Category: Radio

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Senseless: One Soldier’s Fight to Speak Against War

Well, how do you like that! We just got ourselves a DVD/VCR recorder, in hopes of upgrading our video library and phasing out the old tapes that are piling up all over the place. As it turns out, the cassettes I shipped over from the US, which had played fine on the machine that gave up the ghost a couple of days ago, are being rejected by the new, regionally coded, high-tech marvel. Is it any wonder I am such an advocate of the state-of-the-Ark, the marvels of old-time radio drama?

On this day, 9 March, in 1940, for instance, playwright Arch Oboler masterfully exploited the potentialities of the medium with his adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. As reworked by Oboler, this “most talked of book of the year” relates the experience of a soldier (portrayed by James Cagney) who lost his limbs, his vision, his hearing in combat. More than twenty years later, lying “alone in a room in a hospital close to your city,” having “no arms, no legs, no ears with which to hear, no eyes with which to see, no mouth with which to speak,” he yet learns to communicate what serving his country at once enabled and disabled him to say. He does not want a medal; he wants to speak up. It is a freedom for which he fought with the weaponry that is responsible for its loss.

According to Oboler, Trumbo’s story “has even greater emotional impact” on the air because, by virtue of being “transformed into living speech,” the soldier’s words attain an “almost unendurable reality.” Johnny does not address the audience, but is overheard in his desperate attempt to make himself understood by the hospital staff and visitors, the living beings he senses only through the vibrations of their movements.

Oboler was particularly impressed by the scenes in which the “blind, deaf and dumb soldier learns to recognize the approach of the nurse by the vibrations of her footsteps coming up through the bedsprings and reacting against his skin.” It is a cruel irony that appeals to the melodramatist: a man who nearly lost all his senses now tries to make others come to theirs.

Unlike the 1971 movie adaptation, however, “Johnny Got His Gun” was produced at a time when speaking up against war was neither daring nor idealistic. Indeed, most intellectuals warned against a false peace, whereas to isolationists, who didn’t mind dealing with fascists overseas, keeping out of it was literally good for business.

Oboler was no pacifist; soon he would distance himself from “Johnny” and advocate instead the stirring of “hate” as being instrumental in motivating the masses in wartime. “Do not tell me that the people are disillusioned because of our past sins, our ‘Johnny Got His Guns,’ and so on, and that they need a dream of the new world before they are going to fight,” Oboler argued; “anger is what people want. And they want hate, the hate of a determined people who are going to kill and must kill to win this war.” That mass of “living flesh” in the hospital bed had made his appeal in vain.

New generations of Johnnies are getting their guns. No one hands us a voice; that we have to find for ourselves and raise while we may.

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Greek to Me: Notes on an Identity Crisis

Well, I can relate to it. That black sheep on the brow of the hill behind our house. After well over two years of living in Wales, I still feel very much like an outsider. I’m not sure whether I am too resisting of this new, old culture—which is struggling, with a mixture of self-consciousness and pride, to assert itself against or alongside England—retreating and subsequently fading into the American pop culture gone stale to which this journal is largely dedicated.

My self-confidence and sense of belonging were not bolstered any last weekend, when I accompanied my better half (just returned from London) to a dinner party whose far from rustic guests included a Deputy Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales. I did not expect to be conversing about my doctoral study on old-time radio, let alone impart my enthusiasm about the subject. I would have settled for literature, or travel, or dogs (Camilla having ditched the royal Corgies in favor of a Jack Russell like—or perhaps quite unlike—our inimitable Montague). Unfortunately, I did not get to share much of anything that evening. The guests chose, for the most part, to speak in the native tongue, which, I assure you, does not sound anything like English.

Yes, I can relate to the black sheep on the hills. And I sure can relate to the two main characters in the inaugural broadcast of Great Plays. After all, the comedy that evening was Aristophanes’s The Birds, in which two disenchanted old Athenians—Pisthetairos and Euelpides—leave their native soil in search of . . . Cloudcuckooland. A weekly radio program offering adaptations of Western drama ranging from ancient Greece to modernity, Great Plays premiered on this day, 26 February, in 1938. Undoubtedly, it is not the easiest introduction to old-time radio, although the multitude was being accommodated (or patronized) by the deletion of most Greek references.

