Showing posts with label 1940s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1940s. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

3 Chords & the Truth: The hits in hi-fi


All I need is a nice vacuum-tube hi-fi, some nifty record albums and a record changer, and I'm in business, Hoss.

Well, and a time machine. That would be nice.

What do you think is on sale at the House of Hi-Fi this week? Let me jump in my Big Show time machine and find out.

While I'm there -- sometime around 1962 -- I'll see what kind of radio gig I can pick up to earn enough to keep me flush in LPs and hi-fi equipment. Food, too. Food is important.


AND YOU know what? While I'm back in the early '60s, buying neato electronic toys and spinning the hits somewhere or another, I'm going to see how 3 Chords & the Truth translates to "back in the day."

This should be fun -- or is that "koo koo, Pally"?

Ring-a-ding-ding, and all that jazz. Because I'm hep to all that, cats.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

A message etched in shellac


It's kind of like a message in a bottle, only on a record.

It's kind of like it's been bobbing atop the storm-tossed seas for 66 years, only it probably was in someone's basement.

It's definitely a message from 1945, someone committing something he or she thought important to a Presto transcription disc -- someone reaching out to a future and to Omahans then unknown, conveying a slice of what was then into what someday would be.

Message received.

Welcome, fellow survivors of the postmodern age to a time of America triumphant and evil vanquished . . . at least for a brief moment in time. Welcome to Nov. 22, 1945. It's Thanksgiving Day, and this is the world news over radio station WOW, Omaha, Neb.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

When TV was but a punk kid of 10


In 1949, this was the NBC Television Network. It stretched from New York to St. Louis, all hooked up to the coaxial cable, as ably explained that year by Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob Smith and Clarabell the Clown.

If your city wasn't on the hookup, then your local network affiliate (assuming you had a TV station at all) got its national programming, what there was of it, via kinescopes -- 16-millimeter film recordings of a TV monitor at the New York studios. The hinterlands got network shows when they got them.

And videotape still was the better part of a decade in the future.

What you see here --
the state of the art four years after the end of World War II -- features less capability and lower quality than a 4G-enabled smart phone today. And it was miraculous.

As primitive as it seems today, it would revolutionize an entire society in the years following 1949.



THOUGH TELEVISION still was very much in its infancy in April 1949, NBC was in a mood to celebrate how far the medium had come since the advent of regular American broadcasts 10 years earlier in New York.

Through the New York facilities of
WNBT (now WNBC), here we have a kinescope of TV's first anniversary gala. NBC was celebrating a decade of television, and the network was throwing a party.

Kind of an austere party by today's standards, but a wingding nevertheless.


IN THIS CASE,
the folks at WNBT were thanking their lucky stars for now-forgotten singing stars, because not only was TV history in short supply in 1949, but also reliable ways of archiving old programs. That tends to make retrospectives problematic.

Let's just say I hope you enjoy old kinescopes of fighter planes taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. That was a really big deal back then -- it wasn't the content; it was that the TV people could broadcast from an underway naval vessel at all.


IT'S TIME to go, now. And, of course, that would be Bulova Watch Time.

Sunday, June 06, 2010

Racists in the henhouse, 1941

Click on the ad for a larger version.

History books are one thing.

Stories from people who lived history are another.

But when you come face-to-face with what historians call "primary-source materials," sometimes the sheer power of it can leave you gobsmacked . . . despite having lived through a bit of ugly history yourself.

I, as you surely know, grew up in the Deep South in the 1960s and '70s. I attended legally segregated schools until 1970. I was indoctrinated with a full load of the sort of white, Southern racism that one breathed in back then pretty much as one breathed in air.

Polluted air.

Among certain sorts of folk -- common in occurrence, common in behavior -- the N-word was an all-purpose thing back then . . . noun, adjective and occasionally verb. But still, you run across bits of tangible history that show you that things once were even worse.

That even as bad as things might seem -- as delusional and demented as people might seem today -- once they were more so.


I REMEMBER coming across an old Baton Rouge High yearbook -- from 1928, I think -- as a senior in high school. We had a large archive of the things in the yearbook office. And in this one, under the category of what passed for humor at the "white school," was a cartoon of a stereotypically drawn black child, a "pickaninny" in the parlance of the day.

