Radio Waves in my Head

When I was six years old and in the First Grade at St. Anthony of Padua school in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I got exposed to Daytime Radio and, in bits and pieces, it’s been in my head ever since. I’d come home for lunch and my grandmother would feed me soup and a sandwich and milk at the kitchen table and we would listen to her programs. (It wasn’t until Sixth Grade that I would be given money to buy a Hero and a soda at Bruno’s Grocery Store, to be eaten by us boys on the stoops of the houses along Leonard Street, the school block.)

Nan and I listened to: “And now, Our Gal Sunday, the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the little mining town of Silver Creek, Colorado, who in young womanhood married England’s richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope—the story that asks the question, can this girl from a mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?” All of this I remember, and the name Black Swan Hall where Sunday and Lord Henry were beset by ex-lovers, fortune-hunters, shady lords and ladies, even kidnappers, for fifteen minutes every weekday at 12:15 p.m.

Then, the Romance of Helen Trent. I recall, almost word for word, the signature opening: “Time now for the Romance of Helen Trent…the real-life drama of Helen Trent, who—when life mocks her, breaks her hopes, dashes her against the rocks of despair—fights back bravely, successfully, to prove what so many women long to prove in their own lives…that because a woman is 35, and more, romance in life need not be over…” I checked my recollections against “On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio”, by mystery author John Dunning (Oxford University Press, 1998). Independently, I remembered the name Gil Whitney, Helen’s perennial suitor. That she was a sought-after dress designer in Hollywood, changed her men like a whore changes her panties, yet was a straight-shooter and didn’t smoke—this I didn’t know at age 7. Helen Trent was also 15-minutes-long and as the music faded, I was out the door and covering the four blocks back to school before the bell rang summoning us to line up in the street to march back in by class.

After school, I ran home to do my homework before hitting the street—“go out and play” were the magic words, accompanied by “Don’t go off the block and be home for supper. (In Fall and Winter, that meant darkness, about 5 p.m.; in Spring as it stayed light longer, you’d push it.) We played in the streets in that time: stickball, punchball, kick-the-can, ringolevio; my block, Oakland Street was a narrow, cobble-stoned City street, lightly traveled by cars. When it got dark, my Aunt, leaning out the window of our fourth-floor tenement, would shout “Bobby”—loudly enough for me to hear her over the street din, in that summonsing voice that set me in instant motion.

After dinner, The Fat Man awaited. Each Monday night at 8:30, I’d be sitting cross-legged in front of our big RCA console in the parlor when a harp starts playing and a woman intones: “There he goes into that drugstore…he’s stepping on the scale.” (We hear a penny tumbling into the scale) “Weight?...237 pounds.” (A clicking sound of the fortune popping out of the scale), then: “Fortune?---Danger! Who is it?” she asks. “The Fat Mannnnnnn!” PI Brad Runyan answers. I don’t remember a single adventure of the Fat Man although I sat with him for 30 minutes on countless Mondays from 1946 to 1951.

My keenest memories, though, are of Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons (Thursdays at 8). Mike Clancy, his operative, eventually says in a vaudevillian turn: “Saints preserve us, Mr. Keen, do ya mean…?” “Yes, Mike,” Keen replies, explaining how he solved the crime. A charming, old stuffed shirt, Mr. Keen was Philo Vance for the lower classes. And Boston Blackie (Friday nights at 10), “enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend.” Those lines are forever inscribed in my brain. Although I listened loyally to Bulldog Drummond, the Green Hornet, Johnny Dollar, I Was a Communist for the FBI, Mr. District Attorney, Renfrew of the Royal Mounted, I remember the names only, with a touch of nostalgia. “Hi Yo, Silver, Away!” … “Faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”…Spooky organ music, the unholy laugh, then: “Who knows…what evil…lllllurks…in the hearts of men?...The Shadow knows!” Goes without saying, they will always be with me.

From ages six to ten, I was captive to the Magic Box. Then a spinster lady, Josie, who lived with her brother George next door, got an Admiral TV, the first in our building. She invited me in for Milton Berle’s Texaco Comedy Hour and Ronald Regan’s General Electric Theatre, and Radio Days were behind me.

