Showing posts with label WOW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WOW. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 05, 2018

6/5/68


Bobby Kennedy died 50 years ago. It still hurts.

Actually, the assassinations of 1968 -- first Martin Luther King and then, two months later, Robert Kennedy -- hurt all the more as time goes by. Why is that? Why are these the wounds that never heal?

Some say it's because what we lost in that terrible spring of '68 was hope itself. Maybe some did -- I can't say for sure; I was just 7 at the time. But I remember the sadness, and I remember some of the fear. Still, 7-year-olds don't lose hope . . . not really. It takes longer for a body to really and truly lose hope.

I wasn't there yet.

Now, a half century on? I still don't know. My hope is battered and bruised -- besieged, actually, in this hateful and diseased Age of Trump -- but it's not lost. Not entirely, anyway.

But every insult to it -- every body blow, every instance when the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable, but reality -- adds, for me, to the grief over something that happened when I was but a child.



THE PAIN grows exponentially as Americans see what we've become, as we grow ever more acutely aware of what we lost that awful early Wednesday morning as gunshots rang out in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. As hope drained away along with the life of the senator from New York over the next 26 hours.

You know what I think about? I think about how different we might have turned out had we gotten a president who endeavored to heal a divided America, sought to end a deeply stupid and wasteful war, and reminded us that The Other was our brother.

I wonder what the story of the last half century would have read like without Richard Nixon's race-baiting "Southern strategy," the fulfillment of which sits today in a soiled Oval Office . . . and in every act of racial or ethnic hatred across this still-divided land . . . and on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria . . . and in the detention facilities filled with Mexican and Central American children torn away from their undocumented parents somewhere along our southern border.

I wonder about that. And then I grieve -- still -- over a murder from when I was just out of first grade in Baton Rouge.







Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Don Knotts is my TV PC repairman


It's always 1949 somewhere, so Somewhere might as well be my computer monitor.

Obviously, I did not give up geekiness for Lent this year.


Now back to the Johnny Carson Show. Stay tuned for Gabby Hayes at 5:15 and Captain Video at 5:30, right here at this same spot on the dial.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

These parts, back in the day

It was a different time in the great Midwest.

Farmers were farmers . . . and radio was radio. You get a picture of that from the Oct. 28, 1946 edition of Broadcasting - Telecasting magazine.

Yet. . . .

Yeah, this is the Midwest I know, all right. Things change, but this part of God's good earth doesn't change completely.

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.