Requiem for Radio

The problem, a typical one, was to turn a man inside out. Gordon Hughes, grand master of an art lost to us now, considered and rejected the obvious solutions. It had to be authentic, not merely convincing. Of course, it was a good bet that most people did not know what a man being turned inside out sounded like, but the wonder and the challenge of it was that they knew what a man being turned inside out did not sound like. Hughes and his fellow alchemists realized this odd fact. By the tedious process of trial and error they found that in order to express the whole they would have to separate the parts, as follows: (1) Flesh: a rubbery, snapping effect; (2) Bones: a grinding, crunching effect; and (3) Blood and Guts: a squishing effect. Thus categorized, the job became a matter of routine. For the first part of the problem, Flesh, they used a length of inner (continued on page 50) Requiem for Radio (continued from page 33) tube. A technician grasped the bottom of this device with his left hand, inserted his right arm into the tube, grasped the top section firmly, and yanked. Effect: a rubbery, snapping sound. For Blood and Guts, a tub of warm cooked spaghetti and two bathroom plungers sufficed. Problem Number Two, Bones, was somewhat more difficult. Various types of woods were tried, but with signal lack of success. Soda crackers crunched well enough, yet there was a certain feeling of depth still missing. One of the earnest artisans sardonically offered to sacrifice his left leg, but the gesture was refused on the grounds that the effect, though genuine, might, as was so often the case with "actual" noises, sound spurious; besides, it allowed no chance for rehearsal. Finally someone put a Lifesaver between his teeth, motioned for silence, stood close to the mike, and proceeded to grind the candy slowly into powder.

Combined, these three effects succeeded in turning the stomachs of all the Lights Out fans across the nation.

More stomachs are being turned today, but for different reasons. The Sound Effects man is gone. He who plunged knives into defenseless heads of cabbage; who wore a throat mike and chewed celery, thereby conjuring up a rogue elephant crashing through the jungle, splintering the bamboo saplings and tearing up the ground . . . along with the minstrel, the rainmaker, the marathon dancer, the giant roc, this man is a legendary figure from another time. Yet the time was hardly a generation ago, and many matured men of today, who did not gather to mourn his passing, wrote between the thin blue lines of their three-hole notebook paper: "What I Want To Be When I Grow Up – A Sound Effects Man."

Hardly a generation ago. Fins were on sharks then. A jet was what a woman's hair was as black as, in Spicy Detective. Rockets, missiles and atoms were strange and exotic words which cropped up occasionally in the Buck Rogers comic strip and in those new science-fiction magazines.

As for television, it was only a fanciful gimmick, exhibited at world's fairs along with the Westinghouse robot. And of the two, the robot seemed far the more practical.

It was not, I suppose, a better time then, in the Thirties and Forties, except as the time of one's awakening is better; but it was different. We were simpler. We were less sophisticated. There was war, but it was still an understandable sort of business, with villains and heroes and glorious deaths, and we were thrilled by it. We believed in individual triumph and individual failure. A person was either good or bad. The good, we felt, should be rewarded, and the bad punished. A few psychologists and philosophers and writers were beginning to hint that mankind was a mixture, that virtue and evil were only labels we pasted on complex emotional conditions, but we didn't believe the fancy words. Things had to be clear-cut for us. It is true that we weren't too smart. But, some of us having bungled our way to adulthood, we can say that there are certain rewards in being not too smart. Naiveté gave us things the kids don't have now. It gave us the magicians, those tall, dark men in black cloaks who smelled of sulphur and could whisk a rabbit into thin air or saw a woman completely in two, without ill effect; it gave us the carnivals and the smell of sawdust and the sound of strange men promising miracles for a quarter and the fearful gloom of tents filled with alligator women and men who could write their names with their toes; it gave us the earth-shaking, sleep-destroying, brain-exploding circuses, those vast enchanted worlds, forever gone, of elephants and clowns and aerialists and lion tamers and bareback riders and magic people in suits of jewels that sparkled long after the circus had moved on to delight the children of another town; it gave us men whose job it was to make the sound of a man being turned inside out.

