west. Still, I wonder how much of these acts of “betrayal” and states of “occupation” are being remembered now that Prague has gone so thoroughly (so irrevocably?) west, if only in its out-of-the-way way of attracting foreign currencies to be flung across counters all over town by visitors from Europe and the United States. Is capitalism, which swears by competition, staying world conflicts or encouraging them in a way that sports keep the young strong and aggressive so as to make them fit to waste their bodies in international conflicts?

A new kind of megabomb has been cheered in Russia , the news hit me as I settled down after a day of seeing sights. Is this just another sign of healthy competition? Is competition ever healthy, or is it the corruption of the very body it promises to invigorate?

What might be the price and point of removing oneself from the game, he wonders, recalling his inclination to dress up Barbie while other boys his age got dirty chasing and cursing each other on the soccer field, playing the same game that apparently convinced dozens of Irish fanatics in Leprechaun hats to invade this much and oft beleaguered city . . .

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Cherchez Lom

Well, I don’t always manage it. Keeping my everyday contained in a single journal devoted to popular culture; or working my life around its keeping. Not that I am being secretive about what else is going on. I am merely trying to stay within the boundaries I defined for broadcastellan; and sometimes the connections between old-time radio and my present can only be got at with considerable stretching. I wonder whether Walter Pater had this problem turning his life into a work of art, which no doubt is the most graceful and fulfilling way of controlling ones existence.

Today, for instance, I am leaving for Prague without much more than this radio program to keep me on track. It is a 1930s travelogue from the obscure series Ports of Call. Then, there is Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘N’ Roll, a radio dramatization of which aired on BBC Radio 3 earlier this summer. The play is currently on stage in Prague; but I doubt that I am up to watching Stoppard in translation (in a language, no less, that is entirely foreign to me).

According to the Internet Database, my departure for the country I still cannot spell without consulting a pocket dictionary coincides with the 90th birthday of the only major Czech-born actor with a career in English language film I know: Herbert Lom, born (if the Database is to be believed) in Prague on this day, 11 September, in 1917. Lom (looking rather like a Czech Charles Boyer in his pre-Pink Panther period) fled his native country after my fascist forebear invaded and began acting in England in the early 1940s; he was last seen in Marple, the latest television series to dramatize the mysteries of Agatha Christie (last encountered here on her birthday during my trip to Istanbul).

The last time I spotted Mr. Lom in one of his big-screen outings, he was a bad guy after the titular figurine in Brass Monkey (1948), a genre-defying comedy-musical-thriller co-starring The Smiths cover girl Avril Angers set . . . in the world of radio broadcasting. As I said, quite a stretch; I need not have struggled quite this much, considering that, during World War II, Lom was an announcer for the BBC’s Foreign Service.

Now I have got to stretch out a bit before our journey. I hope to be reporting back while on location—with thoughts of Kafka, perhaps, or the Golem—as abject a failure as I am at these on-the-spot updates . . .

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Drifting on the Airwaves; or, Getting Carried Away by The Pacific Story

There was no getting through it today, neither for the sun, nor for my eyes. A shroud of mist enveloped our cottage, obscuring the views of the hills and valleys beyond the hedge. With nothing in sight—and certainly no end—I just closed my eyes and drifted off again, sleeping the morning (though not the mist) away. On a murky day like this, when you just “want to get away from it all,” the Internet Archive can be relied upon to “offer you … escape,” if you pardon the belabored radio reference. True, with a trip to Prague in the offing, and the sounds and sights of Budapest and New York still readily retrievable from the ever deepening recesses of my mind, I am not exactly desperate for a virtual getaway; nor is it escapism I am after. It is the thrill of discovering and taking in something new that keeps me turning and returning to that amazing resource, filled as the Archive is with rare recordings waiting to be explored.

One such recent discovery is The Pacific Story, a series of broadcasts that was part of NBC’s Inter-American University of the Air. According to On the Air, John Dunning’s still indispensable encyclopedia of old-time radio, was heard over NBC stations from 1943 to 1947. The program introduced US American listeners at home to the theaters of war and to peoples of faraway countries and continents, from Luzon to Japan, from China to Australia.

