Comments on Radio?
Radio swirled down from the twentieth century's morning sky, exalted every grassy leaf, and vanished in a vespers echo. It still haunts our collective inner eye with something beyond nostalgia.
From the 1920s into the 1950s, most Americans formed a personal relationship with radio.
Old Time Radio, like other artifacts lost to progress, quickens a longing for times past. But it's different than steam trains, horses, one-room schools, iceboxes, Model Ts, and outhouses. Radio's anima was not replaced, but lost.
The radio-land pageant arose in each listener's imagination. The pictures were theirs, free of the producer's potted vision.
Many still remember TV's jarring, counterfeit replacements for their favorite radio programs, like seeing the movie after reading the book. The new is always exciting, but this time, an old friend slipped away in silence.
After World War I, and well into the cold war, most Americans tuned into radio's tidal wave of advertising for entertainment, news, religion, social engagement, politics and marketplace savvy. The phenomenon grew like a sourdough starter, and its yeasty chemistry baked itself into every aspect of life. The worldview of America's every-person was an image formed in the cerebral cortex by electronic wizardry.
Radio was not a simple pleasure of a simpler time. No time is simple for those living it.
Farming to avoid starvation, caring for livestock, harnessing a team, carrying water from a pump, cranking a gasoline engine, visiting a smelly outhouse, cooking on a wood stove, scrubbing clothes on a washboard, and dying from diseases yet to be conquered, made life neither idyllic nor simple.
The "present" moment of any era is a storm of forces, reflexes, ambiguities, and unknowns, unseen in the moment but inferred from memory, hundreds of milliseconds after blowing through. The simplicity of history's script is abstracted from the outcome of all those unpredictable present moments.
We look back to the Golden Age of Radio, not to revisit a simpler time, but to glimpse the passing of those long-gone instants.
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Here's a bit of cosmic caprice from the footfalls of our wandering reality. In an October 1942 radio program, three years after Einstein's famous letter to President Roosevelt, but three years before Hiroshima, Jack Armstrong, All American boy (Monday at 5:30 PM), split the atom and built an atomic engine. That's unexpected, since we've come to believe popular culture and atomic power were married in a mushroom cloud, but that's not the quirky part.
The namesake for radio's Jack Armstrong was a real-life Colonel Jack Armstrong, a World War II hero, who became a cold war advocate of powering satellites with an atomic engine.
Atomic power had a specialized role in popular culture prior to Trinity. H. G. Wells had an atomic bomb in his 1914 book, "The World Set Free."
Buck Rogers, when he got to the twenty-fifth century in the early 1920s, did a lot of atom busting in his comic books, but not, so far as we know, on the radio. New Mexico historian, Ferenc Morton Szasz, has looked into it for us.
Cleve Cartmill had a chain-reaction bomb in a short story, "Deadline," in 1944, and a Superman Comic Book from 1944 would have had an Atomic Bomb if it hadn't been censored until after Trinity. Superman actually did have an Atomic Beam Machine in 1940, and some Atomic fuel cylinders were stolen the next week. There was also an Atomic pistol in September, 1944, but the main nuclear stuff started in October, 1945, two months after Hiroshama, with a two-month appearance of "Atom Man."
Prior to the day the sun rose twice, however, atomic power had about the same impact on popular culture as time travel does today. To find it casually dropped into a radio program in 1942 is odd, but the real-world narrative link between the fictitious Jack Armstrong, and his living-flesh namesake, transcends odd.
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A generation of children, mostly boys, grew into adulthood tinkering with electronic gadgets. They built radios, strung antennae, rewired speakers, sawed lumber into resonance boxes, and bragged about pulling in sounds from hundreds of miles away.
Catch phrases and sound effects from popular shows littered the small-talk of young people. The sound of the Inner Sanctum door, the Phantom's sinister chuckle, the William Tell Overture, McGee's closet, Buster Brown's Froggy confusing the Professor, Gabriel Heater's, "There's good news tonight," and Bob and Ray's, "Go hang by your thumbs," among many others, flowered like weeds in the garden of popular discourse.
The dominant force of radio entertainment is long gone, but you can still glimpse its power through the programs those long-ago Americans enjoyed. They're all around us on the Internet, just a few clicks away, along with cult-like remembrances of nuance and history about the people who streamed their best efforts into the "Audio Radiance" of Radio Land. Here are a few of them, but Google will direct you to many more.