Well, maybe not. Years after I’d stopped listening, I become a NYC policeman. Then, a criminal defense lawyer like John J. Malone, Attorney at Law (Murder and Mr. Malone, Saturday nights at 8). My first business card as a criminal lawyer read: Robert J. Knightly, Attorney at Law.

Robert Knightly

Serials, Continued

The serial, with its attendant cliff-hanger ending, is as old as Sheherazade. You will recall the story of the sultan's bride, who told him a tale with a cliffhanger every night to keep him from chopping her head off in the morning. In the nineteenth century, and well up into the twentieth, magazines published serial fiction, paying the writers by the column inch (in case you ever wondered why the works of Dickens were so long).

When I was little, serial dramas were acted out on the radio, not only the housewives' soap operas but comic-book style stories for kids, Little Orphan Annie, Sky King, Tennessee Jed, or Jack Armstrong (the All-American Boy). The episodes were fifteen minutes long. Can you imagine? Nowadays it takes fifteen minutes for a TV show to get through the commercials. We would sit transfixed in the big chair in front of the radio, spoiling our supper with handfuls of cookies, waiting to see whether Sky King had rescued Penny and Clipper.

Serials featuring plucky damsels in distress, such as the Perils of Pauline, pulled in many an eager moviegoer in the silent era. Later movie serials appealed to boys. The grim-jawed heroes often served in the armed forces, sometimes flying airplanes, struggling with the customary mad fiend bent on world domination, if not Hitler then Doctor Destruction. Each episode ended with the hero going over the cliff in a car, or falling out of his airplane, or being crushed in a mine explosion. The following episode would begin, "after Captain Bruce Bammer was rescued from the mine, he…"

So the technique is there to be used. Make your audience root for the hero. Involve them deeply in his life. Then do something terrible to him at the end of every episode.

Modern audiences like their serial dramas in bigger chunks than fifteen minutes; an hour or an hour and a half works well on television. And they will wait all summer for the next season of, say, Downton Abbey. But how does this translate into print media? How long should a serial episode be? How many episodes make a story? These questions are still up in the air. Some writers are capable of spinning off an infinite number of episodes of, for example, a sci-fi thriller, and others want to wind it up while the readers are still young. It seems to depend on what the traffic will bear.

How much closure do you need at the end of an episode? That's another question. Some folks are unhappy that the episodes end with cliff-hangers, and to them I say, go read a short story. It's a different form.

It may be that reader input will come to direct the way some of the serial stories will go. There are folks who are horrified by this idea. I'm not one of them. I'll consider suggestions from my friends, so why not from strangers on social media? This is the twenty-first century, after all. How many of us are solitary geniuses cranking out inviolable works of brilliance? As I always say, we'll see how it goes.

Oh, right. I almost forgot to put in a plug for BUCKER DUDLEY.

Kate Gallison

A New Way to Waste Time!

I was sitting in my living room, minding my own business, probably reading the newspaper, when suddenly, out of the blue, came a sound that sent me hurtling back in time to the 1940s. I was sitting on the floor with my brother, our heads bent toward the big, brown radio, listening to “Captain Midnight,” and the familiar announcer’s voice talking up Ovaltine! The sound I had heard was the opening chords of that program.

I opened my eyes to my own living room, with no brother or radio in sight, but my daughter, Anne, holding up her iPod and laughing. When she had recovered, she introduced me to “streaming” of “Old Time Radio.” How incredible! How fantastic! I lunged for her iPod, and she showed me how to find the index, search for my favorite old radio shows and play them. “Jack Benny,” “Information Please,” “It Pays to be Ignorant,” “The Shadow,” “The Lone Ranger,” “The Lux Theater,” “The Green Hornet,” on and on they went…

I never realized how completely my childhood was wrapped up in radio. I woke up with it — “The Breakfast Club,” and went to bed with it (under the covers so my parents wouldn’t hear) with “Fibber Magee & Molly,” “Can You Top This?,” “Suspense”… It was all-consuming, sort of like TV and texting is for kids today.

Then there was the year I was home from school with rheumatic fever and could listen to all the daytime programs, “Ma Perkins,” Helen Trent,” Lorenzo Jones and His Wife Belle.” And now, with a touch of the dial – no, with a punch of the iPod – I can hear those shows all over again. Wow!

Goodbye writing schedule. Goodbye family and friends. Goodbye 21st Century. Hello “Tom Mix”!

Robin Hathaway