Among the authorities on the Far East featured in the series was the aforementioned Pearl S. Buck. Unfortunately, Buck’s remarks on the life of Sun Yat-Sen, heard on the 3 Mary 1944 broadcast, have not been preserved; but I am working myself through the recordings in hopes of coming across other such notable literary commentators.

On this day, 5 September, in 1943, The Pacific Story attempted to put India in a nutshell, wrapping up its history “from Clive to Ghandi.” The dramatic portion of the program, followed by an academic essay on the state and future of India, opens in medias res: a duel between Clive and a subaltern, fought over losses at a card game.

Clive, those attending the duel remind each other, had tried to commit suicide more than once, but had proved a poor shot, as his pistol misfired. Once again, his gun goes off; once again, Clive misfires, missing his opponent. “This,” the narrator sums up, “was Robert Clive, the English clerk, destined to become Lord Robert Clive, founder of the British Indian Empire.”

Hardly the portrait of a hero, “India: From Clive to Ghandi” places the British in a long line of invaders, from Alexander the Great and the Muslims to the establishment of the Mughal Empire. The increasing power of the British over all of India, the story continues, led to the formation of the Indian Nationalist Movement in which Ghandi emerged as a leader.

“Today,” narrator Gayne Whitman reminded the listeners, “both Ghandi and Nehru are in jail because of their call for passive rebellion against Britain.” And yet, the broadcast concluded, only an independent, emancipated India, defending itself, could effectively combat the Japanese. This argument against British imperialism is quite remarkable, considering that the US was closely allied with Britain in the war against Japan, with the designs and dangers of which The Pacific Story was then chiefly concerned.

All the while, as I made my tortuous passage to India in this overloaded vehicle of a public service broadcast, I kept returning to Wales, to a spot I had revisited earlier this year. There, in the former billiard room of Powis Castle (pictured above), the horded riches of Lord Clive—Indian treasures that brought on suspicion, public inquiry and, perhaps, the ultimate suicide of this man—have been on public display since 1987.

Getting your mind to drift on the airwaves sure can take you places. Far from letting you escape, it can also take you straight back into your own backyard by circuitous routes that make it difficult at times to get through a single broadcast.

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It Might As Well Be Maytime

Well, I neither know nor care whether it is still considered a gaffe in some circles, but this was the kind of post-Labor Day that makes me want to wear white, or less. Mind you, I was just lounging in our garden, a rare enough treat this year. I am not among those who look toward fall as a fresh and colorful season, marked and marred by decay as it is. In New York City, my former home, September and October come as a relief from the stifling heat, a cooling down for which there is generally no need here in temperate and meteorologically temperamental Wales. Pop culturally speaking, to be sure, autumn is a time of renewal. In the US, at least, there is the fall lineup to look forward to as the end of an arid stretch in which fillers and (starting in the late 1940s) repeats convinced folks of the pleasures to be had outdoors.

No doubt, the producers of the Peabody Award-winning Lux Radio Theater were trying to stress this sense of a vernal rebirth when it opened its tenth season on this day, 4 September, back in 1944. Here is how host Cecil B. DeMille welcomed back the audience to what then was, statistically speaking, the greatest dramatic show on radio:

Greetings from Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen. At every opening night in the theater, for a thousand years, there’s been a breathless feeling of expectancy, a sense of new adventure. And tonight, as the light to on again in our Lux Radio Theater, there’s the added thrill of knowing that the lights are going on all over the world. With the liberation of France, the torch of Freedom burns again in Europe, and tonight we have a play that expresses something of the bond between song-loving America and music-loving Paris. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s screen hit Maytime, with Sigmund Romberg’s unforgettable music, and for our stars, those all-American favorites, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.