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Fake news is not new. Consider the fact-resistant urban legend of Uncle Don. Every cohort of youngsters since the Silent Generation has repeated how Uncle Don, at the end of his kiddies show in 1928, made a choleric reference to his audience's legitimacy.
By this time, most of the people who've testified to having heard him do it have passed over the bar, and are, presumably, addressing the eternal consequences of their flimflam. Nevertheless, the narrative clings stubbornly to its anti- bona fides.
Uncle Don did not, believing his mike had been turned off, say, "That ought to hold the little bastards."
This doddering story has been "authenticated" by ear-witnesses, and bogus reproductions of old radio shows. It litters the mainstream parts of the Internet so deeply it rivals the Smithsonian's allegations of our sixth president's belief in Mole People.
The Snopes debunking, nearby, is more entertaining than the legend. Please stop passing this canard around. Oh, and the same Internet that gives us an almost trans-finite set of corroborations of the "Little Bastards" incident, also yields up this rare recording of the real Uncle Don. Remarkable.
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September 21, 1939 was twenty days after the opening shots in World War II, Hitler's invasion of Poland.
It was also sixteen days after America's declaration of neutrality, four days after Stalin invaded Poland, the very day Hitler's army ordered the final solution of Poland's "Jewish Problem," six days before German guns on the Siegfried Line attacked France's Maginot Line, one week before Poland's capitulation, and nine days before France fell back to the Maginot Line, awaiting the attack that outflanked them from a different direction.
September 21, 1939, was also the day Washington DC radio station WJSV used the primitive recording technology of the time to preserve an entire day of broadcasting. The recording was a joint project by WJSV and the National Archives. The original mechanical transcription discs have remained in the National Archives, and are now available to us via Internet files.
The recordings provide a unique emersion in American popular culture at a hinge moment in our collective memory. We are a click away from hearing what Americans of that time heard, and visualizing the mental images that informed and entertained them.
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Who in the world cares about Radio?
By JOSH GETLIN
June 12, 1985 12 AM PT
LA Times Staff Writer
Jack L. Armstrong, an Air Force colonel who pioneered the use of nuclear energy in space and whose name was the inspiration for the "All American Boy" radio hero of the 1930s, died Monday in Laguna Niguel after a long illness. He was 74.
During a 21-year military career, Armstrong was a prominent advocate of the non-military uses of atomic power. He played a key role in developing programs that led to the launching of the nation's first nuclear-fueled satellite in 1961.
Following his retirement from the Air Force the same year, Armstrong worked for the Rocketdyne Division of North American Rockwell (now Rockwell International) in Los Angeles and helped develop the powerful engines that were later used in the Apollo and Gemini space programs, according to his son, James.
However, the much-decorated officer is best remembered by his name--a catchy moniker that became familiar to millions of radio listeners as "Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy."
During the early 1930s, General Mills advertising executives wanted to develop a radio show hero who would somehow represent "All-American virtues . . . of courage, a sense of humor and the championing of ideals," said James Armstrong.
"Sammy Gale, a company executive, had been a roommate in college of my father's, and he decided to use the name 'Jack Armstrong' because it seemed to convey all of that," he added.
Like the Wheaties-eating hero named after him, Armstrong saw combat action all over the world. He entered the Army Air Forces as a 2nd lieutenant in July, 1941, and was stationed at Pearl Harbor at the outbreak of World War II.
After the war, Armstrong was assigned by the Air Force to the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission. Rising to the rank of colonel, he began developing programs such as SNAP (Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) that eventually led to the launching of the nation's first atomic-powered satellite.
Armstrong's work with the space program frequently brought him to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) center in Houston, where he "was often on television . . . . I always remember watching him at the space center, in that room with all the technicians and the many television screens," said James. "He was involved with many of those programs, from the first launches to the moon landing programs . . . . I think I have more memorabilia from the astronauts, more autographs from individual astronauts, than anyone," he added.
Armstrong grew up in Minneapolis and received a degree in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1933.
He is survived by his wife, Audrey, his son, and his mother, Evelyn Armstrong.
Memorial services are scheduled for Thursday at 11 a.m. at the United Methodist Church in South Laguna. The services will be followed by full military honors at Riverside National Cemetery at 3 p.m.