Pardon me for failing to come up with a rara avis of a metaphor suitable to the occasion, but it sure is difficult to take off for unknown territory and expect to be surrounded there by those who are of the same proverbial plumage.

Nor do I quite understand the recent influx in visitors to this site from China, presently accounting—to me still unaccountably—for over 25 percent of my, er, readership. They are not likely to find much of interest here, aside, perhaps, from my reflections on avian flu in relation to the famed story by Daphne du Maurier. Then again, “China” and “Chinese” have been mentioned in this journal on several occasions, including these essays on The Shadow, Mr. Moto and the passing of Tokyo Rose, and Pearl S. Buck.

In a word, an admittedly somewhat tacky one in this context, I am disoriented. Perhaps, a flight to New York City is in order. A slow boat to China just won’t do.

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Heavenly Days: What I Get to Watch When I’m Home Alone

Here I sit like a good egg given up for Lent. After having spent much of the week leading up to Ash Wednesday—a period celebrated as Karneval in my native Germany—entertaining two old (make that “longtime”) friends eager to get away from those festivities. The guests gone and my better half away in London, I now have the place pretty much to myself (the pleasant company of Montague excepting). Heavenly days? Not quite; but I did get to watch the movie. Heavenly Days, that is, a 1944 comedy based on the characters created by Don Quinn for his hugely popular US radio series Fibber McGee and Molly (many episodes of which are available online at the Internet Archive).

My web journal tells me that I recorded this film way back in November 2005, during a visit to New York City, my former home. So, it has taken me a while to catch up with Fibber McGee and Molly in their last major movie outing. It takes a day like this to do so without impunity, that is, without having to importune someone else who, despite having humored me by sitting through Look Who’s Laughing (1941) and much else besides, cannot be expected to share my enthusiasm for radio stars on celluloid. Who would?

That said, I have never been a friend of Fibber McGee and Molly; I much prefer the urbane wit of the aforementioned Halls of Ivy, a situation comedy conceived by the same writer, over the middle-America average-Joeness I have neither experienced nor longed for during my fifteen years in the United States. That did not stop me from picking up a copy of Charles Stumpf and Tim Price’s Heavenly Days at the Museum of Television and Radio while visiting Gotham in August 2006.

Messrs. Stumpf and Price point out that Heavenly Days, unlike the comedy team’s previous Look Who’s Laughing and its follow-up Here We Go Again, was not a commercial success. Yet whereas those earlier movies were rambling and largely inconsequential, Heavenly Days attempts to be earnest and socially relevant. Like the radio series, it is in the service of wartime propaganda, sending Fibber and his wife on an educational trip to Washington, from which they return with an awareness of their importance to the nation.

Heavenly Days is at once rebellious and (pardon the anachronism) politically correct. It seems determined to infuse the final months of the Second World War—a period in which fear and fervor made way for indifference and impatience—with the spirit of the New Deal, which, by 1944, was rather old hat. According to the peculiar logic of the sentimental comedy into which he is thrust, Fibber has to learn what it means to be “average,” a label all of the citizen he encounters vehemently reject; that it is neither a shame nor a statistical sham, but an honor and an obligation, considering that being average makes him a representative of the people who declare and elect him to be just that.

Of course, Fibber long had the vote of the people who, by tuning in to his weekly radio program, kept him in the office that was a prominent slot on the air—that realm of statistical averages and mediocrity. After the less than favorable reception of his Heavenly Capraescapades, that slot must have seemed a good place to come home to . . .

