RADIO

One of the things I love about the Internet is the endless variety of subject matter to discover. Today I discovered a site that I know I will be visiting again and again. It's URL is transom.org. It is loaded with information about radio and a few of its legendary practitioners, such as an interview with Roger Corwin, the epitome of all radio writers, who incidentally is still alive and kicking. He is I think ninety-one years old.

The other living great that is featured is Studs Terkel, a man I have written about previously in the Reader. He is another living repository of history who has and still does write books from oral histories he has done in the past. Some of the subjects he has covered are the GOOD WAR about WWII. He has also written about the great depression and its effects on the people who lived through it. Race relations was covered in another book. I could go on about the things Roger Corwin and Studs Terkel have written, and probably will at a later time, but TRANSOM.ORG also has current presentations, one of which caught my eye is titled: 1000 Postcards; about a father, who is a bus driver, writing a postcard a day to his daughter who is a student at Mt. Holyoke in Massachusetts.

It is a site that is loaded with information, and samples of radios past and present. I will definitely bookmark it and call back regularly.

I was listening to a radio show from 1945. The title of the show is ON A NOTE OF TRIUMPH. It was in its day thought to be a great show. It was written and directed by Norman Corwin, a writer and director of radio shows. He had it prepared and ready to air when Germany was defeated. It went on the air May 8, 1945 on the CBS network. It is very moving. But for me it was also in a way very sad. The thoughts of a job well done and finally to have peace again was on all their minds. This time they were sure the world had learned it’s lesson and would give peace a try, a phrase I read somewhere in a book or someone saying it, a good phrase. But looking back from where we are now, sixty years in the future, we know it was a lesson not learned. America has participated in three wars since then, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf war. If you take into account WWI, then just about every twenty years it seems talking peace does not work and killing takes place, a disheartening record for the human race.

The picture is of Marion Sweet, one of the radio actresses who portrayed The Dragon Lady on the Terry and the Pirates radio show that ran from 1937-1948. I listened to the show in it's later years. I never thought that the Dragon Lady dressed like that.
Of course at the age I was I probably couldn't have cared less. I still thought the world revolved around baseball. I discovered a little later that it didn't. I found this picture and an article in WIKI, the free encyclopedia on the internet. If you haven't found it you should. It also has old time radio shows like Terry and the Pirates that you can download and copy or just stream them and listen. It's a good thing as Martha Stewart used to say.