Leave it to the spokesperson of Lever Brothers (last spotted here with the Lord of toilet soaps) and the continuity writers in their employ, to link historical events of such magnitude as D-Day, the establishment of a French provisional government and its relocation from Algiers to Paris a few days prior to the broadcast with an escapist trifle like Maytime (1937), which, as Connie Billips and Arthur Pierce pointed out in Lux Presents Hollywood, bears little musical resemblance to Romberg’s original operetta, begot in the dark days of the Europe of 1917, before the US entered the first World War.

Commercial interests were anxious to reclaim the airwaves, after a period of restraint that we living in the 21st century have not witnessed since the attack on the World Trade Center back in September 2001. During his curtain call with co-star MacDonald (whose 1930 effort The Lottery Bride was released on DVD today), the aforementioned Mr. Eddy was further making “light” of the situation in the European war theater by plugging his new radio program. By expressing that “the lights were going on again all over the world,” Nelson remarked as he dutifully read from his script, DeMille had put him “on the spot.” After all, his sponsors were “160 leading electric light and power companies.” Houselights, please!

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In My Library: Radio Drama and How to Write It (1926)

The man behind the counter looked none too pleased when I handed over my money. This one, he said, had escaped him. The item in question is a rare little volume on radio drama, written way back in 1929, at a time when wireless theatricals were largely regarded, if at all, as little more than a novelty. In his foreword, Productions Director for the BBC, R. E. Jeffries, expressed the not unfounded belief that its author, one Gordon Lea, had the “distinction of being the first to publish a work in volume form upon the subject.”

Nothing to get excited about, you might say. I know, it is not exactly a prize pony, this old hobbyhorse of mine. Few who come across it today care to hop on, let alone put any money on it, particularly now that it has been put out to the pasture known as the internet, the playing field where culture is beaten to death. So, should not any bookseller be pleased to part with Mr. Lea’s reflection on echoes? Not, perhaps, when the money exchanged amounts to no more than a single pound coin. History often comes cheaply; it is the price for ignoring it that is high.

I had been on the lookout for Radio Drama and How to Write It while researching for Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on old-time radio in the United States. After no volume could be unearthed in the legendary and much-relied on vaults of the New York Public Library, let alone anywhere else, I gave up the search, comforted by the thought that Mr. Lea was, after all, a British hobbyhorse fancier, far removed from the commercial network circus in which I had chosen to study that ill-treated bastard of the performing arts.

It helps to take the blinders off. After all, I spotted the obscure volume last weekend, on another trip to Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh bordertown known the world over (by serious collectors, at least) as the “town of books.” Now, I am always anxious to put my loot on display. And so, rather to let it sit on my bookshelf, I shall let Mr. Lea’s pioneering effort speak for itself:

It is asserted that no play is complete until it has an audience. This is untrue. One might as well say that a tragedy of emotion between man and wife, enacted in the privacy of their own drawing room, is not a tragedy, because the general public are not invited to watch it. A play is complete when once it is conceived by its author. But, inasmuch as this fallacy is still popular, playwrights still construct their plays with an audience in mind.[. . .].

Thus, Lea reasons, the stage play

must be such as can appeal to a crowd, as distinct from the individual. This is a difficult thing to do, but such is the power of crowd-psychology, that if the play appeals to a section of the crowd, the disparate elements can be conquered and absorbed into the general atmosphere. An audience may, at the beginning of the play, be a company of individuals, but before long hey are by the devices of stage-production welded into one mass with one mind and one emotion. If the play is incapable of this alchemy, it fails to please and becomes a thing for the solitary patron. 

There, then, are the conditions which govern the production of the stage-play, and [ . . .] within the limitations of the theatre are wonderfully efficacious. 

But, is it necessary to accept these limitations? Is there no other medium more flexible?

In stage drama there is “always the problem of the fourth wall,” the solving (or dissolving) of which lead to intriguing if unsatisfactory compromises. In a production of The Passing of the Third Floor Back, for instance, the footlights were turned into an imaginary fireplace. “[V]ery ingenious,” the author quips,

but the effect is that, when the players sit before the fire, you have the spectacle of people staring straight at you, and, unless you imagine yourself to be a lump of coal or a salamander, you don’t get the right angle.