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Beyond the Walk of Fame: A Monument for Madeleine Carroll

I don’t quite understand the concept; nor do I approve of such an abuse of the medium. The radio alarm clock, I mean. It accosts me with tunes and blather when I am least able or inclined to listen appreciatively. I much prefer being turned on by the radio rather than being roused by it to the point of turning it off or wishing it dead and getting on with the conscious side of life. This morning, however, BBC Radio 2—our daybreaker of choice—managed both to surprise and delight me with the following less-than-timely newsitem. Twenty years after her death, British-born Hollywood actress Madeleine Carroll (whose life and career are documented in this website maintained by her cousin) returns to the place of her birth as the English town of West Bromwich unveils a monument erected in her honor.

Film stars are perhaps least deserving of monuments—not merely because their off-screen antics rarely warrant praise, but because the celluloid on which their contributions to humanity are preserved are fitting enough testimonies to their achievements. Unless, that is, the achievements lie beyond those captured on film. In Carroll’s case, this translates into a return to Britain to serve as a Red Cross nurse during the Second World War.

The star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and Secret Agent put her film career on hold following the death of her sister during the London blitz in October 1940. Just days prior to this personal loss she had already signalled her intentions by contributing to a Canadian Red Cross Emergency Appeal, which aired on 29 September.

Subsequent parts in American radio dramas echoed her new career. In the late 1930s, Carroll had starred in frothy comedies and sensational melodramas produced by the Campbell Playhouse and the Lux Radio Theater; during the war, by comparison, she was most often heard in propaganda plays written for and produced by the aforementioned Cavalcade of America. On 5 October 1942, for instance, she played an army nurse in “I Was Married on Bataan,” scripted by reluctant radio playwright Arthur Miller. Two weeks later, on 19 October, she portrayed a pioneering female doctor in “That They Might Live”; and on 30 November 1942, she played the title character in “Sister Kenny.”

Unlike so many of her glamorous colleagues, Carroll truly inhabited these roles. It is her humanitarian work that is being remembered today.

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"Ancient Sorceries" and New: Wales, Witchcraft, and the Wireless

I can’t say that I knew much about Wales before I moved here from New York City. Undoubtedly, I still do not know as much as I ought to by now, well over two years later. Yet, however much I remain attached to America and its 20th-century popular culture, there is no getting away from what is now becoming home. On this day, 15 February, in 1948, for instance, the East Coast edition of the US radio series Escape presented “Ancient Sorceries,” a fantastic tale set in a remote town on the Welsh border, a town “between two worlds.” Having felt torn between two (or more) worlds myself, I felt compelled to listen in . . .

“Ancient Sorceries” was adapted by the aforementioned Les Crutchfield from a short story by Algernon Blackwood. It opens with what has been called the most romantic of radio sounds, the whistle of a locomotive. Aboard the train is Arthur Llewellyn, a Londoner who relates the strange occurrences during a weeklong—and unexpected—visit to a stay on the border to that wild country west of England.

He describes the countryside as “singularly empty, deserted of life.” There is a haze hanging over “the soft hills and the valleys between,” giving the “whole landscape a feeling of enchantment and unreality.” It is a haze I have often seen from our living room window, as illustrated by the above photograph of that very view, a scene that initially filled a staunch urbanite like myself with sensations not altogether pleasant.

Captivated nonetheless by this air of mystery, the Englishman alights, deciding to spend a night in “this peaceful spot,” despite the advice from a fellow passenger not to linger—not, that is, if he places “any value” on his soul. Heedless of this warning, Llewellyn leaves the train and, inquiring about a room for the night, is welcomed by the local innkeeper. Indeed, he appears to have been expected, as if returned to the village rather than visiting it for the first time.

Nor are the innkeeper and his wife the only ones to treat him like this. Who is the beautiful woman who asks him to come back to her? “You belonged to us once,” she insists. Is it a case of mistaken identity? Or loss of memory, perhaps? Can this mystery be explained away by science? However terrified, Llewellyn is determined to find out . . .

