Category: Radio

A Face Too Good For Radio

This video was recommended to me by YouTube from one of my subscriptions.

I gasped, even before playing it. The woman on the record jacket cover could be a twin for the woman I worked with when I was a voice on the radio, many years ago. I was the news guy during her afternoon shift. We used to indulge the sort of on-air playful banter that became more common later in the business.

Why would such a stunningly beautiful woman choose to work in radio, rather than being seen on TV? Because she was married, and being as smart and strong-willed as she was beautiful, she didn’t want to be objectified by men, to use a current expression.

The Fun of OTR

A couple of years ago I talked about my mother‘s voice training during the years of classic radio entertainment. Later that year I met Ann Robinson, who starred in the classic film The War of the Worlds. I wanted to talk about one of the all-time greatest radio actors, Les Tremayne, who played an Army general in the movie, and Ann happily obliged.

When I was in college, I enjoyed listening to CBS Radio Mystery Theater. On AM radio, the new productions provided a real feeling of the Old-Time Radio experience from before it was old. In 1975 the unmistakable voice of Les Tremayne was heard in “The Ides of March.” The radio play was later adapted into a Sandra Bullock vehicle, The Premonition.

https://youtu.be/riGqt4m0SM0

Comics Books, The Inflation Canary

This is adapted from a letter I wrote to my buddy Denro that, upon review, seemed suitable for a blog post:

If you look up the causes of accelerated inflation in the 70’s, conservative economists always point to Nixon ending the gold standard for currency exchange. They completely ignore our generation coming of age, which I’m certain was, along with the OPEC oil crisis, a main driver of prices. We saw the trend in our comic books!

Comics had stayed 10-cents for over 20 years, and were 12-cents for most of the Sixties. But then in ’69 they went to 15-cents, and only two years later there was the jump to 48-pages for a quarter, before the rapid reversal to 32-pages for 20-cents. The cover date of that first big jump? August, 1971, so the issues were on sale in May-June, exactly 50 years ago. As fans we saw the immediate effect of inflation in one of the smallest segments of the American economy. When did Nixon end the gold standard for exchange rates? August, 1971. Stupidly, I had failed to see that connection while writing my senior paper for Economics on Nixon’s wage and price controls!

I see another factor behind 70’s inflation, with the high sustained wages earned by unionized factory workers at the same time the peak baby boomers were flooding the job market. As I like to point out, the Polka and Portuguese music shows at the radio station on Sundays were paid for by guys who worked union jobs at the Spalding plant in Chicopee. With me having the FCC-mandated license to operate the transmitter, they sat at the mic and played records while their families and friends sat in the talk show studio. The Polish people headed out while the Portuguese people came in, then followed by the stock car racing guys.

The car show was all talk, so I was in the control room at the Gates console, engineering and handling the calls. The guy who ran the car show owned a garage with a custom shop. (You should imagine John Milner instead of Curt Henderson being at Wolfman Jack’s station in American Graffiti.) Half of the ads during the car show were self-promotion for the guy’s business, so I have to assume he wasn’t running a chop shop. 😉

During the Polka and Portuguese shows I was checking the AP wire and reading Billboard, or in the production studio working on commercials, while keeping an ear on the over-the-air monitor, listening for trouble. The guys solicited their own advertisers, and if that money didn’t cover the station’s fee they had to pay the difference out of their own pockets. Sometimes I’d see a new RV in the parking lot, and I’d hear about their vacation houses on Lake Winnipesaukee. I’m sure they were earning more than my $3/hour. Those tennis balls and basketballs aren’t made by union labor in Chicopee anymore, and those lakefront properties now have million-dollar vacation homes owned by executive class buyers.

Yesterday and Today

In 1972 we stopped putting men on the Moon, but our Earthbound future was just beginning. That year, Stewart Brand explained it in his article “Spacewar” for Rolling Stone.

The world of tomorrow, that we have today, was also described in 1972, in perfect detail, in a couple of films. The promise of interactive television, as narrated by DJ Casey Kasem…

… didn’t happen with analog cable systems, but it was of course eventually realized by digital networking.

“Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing” was produced in 1972 at WGBH-TV in Boston. That same year, WGBH also produced a much more entertaining movie, the cult favorite Between Time and Timbuktu. It opens with none other than my childhood idol DJ from WABC in New York, Cousin Brucie.

https://youtu.be/Sdp5-YdS9aE

Sound Trek

For over two-and-a-half years, following a couple of hellish surgeries for a detached retina, I was essentially blind in my left eye. How essentially? I could read something only if it was literally touching my eyelashes.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to radio (heck, I used to work at a radio station) including old-time radio shows, and I did a lot of that during the worst few months of my recovery, while confined to my bedroom. That experience gave me a deeper sympathy for people who are permanently visually impaired.

Sci-Fi Old Time Radio is deserving of special recognition for their TV soundtracks with descriptive narration. The shows were originally available on the now-defunct BlindyTV service, and they include the original Star Trek series and Doctor Who.

Click to go to Sci-Fi OTR

Listening to these programs reminds me of when I was a kid, holding the mic of my little tape recorder near the TV speaker to capture bits of Trek. I’d listen to them after bedtime with an earphone (see two posts ago).