This African-American child was pictured in a watermelon patch, stealing the fruit of the vine next to a sign saying "No Trespassing." A gun was at his head.

The caption? "Read the signs," or some such.

In 1978, I figured it should have more appropriately read "Holy s***!"

ABOVE, WE FIND another one of those moments in this Broadcasting magazine ad for Free & Peters, Inc., radio station representatives. The firm prided itself on being able to "spot a nigger in the henhouse as far as we can see it."

"That's just one more reason why our fifteen good men are welcomed friends and trusted co-workers to most of the radio advertisers and agencies in America," the ad concluded.

With friends like those. . . .

Oh, one more thing. The date of the Broadcasting issue containing our bit of primary-source material? Dec. 8, 1941.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Best radio advertisement ever


North Carolina's "Smoke 'em if you got 'em" station for 1949 doesn't list the number of lung-cancer patients in its "primary area," but I guess you can't cram every marketing statistic into a single trade ad.

On the bright side, however, all its announcers had the most wonderful deep, smoky voices. And WGTM's ultramodern studios all featured the latest in "cough button" technology -- no ifs ands or butts.

Plus, you've got to love a cigarette pack that's giving you the finger. Or at least your lungs.

Friday, May 28, 2010

A message from our sponsors. . . .


For the Lawrence Welk crowd.


For the Three Dog Night crowd.

That is all . . .
as inexplicable as it is.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

On a note of wistfulness


What you are about to hear is a voice -- a voice lost. A voice faded into the haze of the memories of old men and old women, a world lost in the fog of history.

The voice speaks in an unfamiliar dialect. It speaks of strange things in a strange manner.


This voice -- this lost voice -- calls to us from a nation that is no more. A people who are no more.

The voice is strident. It is confident. It is imperfect, and its sins are as manifest as its hope for the future and its determination to do better tomorrow.
Somehow.

This alien voice sounds like Shakespeare, performed in a tavern. By Broderick Crawford.


THE FUTURE GENERATIONS
who hear this voice are strangers to its cadences. The future that plucks this voice from the ether -- from the past -- belongs to an alien people, a weary people, a frightened people. They, I think, are a beaten people, though I am not sure they would recognize this.

They would not recognize this voice
on a note of triumph. Nor would they any longer recognize the name Broderick Crawford.

Certainly they will not recognize the name Norman Corwin.

This program,
On a Note of Triumph, was regarded as his masterpiece -- a masterpiece among many Corwin masterpieces -- aired on every radio network on the occasion of the end of the European War, May 8, 1945.

Adolf Hitler was dead. The Third Reich was vanquished. Americans remembered, and took stock, and gave thanks.
On a Note of Triumph.
Lord God of trajectory and blast,
Whose terrible sword has laid open the serpent
So it withers in the sun for the just to see,
Sheathe now the swift avenging blade with the names of nations writ on it,
And assist in the preparation of the plowshare.
Lord God of fresh bread and tranquil mornings,
Who walks in the circuit of heaven among the worthy,
Deliver notice to the fallen young men
That tokens of orange juice and a whole egg appear now before the hungry children;
That night again falls cooling on the earth as quietly as when it leaves Your hand;
That freedom has withstood the tyrant like a Malta in a hostile sea,
And that the soul of man is surely a Sevastopol
Which goes down hard and leaps from ruin quickly.
Lord God of the topcoat and the living wage
Who has furred the fox against the time of winter
And stored provender of bees in summer's brightest places,
Do bring sweet influences to bear upon the assembly line:
Accept the smoke of the milltown among the accredited clouds of the sky:
Fend from the wind with a house and a hedge
Him who You made in Your image,
And permit him to pick of the tree and the flock,
That he may eat today without fear of tomorrow,
And clothe himself with dignity in December.
Lord God of test-tube and blueprint,
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together,
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors
and give instruction to their schemes;
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color
or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream
as those who profit by postponing it pretend:
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of little peoples through
expected straits,
And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come
for longer than posterities can see ahead,
That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.
LORD GOD of history and culture . . . we do not understand. This world is lost to us.