Aside from mentions of Swansea and the English town of Hereford near the Welsh border, there is little Welsh spirit in this dramatization of “Ancient Sorceries.” Dramatized in a perfunctory manner and delivered without accents to lend it character and authenticity, this is one of Escape’s lesser efforts. It is peculiar, however, that Crutchfield should have chosen to impose this relocation, considering that the original story was set in France. Was there, perhaps, more mystery to him in the wild of Wales, so little of which he managed to capture. Indeed, the strength of his play lies in what it suggests, rather than tells or enacts.

The awareness that the narrator has yet to find out—to live out—the end of his own story encourages the listener to become seer. The limitations of the storyteller turn us into tellers of his fortune. Having been conducted by a slight sketch and a few aural signposts, our trains of thought are railroaded to that place “between two worlds,” a misty and indistinct border region in which to conjure and scheme like the fates of the ancients. Such are the sorceries of radio.

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Up to Scratch; or, Giving the Voice the Finger

I guess we have all been exposed to them, no matter how quickly our fingers move to stop our ears. Sounds that drive us up the wall and get us to scream, shiver, and wince. For some, it is the screeching of a piece of chalk on a blackboard (perhaps already one of the “endangered” sounds aforementioned; for others it might be a creaking door swinging on rusty hinges. Fiddlesticks (however annoying they might be), that’s nothing compared to the noise Agnes Moorehead has to endure in the Suspense thriller “The Thirteenth Sound,” first broadcast on this day, 13 February, in 1947.

It is a battle of sounds, mind, considering that Moorehead had one of the most grating voices in the business, which is just what makes “The Thirteenth Sound” (written by writer-actor team Cathy and Elliot Lewis) such a frightfully clever—and cleverly frightful—vehicle for the “First Lady of Suspense (previously mentioned here).

Crime dramas can be divided into head-scratchers and nail-biters; the former being the whodunit, the latter the kind of thriller I shall call the will-they-won’t-they, in which a character, hero or villain, is placed in a shaky situation or shown to be in an unstable frame of mind. Will they get out of it, or won’t they. This is stuff in which Suspense, which started out as a series of detective mysteries written by the aforementioned John Dickson Carr, came to specialize after the success of “Sorry, Wrong Number,” also starring Ms. Moorehead (and featured in one of my podcasts. Improving on both the head-scratcher and the nail-biter, “The Thirteenth Sound” might justly be called a nail-scratcher.

It gets under our skin with a goose bumps inducing sound, a sound that could be the undoing of the play’s central character, slyly named Mrs. Skinner. She—and this is no mystery since we’re in on the act—has bumped off her husband, who doesn’t get a word in, but whose loud snoring and “nervous habit of grinding his teeth in his sleep,” the good woman claims, used to keep her up at night. Upon doing him in, she sleeps soundly for the first time in years.

And yet, in the effort of keeping a guilty secret, Mrs. Skinner’s nerves may not be up to scratch, old or otherwise. However strident, her voice may have met its match in the finger of suspicion pointing from beyond the grave. Like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” before it, “The Thirteenth Sound” presses a stethoscope on a guilty conscience. It is the microphone that makes a public hearing out of the ordeal.

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"Endangered Sounds"?

Well, let’s see. No, wait. Let’s listen instead. “Now I will do nothing but listen, / To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute / toward it.” Walt Whitman wrote these lines. What are the notes to the song of my self? What are the echoes of my everyday? What do these sounds have to do with me?

When I moved to Wales, far from the hubbub of Manhattan, I had to get used to a whole new soundscape. I haven’t quite gotten used to it yet; particularly not to the howling of the wind. These days, there is a new sound in the living room. Yet it is so old, Whitman might have heard it. It is not a Welsh sound, but one made in Brooklyn. It is the sound of our Ansonia clock, anno 1881 (pictured above), which is now part of the ambiance in which I breathe and move.