I was reminded of my experience seeing What Every Woman Knows at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, which thrust me into a similar hot spot I did not relish.

Sure, sound-only drama can readily break the barriers of convention. Yet when Lea dreams of the new medium and its potentialities, he has technology, not commerce or politics, in mind. Whether state-run or commercially sponsored, radio was never quite as free and free as the air. The audience, its size and sensibilities, always mattered more than the voice of the single speaker.

Nor am I convinced that a play is a play without playing itself out before or within an audience, whatever its number. A thought must be communicated to mean, and indeed to be. It is for this reason that I air out my library from time to time, to dust off those forgotten books and share what I find there in this, the most flexible medium of all . . .

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Songs, Speeches, and Musical Spoons: The Noisy Closet of Marie Slocombe

How about taking that spoon out of your noodle soup for a tuneful interlude? Apparently, the Vietnamese get a lot of noise out of their flatware. Back in 1936, one woman, a BBC temp by the name of Marie Slocombe, set out to preserve such sounds, recorded for broadcast but to be discarded thereafter. This Saturday, I am tuning in to “Saving the Sounds of History,” a documentary about Ms. Slocombe and the origins of the BBC sound archive. There are rural dialects, the ancient harp of King David, and a bird song anno 1890 (more of interest, no doubt, if the captured talent had gone the way of the Dodo).

I have long been fascinated by natural and man-made sounds, endangered or representative, familiar yet fleeting. For years, I kept my own library of noise: New York City traffic in the age of breakdancing, the laughter of an old friend, the footsteps in the hallway of a former home—noises that conjure up scenes left out of pictures in an age before mobile phones and digital cameras.

Sean Street’s documentary perhaps overstresses the historical significance of “cupboard S,” in which Slocombe secretly stored the abdication speech of King Edward VIII, the recording of which the BBC did not wish to preserve. As Slocombe acknowledged in an interview, the speech (transcribed here), was available in the US, having been transmitted over shortwave throughout the world on 11 December 1936 and was rebroadcast in part on NBC’s Recollections at 30 back in 1956. As it was replaying in the US, it still sat hidden in Slocombe’s closet.

To this day, access to the BBC sound archives requires a trip to London; but “Saving the Sounds of History” at least creates an awareness of such treasures. Say, which sounds would you preserve? The spoons, if you ask me, are best kept in the bowl.

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“. . . said the spider to the fly”

Just about anyone can walk into your parlor, give it the onceover and imagine you out of the way. That is something you have to put up with when you put your home up for sale, as we have done a few weeks ago.

Last Friday, we were supposed to have moved into town, but the deal fell through earlier this month after our buyer pulled out; and now we are trying to attract others without having any place else to go at present. I do not thrill to the prospect of having to be ready at a moment’s notice, or even a day’s, to make way for a parade of strangers traipsing in, to get cobwebs out of corners and the lawn neatly cropped only to vacate the premises to facilitate the inspections.

Yesterday, a rather po-faced lady from England stopped by for a viewing of our Welsh cottage, gliding across the threshold like a dark cloud. Her parting words, the remark that we should not have any trouble selling the place, only underscored what her dour expression could not cover up. She hadn’t found what she was after. Her crystal, she later told the estate agent, just did not swing the right way.

As it turns out, she was after something very particular, indeed: the very place she once called home. Now, last summer, we’ve had someone stopping by all the way from Pittsburgh, showing up unannounced and claiming that her ancestors had once dwelled under our roof. She had no intention to buy the house; but we gladly bought her story, until we eventually proved that she had been mistaken. The dame with the crystal, on the other hand, was not simply catching up with her past. She was on a mission to find the house she had inhabited . . . in a past life. Who sent her? Shirley MacLaine?