It gave us radio.

They say that radio is alive and healthy, but they're wrong. Radio, as we knew it and loved it with all our young hearts and minds, is dead, and it could no more come back than could the magicians or the carnivals or the circuses. It is entombed with these remnants of a vanished era, not far from where the troubadours and minnesingers lie.

It is our business now to lay a friend to rest.

Imagine yourself thirteen summers young in a world that stretched as far as the eye could see, but no farther; a world of boring visits to ancient aunts and Sunday drives and triple features, plus serial and two cartoons, of baseball in the streets and zoos and jawbreakers and Indian gum and penmanship and firecrackers and Tarzan and the Scarecrow. It's morning. Off to the gray prison, school, and the heavy books, the ceramic women with their fiery eyes, and the clock-hands that never moved. One o'clock. A century later, two o'clock. Two centuries later, three o'clock. Saved by the bell! Out of your seat then, out the doors, down the steps, running, you and your friends, though never so fast you forget to step on every third crack in the pavement, and, finally, home.

Maybe it was kick-the-can for you. Or over to Phillip's, or Jimmy's, or Fred's, for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Or tag football. Whatever it was, the chances are you didn't stay at it very long. Around five, when the soft dark had begun to gather, somebody would say: "Whose house?" Somebody would answer "Mine!" and off you'd fly.

If your name was Charles Beaumont (mine was, you see) and your house was "it," you'd be the first to the radio. You were proud of that radio because it was almost as tall as you were and twice as heavy and its dark polished wood reflected the light. While your friends squatted on the carpet, you turned the middle dial and waited for the hum and changed stations with the speed and accuracy of an engineer.

A hush.

Then, the call to adventure, the words that sent chills down your back every time you heard them: "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy!"

You set the volume just right, you scooted along the carpet until your head was directly underneath the radio, you closed your eyes, and you listened . . .

After the most popular song in America ("Have you tried Wheaties? The best breakfast food in the land. Won't you try Wheaties? They're whole wheat with all of the bran!"), the rich, confidential voice of the announcer – omniscient, as all announcers were – bringing us up to date, as though any of us needed it: "Jack and Billy are rowing their hearts out – getting the last of the supplies aboard the two-masted schooner Spindrift. The Spindrift rides her mooring like a gray ghost while the San Francisco fog hides her from the view of hostile eyes on shore. The schooner is all ready to start on her perilous journey to the Sula Sea to recover a precious cargo of [this was back in the Thirties, remember!] uranium, sunk off an uncharted reef. Jack and Billy, as they bend to the oars, know that other persons are trying desperately to get possession of a mysterious ring which Uncle Jim has just received – a ring which may contain the secret of the uranium. Betty, alone on the schooner in the fog, is having the fright of her life – but Jack doesn't know it – yet! Listen!"

Listen we did. After drifting for twelve minutes in a fogbound sea, we leapt up, sent away two boxtops and ten cents in coin or stamps for an exact replica of Uncle Jim's mysterious ring, and scooted back barely in time to switch from schooner to sampan. Terry was engaged in a week-long duel with the Pirates, and things were not going well.

He was having a picnic, though, compared to Captaaiiinnnn Midnight, whose single-engined plane just ran out of gas over the Himalayas.

(continued on page 52) Requiem for Radio (continued from page 50)

Still. of them all, it may have been that the Lone Ranger was in the worst shape. In a gallant effort to rescue his faithful friend Tonto, the Masked Man found himself, along with a dozen kegs of dynamite, locked in a burning cabin.

The world of radio was real to us. There are squirts and small fry today who will soon be as old as the Us of Then, and I know some who haven't turned a radio on in their entire lives. I try to tell them what it was like, but they don't understand. They can't believe I'm talking about the little plastic box in the kitchen that plays rock-'n'-roll songs and gives us the news, and I'm not sure I believe it, either. Television is the substitute for what we had, and I deem it a bad one. It inspires neither loyalty nor awe. It does not thrill, transport, terrify or enchant. It only entertains. The kids, as a rule, can take it or leave it alone.