I have been listening to the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Endangered Sounds.” What might that be, an endangered sound? In my adolescence, I began to wonder about the perishable fabric of my sonic everday. I began to record noises and voices in an attempt to capture where—and who—I was. I did not trust my archival mind as a storehouse of sonic markers of place and time. We tend to make records of our lives in words and images rather than sound. The image seems to be more desirable as a keepsake—more reliable and persuasive. It dominates our senses. Is it any wonder we feel out of touch with the past if we insist on turning it into graphic objects.

I remember sitting in Central Park one afternoon, thinking how serene my environs were. I recorded the sounds of that afternoon and played them back at home, only to realize how noisy that spot had been. The images were so powerful, they drowned out the sounds of the metropolis—the cars rushing by just behind the trees, the buzz of commerce puncuated by sirens. I took no notice of what was out of sight (though hardly out of earshot); I did not hear what the eye fooled me into believing absent. I listen for them now that I am gone. I miss them more than the sights, stored in my mind, preserved on paper, and displayed in this journal.

“Endangered Sounds” provokes thoughts about our changing environment, about noise pollution, about the loss and luxury of silence: the nostalgia for our silenced past, the awareness that, as technology advances, we lose ourselves soundscapes whose sameness is robbing us of our identity—an alienating, Kmartian sub-urbia, a generic soundtrack as mind-numbing as Muzak. For all this, “Endangered Sounds” frustrates as much as it intrigues, especially since it does not resound with many of the authentic sounds it declares to be on the brink of extinction, some of which were recreated in stock recordings, others crushed in musical beats.

Rather than preserving sound, the program serves as a reminder of loss; it is a memorial service for our silenced past. It suggests that, in the near future, technology will permit us to deaden what we do not wish to hear, to create bubbles of choice sound and tranquility distilled from the din of civilization. Manufacturers of sound are hard at work to sell us back what commerce and progress has robbed us of.

Do we really need highly sophisticated computer technology to create our individual sound spheres? When I lived in Germany and dreamed of New York City, I would listen to the sounds of streets and avenues I had recorded while away from what was not truly home. The sirens, the footsteps on the sidewalks, the babble of the passers-by—they provided more comfort than the electronic tunes I merely consumed. Unlike the artifice of those purchased sounds—a sonic anywhere to take the place of the here and now—the metropolitan noises I had recorded were real and concrete. My feet had touched those steps, my shoulders had brushed against those voices, my nose had taken in the fuel with whose burning the traffic resounded. That was somewhere—a there I felt—and I knew I had to go back there to stay.

These days (owing to the electronic blasts of the past, no doubt) I am somewhat hard of hearing; but instead of deadening my everyday in specious phonics or phoney silences—some New Age orchestrations of an assembly-lined existence—I seek and find comfort in sounds whose source I can identify and take in with my other senses—the fire I feel against my skin, the yawning of our none-too-pleasant smelling dog on the carpet, and the clock on the mantelpiece (which, in the picture above, reflects both me and the dog on its surface); and instead of losing myself in the folds of a custom-made soundcarpet, I wrap myself in this resonant quilt and know myself to be . . . at home.

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For the Love of Lana: Rains on a Snowy Evening

If I had to put it in a nutshell, I’d probably go anaphylaxic. Let’s just say that 2007 is not exactly shaping up to be My Favorite Year (even though it’s looking promising for Academy Award-nominated Peter O’Toole). Spent rurally secluded without phone and internet (still only tentatively restored), slipping off a ladder during an attempt at high-stalks gardening, and seeing my first teaching stint here in Wales come to an unceremonious if not altogether surprisingly abrupt end (considering that I started off well by forgetting to show up for my first class), the past three weeks had about as many highlights as Roy Orbison’s hair seen through a pair of his shades . . .

Speaking of hair (because I could not come up with a smoother transition and it sure is time to move on): today, 8 February, marks the birthday of one of the best-tressed stars of Hollywood’s studio era: Ms. Lana Turner (who died back in 1995). Now, Lana was truly an appalling actress; but that is just what makes star vehicles like Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) such fascinating studies of the Lana persona and the studio system in its declining years.