As I said, you have got to be prepared for all sorts. In view of such strange visitations and the negotiations that may ensue, I began to wonder whether I am to be the spider or the fly, the one that catches or the one getting caught. I was a latchkey child, so yarns spun from such material have always made a great impression on me. Grimm’s “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” was an early favorite. I, of course, cast myself in the role of the littlest kid, hiding inside the grandfather clock while my older sister was being devoured by a predatory trespasser whose entrance did not so much depend on brute force but on the slyness (and the piece of chalk) with which he altered his voice to impersonate a trusted caregiver.

The soft-spoken, smooth-talking outsider who draws you in or cajoles his way inside is a figure cut out for radio drama. Yes, radio drama. If that cooky cat can dangle her crystal, let me romance a whole set. The long-running Suspense program, for instance, offered its listeners some memorable updates of the lupine intruder sneaking in and the arachnoid charmer sneaking up on its prey.

“To Find Help” comes to mind. In it, homeowner Agnes Moorehead is being harrassed by young Frank Sinatra (18 January 1945) and Ethel Barrymore struggles to fend off Gene Kelly (6 January 1949). It is an edge-of-your-contested-porch melodrama commenting on and deriving its poignancy from the post-war demobilization and the subsequent housing crisis (a contemporary edge removed from Beware, My Lovely [1952], the inferior screen adaptation starring Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan).

On this day, 30 August, in 1945, it was Peter Lorre’s turn to come a-knocking. Co-written by Academy Award nominated Herbert Clyde Lewis, “Nobody Loves Me,” is a slight yet ideal vehicle for the aforementioned Mr. Lorre, who inhabits the role of an armed man forcing himself inside a police station to relieve himself of a burdensome tale many of the folks he encountered did not live to tell. Leave it to Lorre to make the wolf sound like a poor kid, to give the spider the qualities of a hapless fly.

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"A-spinning goes our weekly wheel of fortune . . ."

Well, here we go again. As the aforementioned “Major” Bowes used to say, “Around and around and around she goes,” referring to the spinning wheel on the Original Amateur Hour. A few years after Bowes took his final bow, Ted Mack (pictured) took over as host of the show, which, when revived in 1948, was both heard on the radio and seen on television. The concept has been going around and around as well, there being more amateurs than ever on television to root for or laugh at. Another season of The X Factor is currently underway in Britain, with Simon Cowell once again heading the panel of judges, rolling his eyes, and uttering his standard “if I’m being perfectly honest” until the winner is being declared by audience vote just in time for the release of the Christmas single.

Here is how casting director Marie Correll (wife of Amos ‘n’ Andy co-creator Charles Correll) described the auditions for the televised Amateur Hour to the readers of the Radio and Television Mirror back in the summer of 1949:

“The wonderful part is that auditions are open to everyone,” she tells you. “We get hundreds of letters a week and every letter is answered, although it may take from two to three weeks. Our staff sorts the mail geographically. We set dates and enclose application blanks for those close enough to New York to audition here. We tell the others about our out-of-town audition staff and give dates when it will be in their vicinity. But every affiliated station helps as a clearing house for local talent.” 

Application forms are numbered when they go out. Applicants are auditioned in numerical order on the day they appear. No favorites are played. Everybody gets the same chance. Even second and third chances. 

“It’s amazing how much performers can improve even in a matter of months sometimes,” Mrs. Correll says. “We’ve had talent audition, be rejected, write in later for another appointment and make the grade. We never discourage anyone. We try to get a little background on them, find out what they’re aiming for. If they are singers we sometimes make suggestions about numbers that may suit their voices better, though I must say that nine times out of ten they stick to the same numbers. And you’d be surprised how many come to the first audition with only one number prepared, staking everything on a single effort.” 

Space being at a premium even in New York’s huge Radio City, the room where hopefuls wait their turn is really a long corridor, flanked on both sides with chairs that leave only a narrow passageway between. Every chair is filled. Standees lean on their instrument cases, huddled in little groups. 

Youth and hope predominate here, with a sprinkling of the middle-aged and a few elders [. . .]. 

