©2017 by
John LaTorre
John LaTorre
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear,
when a twelve-year-old boy is tuning into a radio station with a crystal radio
set. It is past his bedtime, but he tweaks the dial, listening for the strains
of “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,”
from Gustav Holst’s The Planets, in
his World War II surplus headset. Finally, it comes, and the boy’s imagination
soars. The year is 1960. It is the sunset of radio drama’s Golden Age, but the
boy doesn’t know that. That crystal radio is his ticket to the doors of
imagination.
When I was that twelve-year-old boy in Germany, I was a
child between generations. Most of the families that I knew back in the United
States had television. Our family had television, too, for a couple of years before
we moved to Europe in 1957. I remember watching a cartoon adventure show called
Winky Dink and You that you could
interact with, after a fashion. Your mother would buy special kit at the drug
store or the five-and-dime store for fifty cents. The kit contained a sheet of
vinyl plastic and some “magic” grease pencils (as the pitchmen put it) of
various colors. The idea was to slap the vinyl sheet onto the television screen,
where it would adhere through the “magic of static electricity.” Winky Dink would
need your artistic abilities in some fashion. For example, he might need to
escape in a car, but the car on the screen would have no wheels. It would be
your job to draw the wheels so that the hero could drive away. It would also be
your job to clean the vinyl sheet and get it ready for the next adventure. (You
didn’t really need the vinyl sheet, but your mother would be very upset at you
if you forgot to put it up, and used your magic grease pencils directly on the
picture tube instead. Ask me how I know this.)
I remember watching Kukla,
Fran, and Ollie, a show featuring hand puppets. Speaking of puppets, there
was also the marionette Howdy Doody, who lorded over the airwave with one of
the most popular kidvid shows of the era. And who could forget Captain
Kangaroo?
This was also the
heyday of the TV western. Roy Rogers,
Hopalong Cassidy, and the Lone Ranger
were marketed mostly to the younger audience, while Gunsmoke and Wyatt Earp appealed to the older crowd. (I only met the
latter two some years later, through reruns.) A housekeeper would commandeer
the set to watch Queen For A Day, and
my mother had a few regular soap operas whose names I don’t remember.
All that changed when we moved to Europe. We’d brought the
TV set along, but there were no English-language television broadcasts then in
Frankfurt. For the next five years, we’d watch mostly German sports shows and
dramas, although I remember seeing a few episodes of Dennis the Menace, dubbed into German. Rather than break shows for
commercials, the broadcaster would lump them all together in a ten- or
fifteen-minute slot after the show. Believe it or not, people actually watched
them, because each advertisement would be followed by a short cartoon featuring
“Onkel Otto,” the mascot of the Hessian Broadcasting system. Onkel Otto was a mustachioed
pear-shaped figure with a television antenna sprouting from his head. The
cartoon would be a gentle spoof of the ad; for example, after a commercial for
bar soap, he would be in a bathtub, with a slippery bar on the floor, just out
of reach.
But for the most part, I was raised on radio.
English-speaking radio, at the time, consisted of the single
station operated by the Armed Forces Network, or AFN. It aired a bit of
everything during the daylight hours: news on the hour, popular music, game
shows, and the occasional sports show, usually in the form of game highlights.
But at night, the programming shifted to comedy and drama, and I would be
there, in the bottom bunk of the bed (my older brother claimed the top bunk),
listening on a crystal radio that my father had given me.
The crystal radio itself was a relic of times past. It was
the simplest possible radio circuit. It required no batteries or household
current, drawing its energy from the transmitter of the radio waves it picked
up. My device was a “cat’s whisker” setup which used a thin copper wire whose
tip made contact with a galena crystal. These radios would only power earphones
that could pick up the faint signals that the crystal would produce, but they
were the first to introduce the general public to the wonders of radio in the
early years of the last century. By the 1920s, radios powered by batteries
(and, later, household current) could drive speakers that the whole family
could listen to, and the lowly crystal radio became the object of interest mainly
to hobbyists who could build them from scratch. I remember that they needed a
lot of antenna wire to capture a signal efficiently, which meant that the
springs of my brother’s upper bunk suspended not only the radio itself, but a
network of wires. (We’d even tried to use the springs of the bed itself as an
antenna, but it didn’t work as well.)
When I was researching this essay, I was surprised to find
that many of the radio shows I remember were still current at that time. Gunsmoke was still being issued in a
radio format, with William Conrad (who was TV’s Cannon later on) still performing
the role of Matt Dillon while James Arness was doing it on television. Joining
Matt was Paladin from Have Gun, Will
Travel which ran concurrently as a television show and radio show. There
was also Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar,
a drama about a wise-cracking insurance investigator who solved cases while narrating
his expense account. (Sample dialog: “Item twelve: two dollars and fifty-seven
cents for dinner at Joe’s Diner. I was meeting a dame who swore she knew where
the painting was…”)
Then you had the horror shows. The king of them was Suspense, which ran from 1940 to 1962
and featured a succession of directors, writers, and stars. There was also Inner Sanctum, featuring macabre stories
that reflected the aura of the famous horror comics put out by EC publications
during the fifties. The radio version only ran from 1941 to 1952, so I must
have been listening either to transcripts of the original show or radio
versions of the television show that briefly replaced the radio show in 1952.
