Assorted Thoughts

Well, here it is Friday morning, and I suddenly remember that I'm supposed to have written a blog post. I guess I'll talk about whatever has been on my mind for the past week.

Tomorrow night we set the clocks back. Fall is here for certain in Lambertville, the Halloween capital of pretty much everywhere. Gorgeous displays bedeck the yards of Union Street, Dolores Dragan's being the most spectacular. The leaves have turned, many have fallen. Everett was out yesterday with a big gas leaf-blower, blowing the leaves from the funeral home sidewalk into the street. The wind blew them all back again. Some things are hardly worth doing, though a good Halloween display is forever.

Speaking of the weather, last night I showed up late at the monthly meeting of the Zoning Board of Adjustment, having totally forgotten about it due to my absorption in Sunday's episode of The Good Wife. (You can see these on CBS.com if you're willing to wait until Monday or later.) Luckily I didn't hold them up. Only one case was before the Zoning Board, that of a local electrician who sells generators. He needed permission to put an apartment over his place of business. I was kind of tickled to see him waxing nostalgic over Hurricane Sandy. We haven't had a hurricane since then, or any other major power outage that I can recall, so the traffic in generators has fallen off dramatically. Alan would like to see another good hurricane.

Change is in the air, if not hurricanes. Change of time, change of season. Last night I dreamed we were selling the house. A hot-shot real estate agent was showing me all around Lambertville in my dream, offering me other houses, big old Victorian palaces with English gardens. These days you can't get a doghouse in Lambertville for much under a million dollars, so I was eagerly awaiting the realtor's assessment of what our little hovel was worth, and thinking, we could move here, we could move there. Then I thought, wait, this is my house. Why would I want to leave it? And I woke up.

So you see, I'm perfectly happy with my life. I like my house, even though the neighbors are given to noisy drama. I have no generators to sell if the apocalypse comes, so I won't wish for it. I'm sorry the cat died, poor little booger, but they don't live forever, and now we can go traveling without feeling bad about leaving the cat. Because we don't live forever, either.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

War of the Worlds: the Day Orson Welles Said “Boo!”

“…you don’t play murder with soft words.” — Orson Welles, 31 October 1938

Tomorrow will be the 76^th anniversary of the infamous The Mercury Theatre's dramatization of H.G. Wells’s story War of the Worlds.  Social scientists and historians are still studying and postulating on what exactly happened in its aftermath and its meaning when it comes to mass hysteria.

A bit of background:  the world was on tenterhooks on 30 October 1938.  Nazi saber rattling had reached fever pitch.  People over the world were focused on a crisis in Munich.  Everybody was worried.   

Radio broadcasts had only recently begun interrupting normal programming to report what we would call “breaking news.”  Having just endured the privation and pain of the Great Depression, listeners across the United States were just getting used to sudden, staccato reports of dire happenings in Europe.

The American radio audience was primed for bad news

Then came CBS's broadcast of War of the Worlds.

And there is no doubt that the writer Howard E. Koch, the producer John Houseman, and the director Orson Welles sought to capitalize on prevailing conditions to ramp up the impact of their little Halloween hoax.  They used the names of actual people and told a story that sounded (sort of) like a report of actual, ongoing events.

On the other hand, they did announce—at the beginning, twice during the course of the broadcast, and at its end—that they were acting out a play based on H.G. Wells’s fiction.  Also, given the supposed “real-time” nature of the broadcast, the willing suspension of disbelief would have to have been at higher than fever pitch for people to believe, even in those simpler times, that all the events reported could have taken place in 62 minutes.

Certain habits of radio listeners played into their gullibility.  The Mercury Theatre ordinarily garnered only about two percent of the radio audience.  The Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen  got the big bulk of the eardrums.  But about twelve minutes into that hyper-popular variety show—that featured a ventriloquist on the radio, by the way—they announced a musical performance by a rather dull ensemble.  Quite a few people got up from their easy chairs and twisted their dials to CBS just in time to catch the scary part of the Mercury broadcast, having missed the disclaimer at the beginning.  The dimmer brains among those latecomers were the ones who were duped into thinking  they were listening to an actual report.  Some of them raised a ruckus.

Pretty much immediately after the show signed off the air, the cops invaded the studio, network employees collected all the scripts and records, and the print press corps took over the story.  The next day, which was Halloween, newspapers across the country blared headlines about how the Mercury show had caused widespread panic.  And, on that October 31^st, Orson Welles was forced to meet reporters and apologize to the nation for its overreaction to his joke.

For a long while people believed the reports of widespread panic in the wake of the show.  Recent analysis, however, has come to a different conclusion.   American University media historian  W. Joseph Campbell and many sociologists have reinvestigated actual events and found no evidence of panicked crowds in the streets.  Slate Magazine ran an article last year on the 75^th anniversary that concluded, “Almost no one was fooled.” 

So what were all those news headlines about?  Well, you see, in the 1930’s a real war raged between newspapers and radio for dominance in news reporting and in garnering the bulk of advertising dollars.  In an attempt to discredit radio, newspapers greatly exaggerated the dimensions of public’s panic.  It seems now that  all those banner headlines were really meant to characterize radio news as an unreliable upstart medium.

Orson Welles took the blame.

For your listening pleasure, here is a link to the actual broadcast:

http://youtu.be/Xs0K4ApWl4g

And here is the adorable young Orson apologizing on the following day:

http://youtu.be/uuEGiruAFSw

Happy Halloween from---

Annamaria Alfieri