Tonight’s auditions are fairly typical. There are about half a dozen young boys, whose occupations were listed on their applications as shipping clerk, parcel post clerk, plasterer, salesman, and the like—all eager to break away from the routine of their jobs and get into the glamorous show business world. They sing the same numbers in about the same way. 

“It isn’t that they’re bad—they’re just not good enough,” Marie explains. 

There is a harmony team of five Negro boys, a choral group with an earnest leader, and two schoolboys who have written their own material. (Under “type of talent” on their application forms they had put, “Comedy—we hope!”).

Yes, our “weekly wheel of fortune” goes a-spinning, even though talent has long become secondary to hitting the no longer quite so elusive jackpot. Discontented, determined or delusional, they are lining up by the thousands for a chance to enter that allegedly “glamorous” realm of show business, to be enfranchised and marketed, which is why decent plasterers are harder to find these days than celebrities behind bars and disgruntled clerks prepare for their seconds of fame by slipping plastered behind the wheel . . .

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Theater of the Mime

There is something magical about it. The idea that an old mirror might show us a reflection of our past, with you and me on the other side to make sense of it all. I don’t believe there is such a thing as old news, unless you are averse to or incapable of examining it in the light of your own reflections. I am still flicking through the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Mirror, as I have been all this week, if only to test my own maxim (which, I admit, sounds rather like the slogan with which NBC once tried to vindicate its reruns).

Earlier this week, an article in the Hollywood Reporter suggested that television is on its way out (except in Australia), that people turn to their computer instead to snatch out of the web whatever they want whenever they want it rather than rely on the old TiVo, let alone simply stay put when something of interest comes on. Back in 1949, television, though practically dating back to the age when radio became the medium of the moment, was still in its commercial infancy, “commercial” being redundant, considering that its growth and maturity were determined by the medium’s viability as a promotional tool.

According to the Mirror, there were just over 1.3 million TV sets in the US that spring, half of them in New York City. Radio was still tops; but those who did not have a TV set were beginning to think of radio as something inferior, as something that would never allow them to keep up with the Joneses.

Few people defended radio those days, in part because programming had gotten worse (instead of more diverse) with the advent of tape recording, used largely for the sake of economy, rather than reportorial or artistic experimentation. Shows were no longer produced live, which gave audiences the impression that they listened to a reproduction rather than a once-in-a-lifetime theatrical event and, as summer reruns became common, the sense that one had heard it all before. Radio was losing its edge, and listeners were only too ready to find that edge and push their old receivers over it. In other words, they were pushovers for television.

So, just what could television do that was not possible on the old wireless? Not much, really, considering the picture quality was still so poor as to give you a headache finding the difference and the production techniques were so inferior as to give rise to the adage that, in radio, the pictures are better. The theater of the mind, it is true, could not recreate the enjoyment of an old-fashioned charade, as demonstrated above by Vincent Price. Pantomime. Now there’s a concept with which to silence the old wireless (even though silent movies could hardly have staged such a comeback against the talkies).

Mr. Price, who appeared on KTTV’s Pantomime Quiz, along with Lon McAllister (also pictured in the foreground), seems to have leaped at the opportunity of saying “boo” to shake up the public on behalf of the television industry. Pity, he was so much more sophisticated as the Saint of the airwaves.

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"Life with[out] Mother": Anna and Eleanor Roosevelt on the Air

Leave it to Will and Grace. That is what I used to say when that show was still on the air. Sarcasm, I mean. The kind of at-someone-else’s-expense humor those most likely to be subject to bias attacks are so quick to dispense. Sometimes, though, even I cannot hold back. While flicking through the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Mirror, something I decided on doing all this week here at broadcastellan, I came across an essay by Anna Roosevelt, commenting on her life with former First Lady Eleanor.

Back in 1949, the two had a radio program, broadcast Monday through Friday afternoon over ABC stations. Now, imagine soon-if-not-soon-enough-to-be former First Lady Laura Bush and one of her daughters going on the air five days a week to discuss politics and social matters. Who would tune in, let alone without a smirk or the fingers-crossed anticipation of a delicious gaffe?

