Happenstance

Two

Two 61 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Try to give your youngster good sense, good taste, a definite religious concept (Faith), a sense of moral values . . . all the things he will need to mold his character. But let his personality flower of itself. —betsy root Two 62 The Hundred Days Radio The living room of my grandparents’ house was the center of family life in the years I lived in that house, and I instantly identify familiar furniture in the background of family photos. I recognize an upholstered chair positioned by a window, the burgundy-colored davenport—the source of my knowledge of the word “burgundy” as a color—along the wall below the stairs, the chair my grandfather always sat in near the dining room entrance, the lamp beside it. I remember too the wooden cabinet that housed the family radio and the phonograph that sat on top of it, though I can’t recall if the phonograph was a separate unit or a part of the radio cabinet. The phonograph had a handle someone had to crank to make certain that the record—a heavy flat black disk that played at 78 rpms (revolutions per minute)—produced sound at the proper speed. The idea of making the record play too fast so that voices and music were frenzied and high pitched or too slow at an uproariously funereal pace would earn me, my siblings, and my cousins reprimands from my grandmother. I think that the Victrola was a prized possession of my mother’s and most of the recordings that played on it were hers. I can conjure images of her in the living room, dancing either alone or with me in her arms to big band swing, the music of Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Glenn Miller, the voices of Frank Sinatra, Tex Beneke, Johnny Mercer. But the radio was the primary focus of family attention. My grandmother would listen to continuing dramas during the day—The Romance of Helen Trent, for example, and One Man’s Family and perhaps The Brighter Day or The Guiding Light—and in the evening we would all listen to adventure series or mysteries or comedy shows. I recall in snatches moments from The Great Gildersleeve and Henry Aldrich and Fibber McGee and Molly; I can hear the voices of the characters, the sound effects of the crashing items in McGee’s closet, the catchphrases connected with each; I can recognize the theme music and announcer’s intros to all kinds of radio series. I preferred shows with continuing characters, especially adventure series, rather than drama anthologies. It wasn’t only that the creaking door that opened Inner Sanctum unnerved me, it was also that the cast of characters kept changing, with no familiar characters to identify with. Two 63 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 The moment I begin to write about radio, all manner of sounds and themes surface from memory, all kinds of tidbits of information. It’s hard to sort them all out—racing through my mind are titles and theme music and catchphrases for Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons; The Fat Man; Duffy’s Tavern; Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy; Gang Busters; The FBI in Peace and War; Richard Diamond, Private Detective; John Steele, Adventurer; and dozens more, though I suspect that many of these programs I remember only from opening lines as I was carried up to bed or from snatches of music and dialogue that wafted up the stairs as I dozed off. The days around the radio are not distinctive, not separable from one another, but I remember this: After supper, my grandmother, still in her apron and drying her hands on a dishtowel, would scurry in from the kitchen to make sure the radio was tuned to the right station to hear the opening strains of the “March of the Swiss Soldiers” section of Rossini’s William Tell Overture, the trumpets setting up the stirring call to action before the sweeping, galloping sounds of the rest of the orchestra took over and the announcer intoned...