Of course, ninety-nine percent of the shows on TV are trash; but I don't think this is the reason for our generally dispassionate reaction. Research into the subject shows that most of the quality we now associate with radio did not exist. We think the material was top drawer, but we are only trying to justify our profound nostalgia: the truth is that radio offered very little in the way of quality. Whereas television has developed such fine writers as Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, Reginald Rose, Tad Mosel, James Costigan, Horton Foote, and at least a dozen others, an imposing roster of actors and directors, and such excellent dramatic programs as Hallmark Hall of Fame, Playhouse 90, Studio One and Alcoa-Goodyear Playhouse, radio in all its years could boast but two consistently first-rate writers – Norman Corwin and Arch Oboler – and a handful of really adult shows.

The reason probably lies in the essential difference between the two media. Television makes no demands, except upon our patience. It presents its stories ready to wear. All the work is done. There is nothing we can contribute. For this reason, television is an impersonal form of entertainment. Radio was something else again. What was originally thought to be its greatest limitation, lack of visual interest, turned out to be its greatest strength. It made a direct appeal to what producer-writer Blake Edwards calls "the great ally, imagination." Through the use of sound effects, music, a very special form of writing, and acting which bore scant relationship to other modes of acting, radio created a world which had to be believed to be seen. Participation was not merely desirable; it was essential. Radio provided a sketch, but it was up to the listener to make the finished picture. The greater reality was his to create. Thus programs were real or unreal depending entirely upon the imagination quotient of the participant. Radio can be said therefore to have been a personal medium.

It was closer to narrative than to drama. As with narrative it had no location or set problems, and casting was always perfect. If a script called for "a city of golden towers, stretching to infinity," the city was built. Not by stagehands, nor by studio carpenters, but by a few words and a little music. A woman described as "the loveliest creature in the world" was exactly that. When Sam Small flew, he really and truly flew, without the aid of piano wire or trick photography. When the Lone Ranger announcer, in his standard opening, spoke of "A fiery horse with the speed of light," we saw – metaphorical miracle! – exactly that. Nothing was impossible in the world of radio. It was a wild, illogical world, but it made perfect sense to us kids. We were never bothered by the fact that time did not exist as it did in the "actual" world. A minute could last a week, a month could go by in a matter of seconds, yet we were not concerned. Even when they turned time backwards, to let us know what Kato was doing when The Green Hornet walked into that trap, we accepted, presumably on the theory that if it was happening, it was happening. We radio listeners were able to accommodate two separate and distinct truths. We believed that Doc, in I Love a Mystery, was an actor and we believed that he was Doc. So it was that when an unknown actor replaced Barton Yarborough in the central role, we wrote heated letters to the network, advising whom it might concern that the wool hadn't been pulled over our eyes, or ears, and to Jack and Reggie warning them that an imposter had taken Doc's place and that they'd better watch out.

We were an extraordinary audience. Perpetually accused by our parents of "not concentrating," I think we must have been the greatest concentrators of all time. In a single evening we would travel up the Yangtze, fight ravenous wolves in the frozen wastes of the Yukon, ascend into the stratosphere in a leaking balloon, skim the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, shoot it out with desperadoes in a Chicago alley, cut down a dozen pirates, get trapped by an avalanche, and sink into a coma as the result of having been pierced by a dart tipped with deadly curare; yet we kept our heads. Some of us even managed to do our homework at the same time! I can think of no period during those years when we did not have at least twenty different stories and a hundred or so characters to carry around in our brains, and I can think of no one who ever lost track. We might forget the principal products of Bolivia, or the date of the Magna Charta, but when it came to our radio heroes, the latest IBM machine should have such a memory.