Now, I do have doubts that the Bush women could handle such an assignment; but that is almost beside my point. Take Hillary and Chelsea, if you must. I mean, would anyone tune in, unless Hillary were having a giant tumor removed or Chelsea defended herself after being caught driving naked under the influence?

We chuckle at the so-called “good old days” with an air of superciliousness or else wax nostalgic. The very thought of sitting still while two of the western hemisphere’s most famous mother and daughter talk without any scandal or sensational element in sight! Preposterous, right? To me, this is neither cause for ridicule nor romance. It is simply a fact that we have become more callous and shallow and than we have ever been in the best and worst of times, even in the face of what might be, according to some scientists, the worst yet to come.

I do go on a bit; but I am not one to attach as of course the adjective “cheap” to the much-abused noun “sentiment.” At any rate, here is Anna Roosevelt talking about her mother and their joint radio venture, recordings of which, I regret, do not appear to have survived for appraisal:

Life with Mother always has been rich with her inspiration. Her aim never was to mold me in her image, but to guide me along lines of intellectual independence, social awareness and understanding. If I am able to bring any of these qualities to our radio program, I recognize how deeply indebted I am to Mother—even when I have the temerity to take issue with her on a subject. 

Neither Mother nor Father ever courted sycophants among their children. And if I have learned to speak up, I can trace my assertiveness to the family hearth. Although the family has arrived at broadly the same general philosophy, it would be an error to suppose that we agreed automatically on every social and economic question of public interest. 

Certainly there was nothing to support such a notion at our spirited family gatherings where everyone was free to express opinions, where sometimes even Father would have to shout to get the floor. The dictum that children should be seen and not heard was sharply modified in our household [. . .]. 

Our silence [in front of company] was not mere obeisance to good manners, but a credit to Mother’s good sense. For she took great pains to impress upon us that we should learn by listening to others[. . .]. 

It was second nature for us to hear Mother—from the time I was a child—discuss settlement work in New York, and to hear her connect individual cases to broad social problems affecting hundreds and thousands of others in any large city in the United States [. . .] 

Whether at the White House or elsewhere, life with Mother is unfailingly eventful—and always has been. It was especially eventful recently when Mother—the very epitome of punctuality—did not arrive on time for our first broadcast together at the ABC studios in New York City. 

I couldn’t understand it. Mother had planed in the night before from the United Nations meeting in Paris. We had worked out a few questions I was to ask concerning the Human Rights Committee, and were to meet at 10:30 the following morning at the ABC studios in Radio City. 

I had thought how easy our first program at the same microphone would be. I didn’t become alarmed until I noticed that Mother still was among the missing—and it was just two minutes before air time. 

Suddenly I found myself on the air—and utterly alone. I gazed entreatingly at the door. I was certain Mother would burst in at any moment. But there was no sign of her. I ad libbed for ten and one half minutes, without a page of script or a note to guide me. I filled in two more minutes by playing a recording Mother had made in Paris. I discussed New York traffic. Christmas shopping and anything else that came to mind. 

Then Mother arrived—in time to answer just one question. I knew Mother must have had a good alibi. She did. She had forgotten about the congestion of New York City traffic. She had thought—with incredible naiveté—that she could travel from Washington Square to 50th Street in ten minutes. 

Quite a miscalculation for so adept a world traveller as Mother. It made her realize just how completely engrossing the United Nations sessions had been.

Mrs. Roosevelt, who was taking a break from broadcasting during August, kept turning to the radio for news from Korea. On this day, 22 August, in 1949, she expressed herself concerned about the use of the Atomic bomb to resolve the conflict, hoping that the weapon would never be used (and she does not write “again”) since it would create a deadly chain of retaliation that might prove the end of the civilized world. In light of the current state of broadcasting here and stateside, I have a feeling it takes less than a nuclear weapon to accomplish just about that.