Lord God of reality TV and bling, what is the past trying to tell us?

Lord God Almighty, are we all the better or all the worse for all the "progress" we, Thy unfaithful creation, hath wrought?

We laugh at the strange cadences. We laugh at the naiveté. We laugh at the world-weary optimism. We laugh at the reverence.

We, the sophisticates of monosyllabic mindlessness, have no time for these earnest ghosts.

Norman Corwin, the genius of glowing vacuum tubes and the "Golden Age of Radio," turned 100 on Monday.
Unfortunately, this is no country for old men.

Or their genius. Or their poetic prose. Glorious words lovingly set so gently, so precisely onto the airwaves of a lost civilization.

What?
I can't unders. . . .

Gone. The signal --
I lost it.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

My hit parade


This is our iPod. It has vacuum tubes, and you can't stick it in your pocket.

But it does get nice and warm, and the hot tubes in the guts of the 1956 Zenith hi-fi console smell like the magic dust of a long-lost childhood.

There apparently is something out there called "the slow-media movement." This, in our living room, is the "slow-music movement."

Tonight, Mrs. Favog and I were listening to a stash of 1940s home recordings, from back when home recording meant putting a cutting stylus to a blank transcription disc, then carefully brushing away the shavings as the music made its way out of the radio and into the acetate.


I WONDER whether that long-ago Omaha recording enthusiast imagined -- as he (or she) plucked favored songs out of the ether and hid them away in homemade records -- that someday, someone in Future Omaha would listen to those recordings and, however briefly . . . however tenuously, rend the veil between our worlds.

I wonder whether they could grasp that, amazingly, Your Hit Parade would live on -- that the world the recorder knew in 1944 would again emerge, not from the ether but from a homemade record to touch a future world of atom bombs and television and space stations and a computer in every . . . lap.

DID THEY imagine that the youthful Frank Sinatra -- the star of the show who drove legions of bobby-soxers to squeals of ecstasy more than a decade before Elvis got in on the act -- someday would be the long-dead Chairman of the Board . . . and that those frenzied young girls would be great-grandmas?

Someone in 1944 put a heavy stylus down on an acetate-covered aluminum disc rotating at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. The stylus cut tiny grooves into the acetate blank. Message met bottle, and that union was cast into the currents of time.

Ah, but I have a time machine. It's a 1956 Zenith.

It's April 2010. It's December 1944. Ol' Blue Eyes is dead; long live Ol' Blue Eyes.

The slow-music movement can zip you across time and space in just the time it takes needle to meet record.

Listen! Sinatra's singing the No. 1 song on Your Hit Parade. Oh my God, you barely can hear "The Trolley Song" through the screams of the bobby-soxers!

L.S./M.F.T! L.S./M.F.T! Lucky Strike means fine tobacco . . . and lung cancer just in time for the Space Age. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.

Well, 1944, it was good to make your acquaintance. So long . . .
for a while.

Monday, June 02, 2008

This. Is. Cool.


In 1945, what now is WNBC-TV in New York was WNBT, and it broadcast over Channel 1.

Yes, in 1945, there was a Channel 1. What there wasn't was too many televisions on which to watch what was playing on Channel 1. That's a pity -- folks missed one of the freakin' coolest station IDs ever produced.

Back then, lots of things seemed important. They were surrounded by an air of importance. And people thought they were important.

Today? Everything is cutoffs and flip-flops.

Whatever.

I wish I had been born a couple of decades before I was. It might have been nice to live more of my life during the era of Stuff That Mattered, you know?

Radio on the TV: 1948








What's interesting about these kinescopes of a special DuMont television broadcast of Don McNeill's Breakfast Club program from ABC radio isn't just the peek we get at the earliest days of American network television.

NO, WHAT'S INTERESTING is the view inside what it took to put on a live network radio program way back when. It took people. Lots and lots of cast members. An orchestra. Writers churning out scripts. A technical crew.

Today, we get WAV files on HAL 9000.

Anybody got a time machine they can lend me? "Progress" hasn't left me exactly edified.