Although we realized vaguely that somebody wrote the shows we loved and somebody produced and directed them and a lot of actors and actresses acted in them, we were an incurious lot. It may be that we were aware of the delicate balance of our beliefs, and how easily that balance of our beliefs, and how easily that balance could be upset. Each of us had his own conception of, say, Lamont Cranston, otherwise known as The Shadow. For me, he was about six feet two, ruggedly handsome, dark-haired, and impeccable in matters of dress. For you, he may have been on the short side, somewhat chubby, blond and casual. It doesn't matter: we were both right. So long as we never saw a picture of him, that is. Unfortunately, the networks did not fully understand this. From time to time they would release photographs of the actors, and we were invariably disappointed. I could be wrong, but it seems that the heroes of our dreams always turned out to be suspicious little men with pencil mustaches and bad teeth. Eventually the networks realized that they were like the magicians who enchant you and then insist upon showing you how it wasn't enchantment at all but simply sleight of hand, and the men behind the scenes returned to their anonymity.

But it has been years now since the last magician passed through town. The shows we loved were considered trivial. No one bothered to record them, practically all of the scripts were destroyed, and so they are gone – which is to say, they can never be taken from us now. "If you want your castle to last, build it of sand," says Walter Kerr, and he's right. The enchanted hours are locked away in our minds. No one can get to them now except us. So it will not hurt, I think, in this requiem, to call a roll and look at the men and women who created and sustained for so many years our dear dead friend.

The first radio program was a disc jockey show: records and gab. Emanating from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, on the eve of Christmas, in the year 1906, it was heard by wireless operators on all ships within a three-hundred-mile radius. Over twenty years passed before the dramas began, but when they came in, they came in strong. The writing was of a necessarily specialized nature, and because of this, few established authors were able to make the transition. They had too much to unlearn. For this reason, those who succeeded got their start as (continued on page 84) Requiem for Radio (continued from page 52) engineers or ad men or station owners.

Of course, there were exceptions. Notable among these was Archibald MacLeish, whose verse-play The Fall of the City won just about every available prize and stands as the high point in radio drama. Norman Corwin brought quality to the airwaves, though in retrospect his orotund antiwar messages seem more valuable as propaganda than as art. Still, it was he who defined and shaped strict radio style, and through his influence the classic form was developed. Corwin demonstrated the vast potential of radio drama by abolishing both time and space. He created the little musical bridges that spanned centuries, and helped to create most of the other technical magics. If anyone deserves the title Mr. Radio, it is surely he. Equally an innovator, but slightly less a pure talent, was horror-specialist Arch Oboler. Oboler wrote the way a machine gun fires. A script a day was routine, but occasionally he would do two or three, and once in a while even four within a twenty-four-hour period. They were all short on characterization, as might be expected, but a surprising number of them showed real imagination. Oboler's Lights Out dramas, in particular, were rich in the stuff of horror. One week he would give us a story about an experiment on a chicken's heart which causes the heart to grow and grow until it covers the earth (at the end of this play, the last survivors are cruising at six thousand feet in their private plane; we hear the drone of the single engine; then the dry cough and spluttering which indicate that the plane is running out of gas; another cough, a final splutter, a rush of air, a ghastly SPLOOGE! as the machine is swallowed up; and then the steady, horrible THOOMP-THOOMP of the earth-en-compassing heart). The following week, he would give us a woman who turns into a cat and eats her favorite canary; the week after that, a variation on the chicken heart yarn – a hole in the ground that gets deeper and wider and deeper, until . . . It wasn't art, but it was effective, and it had magic. Oboler's intention was to scare us sily, and sily he scared us.

Of course, the child psychologists objected to the plethora of horror on radio, but as a matter of strict and demonstrable fact, most shows were very moral. At the end of each episode we were reminded that although the villains appeared to be having a grand time, they would inevitably be crushed under the humdrum heel of Good. Or, as The Shadow so aptly put it: "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit." And he knew.