By that time, Lana had not only negotiated a flexible Universal International contract, giving her approval of script, co-star, and director, but set up her own production company, Lanturn (which produced a single film). As she (or someone writing on her behalf) expressed it in an issue of Britain’s New Film Show Annual, Lana experienced “freedom for the first time” since she started to work in motion pictures back in the 1930s and was looking forward to the joy of being her “own boss.”

Lana never came across as a career woman, even though she looked like a gal who could take care of herself. In Imitation, she succeeds in portraying a selfish, out-of-touch actress desperate to become a star precisely by failing to connect to any of her fellow actors, some of whom—Susan Kohner foremost—were moving toward the 1960s by challenging the conventions of earlier cinematic emoting with a realism of which Lana was incapable.

Playing for the camera rather than interacting with those who shared the screen with her, she was most convincing at playing self-centered and greedy broads, calculating characters toward whom the audience could rarely warm. In turn, this edge rendered her exciting even when her acting lacked the lustre of her bleached curls.

Not that her one-on-ones with the public were dramatically superior; on the radio, her shortcomings as an actress became particularly noticeable, the mike serving as a microscope under which the falsehood and superficiality of a performance are laid bare. Prime examples are Lana’s tepid line deliveries as the narrator of “Fear Paints a Picture” (3 May 1945) and “The Flame Blue Glove” (15 December 1949), plays produced by CBS radio’s award-winning thriller anthology Suspense.

Rather better is her performance in “Doughnut Girl” (4 December 1944), a bit of Cavalcade of America propaganda, in which a vain and spoiled young woman encounters the hardship of serving as Red Cross nurse in the war theater of New Guinea and the boys who act in it. I believed her to be vain and spoiled, but remain suspicious of her transformation.

Tonight, in anticipation of the slushy destiny of the snow presently coating most of Wales (an anomaly for this temperate region), I am making my pilgrimage to the TechnicoLourdes that is 1950s event cinema and commemorate Ms. Turner’s career by immersing myself in The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), a soggy rather than steamy romance-cum-disaster movie co-starring turban-topped Richard Burton, one of Tinseltown’s most memorable Welsh imports.

Once again, Lana is the pampered, self-absorbed anti-heroine whose chance at redemption is suggested rather than acted out. When her character makes her exit after having proven as devastating and fleeting as the titular weather phenomenon, Lana slightly adjusts her blonde coif, brushing aside any sense of character development with a single gesture.

Were I not experiencing a pop-cultural drought—or a tremendous thirst, at any rate—I might not have been caught in The Rains at all; these days, however, I don’t open the umbrella of distinction quite so readily, letting come down on me whatever UK television channels deign to pour out. I don’t mind such indiscriminate dousings, as long as I can take refuge now and again in the vault of our DVD library, which is more representative of my cinematic tastes.

To account for times thus passed (in the absence of any other prominent markers of distinction), I am now putting together a list of all the films I am watching this year (see right). Some of the titles, listed chronologically in the order of my viewings, will link to relevant pages on this site or those maintained by fellow web journalists.

In the days to come, I am going to share my thoughts on some of the films I have taken in—from Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse thrillers to Mitchell Leisen’s extravagant Lady in the Dark, with the obligatory references to old-time radio drama and the occasional connections to my private everyday and the world beyond.

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Blandings Waves: Cary Grant’s “Dream House” Annex

Well, glamorous it ain’t! Chasing a runaway trash can down the lane and harvesting stray garbage bags from the hedges—before dawn, no less, with little more than a tiny flashlight to guide me. The storm that has been wreaking havoc across Europe swept over Wales this morning, however accustomed folks here may be to such violent weather conditions. Barring outages of power, as experienced by thousand of households in the wild west of Britain, I am going to get my dose of glamour and sophistication yet, by celebrating the career of Cary Grant, born on this day, 18 January, in 1904.