That’s not surprising, because I also heard episodes of
shows that had gone away or moved to television years before, such as The Shadow and The Magnificent Montague. They were joined by Our Miss Brooks and Father Knows Best. But AFN still had
access to recorded transcriptions of the radio shows and made liberal use of
them in their programming. To me, they were as current as they could be,
because unlike television, radio’s production values hadn’t changed remarkably
over the past twenty years. (One of the drawbacks of television re-runs is how
quickly their mise-en-scène becomes dated – think of the black-and-white
Twilight Zone shows or the garish
color design of the original Star Trek.)
So I was listening to some of the same radio shows of a half a generation or
more before me.
Of all these radio shows, the one that I recall most fondly
was a science-fiction show. It started with a countdown, followed by the sound
of a rocket ship taking off. Then you heard a voice saying, “From the far
horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and
space. These are stories of the future, adventures in which you’ll live in a
million could-be years on a thousand maybe worlds. The National Broadcasting Company, in cooperation
with Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine,
presents [echo effect inserted here] X … Minus … One!” And off you went, your
imagination taking you far from that bottom bunk in a bedroom in Germany and
toward … well, anyplace that excellent writing and voice-acting cared to take
you.
And excellent writing it was, too. X Minus One used a host of science fiction writers who were already
famous among their fandom, having been published in Galaxy and other magazines for years: Robert Heinlein, Isaac
Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Katherine MacLean, and dozens more. If you’re a sci-fi
fan, I’ll only need to give you some of their last names: Dick, de Camp, Blish,
Bloch, Leiber, Pohl, Scheckley, Simak, Sturgeon. A veritable Who’s Who of
science fiction, they were, many of them at the beginning of long, distinguished
careers.
That twelve-year-old boy could not have had a better
introduction to science fiction, as he lay in the dark, crystal radio suspended
from the springs in the upper bunk, headset clamped to his ears, straining to
hear the faint sounds of the crystal radio, as if the radio broadcast itself was
coming in from beyond the stars. He listened to stories of alien visitors,
dinosaur hunters, expatriates from Earth, sentient computers, apocalypse
survivors, and other flights of imagination. The Golden Age of Radio also ushered in the
Golden Age of Science Fiction, when aspiring writers could actually make a
living from selling to the numerous magazines of the genre and eventually
become the established authors we revere today.
Tropes such as space travel and robots and misbehaving
computers, boringly trite now, were fresh and exciting back then. And radio was
the perfect medium, requiring nothing beyond what a competent sound-effects man
could produce. There was no need for the Styrofoam boulders and papier-mâché
props and stop-action animation of those sci-fi movies and television shows of
the era. If you wanted a Tyrannosaur for a scene, well, you said that one was
there, and had people screaming as they ran away, and maybe provided a lion’s
roar for effect, and there was your Tyrannosaur, as convincing as anything.
Nor was there a need to figure out what a computer of the
far distant future (say, 1995) would look like. A few beeps and boops, and
perhaps a teletype clattering in the background, was all you had to provide,
and you could count on the listener to fill in the rest. Rocket ships? We
already knew what they looked like, because we all had seen pictures of them in
Galaxy and Amazing Stories and even, by that time, in the newspapers that
followed the space program’s Project Mercury. You could even buy plastic model
kits of them, and assemble a “lunar lander,” although it looked more like a
Bell X-1 than the spider-shaped contraption that actually went to the moon in
1969. So when you listened to the radio
show, you could hear the roar of the rocket taking off, and let your
imagination fill in the rest. Those were good times.
I have nothing in particular against the proliferation of
“computer-generated imagery” in today’s movies and television shows, but I am
saddened when I see them now. I envy the people who storyboard them and figure
out how to put them on the screen. They’re the only ones who are allowed to use
their imagination to create these scenes. The rest of us have them delivered to
our brains all wrapped up and tied with a ribbon … every explosion, every
tumbling car, every phaser blast, and every monster imaginable (although it’s always
somebody else’s imagination, not ours). All we can do is appreciate them as
best we can (and that usually means suspending belief not only in our real
world but the very laws of physics), and wonder if the inevitable sequel will
be able to live up to the standards of the show. They engage my senses, and sometimes my
admiration, but seldom do they engage my imagination. What good is imagination
when you don’t need to provide any of it on your own?
Well, there’s nothing to do about it now. Or rather, there
is one thing you can do: you can click on one of these links below, put on a
seat of headphones (and earbuds will do, yes they will, if that’s all you have),
close your eyes, and let your imagination soar. I just did, and for a little
while, I was that boy in the bottom bunk again. It was good to be back.
L. Sprague de Camp’s “A Gun For Dinosaur”
Katherine MacLean’s “Pictures Don’t Lie”
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/sci-fi/x-minus-one/pictures-dont-lie-1956-10-24
Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe”