There were even more subtle appeals to the moral sense. Breathes there a man among us who does not remember vividly the Elephants' Graveyard chapter in Jack Armstrong? Elephants, we learned, were wise and mysterious animals who knew when they were about to die. It mattered not whether from disease, a wound (barring direct brain shots), or old age: they knew; and, feeling the bitter wind from The Great Scythesman upon them, they would lumber proudly to a secret place and lay their heavy living cargo down and quietly die. In a fog-shrouded valley hidden deep in the deepest part of unknown Africa were ten thousand elephant skeletons and twenty thousand ivory tusks. It was a great white cathedral, holy and untouched. To disturb it would be sacrilege. Ivory we knew to be valuable, and so it was no surprise to learn that there were certain unscrupulous men, evil to the last whisker of their black beards, who had so little regard for what was proper that they actually intended to pillage the cemetery – and for the basest reason of all: money. It took Jack a long time (something like six months) to thwart the monsters, but he succeeded, and we all rejoiced. A child today, in the time of Charles Van Doren, might ask why. The men were only trying to turn a little profit on some dead bones, after all, weren't they? No! They were trying to defile beauty, ruin loveliness, flout tradition. Not a bad message, it seems to me.

Then of course there were the prizes. We can't talk about radio without mentioning the wonderful things that kids got for two boxtops and coin-or-stamps. Among the more memorable treasures:

Rings. With secret compartment (for hidden messages); with decoder (for clues regarding next week's adventure); with siren (for summoning aid): with identification (for showing your friends that you were a member in good standing of the Secret Squadron); with compass (for never getting lost); and with mirror (for checking to see that you were not being followed). All bright as quicksilver upon arrival, these items were guaranteed to turn your finger dark green in a week. Badges. With cluster leaf for spirit of faith shown by sending extra boxtops. Periscopes. For seeing around fences and spying on your enemies. Hike-O-Meters. For measuring how far you walked in a day. Ovaltine shakers. For holding next to your forehead when dissolved Ovaltine crystals and milk had turned the shaker cold and frosty. Charms. Buttons. Wings. Silent whistles. And a hundred other precious gewgaws, eagerly awaited and delightedly received by small fry who didn't know or care that they were making the manufacturers rich.

I think of my childhood friend, radio, and I wish I could go back to him for a little while. For an hour. One hour with my eyes closed and my mind open, lying on my back under those great carved wooden legs, listening. Listening to the kid shows, but to many of the grown-up shows too; listening and listening and listening. . .

To Little Orphan Annie ("Who's that little chatterbox, the one with pretty auburn locks?"); Don Winslow of the Navy ("Oh, Cuh-humm-byuh the Gem uv the Oh-shunnn!"); Buck Rogers (". . . in the Twenty-Fifth CENNNN-tureeee!"): The Lone Ranger ("A cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-yo Silverrrr! Awa-a-a-ay!"): First Nighter ("The little theatre off Times Square"); Vic and Sade ("The little house halfway up in the next block"); Amos and Andy ("Buzz me, Miss Blue"): Gang Busters ("Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!"); Og, Son of Fire; Terry and the Pirates; Captain Mid-night; The Green Hornet; Wilderness Road; King of the Royal Mounted; The Shadow; Peter Quill: Lights Out; Inner Sanctum; The Hermit's Cave; The Molle Mystery Theatre; Suspense; Mr. Keene. Tracer of Lost Persons; Columbia Workshop: Theatre Guild on the Air; Lux Radio Theatre; John Nesbitt's Passing Parade. . . and the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic . . . Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, Kate Smith, Jack Benny, Don Wilson, Harry von Zell, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Nelson Okm-sted, and George Hicks, speaking to you for United States Steel. To Orson Welles and his Mercury Players, who convinced us that the Martians had arrived. To Nila Mack and the Let's Pretend people, who filled our lives with beauty. To Raymond, Your Host, and Arch Oboler, who kept us shivering under the covers. To James Fassett, who taught us that Mozart wrote some pretty tunes. To Archibald MacLeish and Norman Cor-win, who gave us poetry and drama. Yes, and even to Helen Trent and Life Can Be Beautiful and The Goldbergs and Stella Dallas (plus Stella's nemesis, "the wealthy but insane Ada Dexter") and The Story That Asked the Question: Can a girl from a little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?

But – sadly – I can't go back. So: to all the terrible, wonderful shows, all the lost hours of enchantment, all the laughter and fear and dreaming – a salute, and a farewell.