I regret not to have spotted the statue erected in his honor down in Bristol, England, where Grant (or Archibald Alexander Leach) came into this world. He left it in 1986, which prompted me, a sour-faced and romance-starved youth, to compose a eulogistic piece of poetry (not to be dug up for this or any other occasion). This year, I have already revisited two of Grant’s performances—the one truly Grant (George Cukor’s charming adaptation of Holiday), the other cash-and-Cary (Leo McCarey’s World War II oddity Once Upon a Honeymoon). I very nearly caught a third—Destination Tokyo—which is frequently showing on the very poor cousin of Turner Classic Movies here in Britain. Tonight, I might pair him with Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, or Rosalind Russell.

Like so many Hollywood actors of his generation, Grant was frequently heard on US radio; here, for instance, you may listen to Grant singing in a 1936 broadcast trailer for Suzy. On his very birthday, back in 1955, he was once again heard in a Lux Radio Theater adaptation of his screwball hit The Awful Truth. After having been cast opposite Claudette Colbert (in 1939), he was reuniting with his original screen co-star, Irene Dunne.

Yet Grant was also among a number of leading men—including Alan Ladd, Glenn Ford, Humphrey Bogart, and James Stewart—to seize the opportunity of starring in a radio program of his own. Together with wife Betsy Drake, who also wrote some of the scripts, he was heard in Mr. and Mrs. Blandings (1951), a situation comedy based on the novel Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, filmed in 1948 with Grant and Myrna Loy. By the late-1940s, radio shows were no longer performed live, which made the medium attractive to busy film actors interested in making a few thousand bucks on the side, for the comparatively easy assignment of spending a few hours in a recording studio reading (rather than memorizing) a short script.

Radio, in turn, had its influence on Grant’s career in motion pictures. In 1944, he starred in Once Upon a Time, a film based on Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy “My Client Curley.” Yes, once upon a time, radio played a significant role in the lives of actors and audiences who, like ambitious Mr. Blandings, managed to evaporate the humdrum of the everyday by building castles in the air.

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Not Keeping Up with Myself: Still a Bloghead at 300

Well, it “is better than being totally unemployed.” Teaching, I mean. At least that’s what our disgruntled Miss Brooks told herself—and the audience of the situation comedy bearing her name—on this day, January 16, in 1949. She was asked to fill in for a colleague and was tempted respectfully to decline; but, educators being generally treated with less respect than the handouts lavished on their listless charges who promptly doodle themselves out of earshot, dutiful Connie Brooks showed up anyway.

Showing up! That has got to be the easiest and most elementary aspect of fulfilling any job requiring our leaving home. In my case, though, even that seems too much to ask. Apparently, I am too busy these days keeping up with the out-of-date to consult my personal calendar much, at least when appointments involving more than me and the radio are to be kept. At any rate, showing up was something I neglected to do this afternoon, scheduled as I was to start a teaching assignment—in Creative Writing, no less—at the local university.

There is small consolation in listening to absent-minded Dr. Hall of The Halls of Ivy, who, on this day in 1952 suffered the following blackout while hanging up some paintings with his wife:

Mrs. Hall: . . . put this one over the sofa.

Dr. Hall: What is that?

Mrs. Hall: It’s a painting I found up in the attic. Don’t you remember it?

Dr. Hall: No, and please don’t accuse me of having bought it. 

Mrs. Hall: Darling, you painted it!

There was reason for Toddy Hall to suppress the memory. Some fifteen years earlier, the painting had met with the assessment that “hanging is too good for it.”

Unlike Dr. Hall, Dr. Heuser tends to remember nothing more clearly than his past embarrassments, a failing that inevitably leads to further blunders. So, pardon me for not being in the mood to celebrate my three-hundredth entry into the broadcastellan journal and for cuddling up with my Mr. Boynton for a screening of Hitchcock’s Wrong Man (showing today on TCM UK).

Considering that I have fallen into the habit of editing my work online, you might find something new (or even worthwhile) in the previous posts. I am sure this short note will be revised before long. For now, it is rather a sour one, reflecting my current mood. Remind me to snap out of it—perhaps by divulging an incident involving a mental power failure of your own.