Wartime Halloween OTR Old Time Radio

[Originally Buzzed by me 2010-10-27]

You can get a very deep (if gauzy) glimpse into another time by receptively engaging what it left behind in its entertainment. Not just listening. And "engage" is filled with too much buzz to really convey what I mean. How about "dialog." Listen and respond.

I've been listening to wartime Halloween radio, and wonder at how close it reflects today's sentiments, and yet how far away it is.

What are ration credits? I don't know, but you get them when you buy Kraft foods. (I could find out, but I kind of like not knowing, instead feeling by context.) Ads encourage you eat every scrap of food, and nothing helps more than an attractive and tasty presentation, like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (with "grated" cheese). Your family will eat every bite, especially if served in a molded ring with steamed vegetables or a little fish or meat in the center (notice, a "little").

That was 1943, the war was not going well, basic staples were scarce. My Grandpa Cairns, who retired as a district director for Loblaws back when they had US operations, was a Loblaws grocery store manager in 1943, and neighbor women - women that knew him and his family - would beg him for baby formula, but he had none to sell. Grandma Cairns' maiden name was Bauer, and some folks shunned her because it was German. She was in fact German. Her father was a first generation immigrant. I have seen his birth certificate. He was a bible-believing Lutheran, a carpenter, and smoked a pipe. Grandma says she remembers watching the smoke curl up from behind his bible as he read. While listening to the radio perhaps.

My dad remembers radio. And families really did gather round it and listen together. In 1943 he was 5 years old. A new Zenith console cost $425 in 1947 http://bit.ly/94r7pU. That's over $4,000 today according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics http://bit.ly/276heh.

Kraft aired that Macaroni and Cheese ad during The Great Gildersleeve on October 31st. In the same show Gildy's nephew Leroy scoffs at jack-o-lanterns and trick-or-treat as old fashioned. Instead, the kids plan a dance, though Leroy learns to have some Halloween fun.
Halloween 1944: a ghost in an old house turns out to be a war widow who can't bear the loss of her husband. Chester Riley (Life of Riley's William Bendix, who was a star of war movies at that time) encourages her to go on, because her husband would want it that way.

There's also often a not-so-subtle sexual subtext in family radio entertainment; a puzzling difference is, this is often followed by another punchline. The audience doesn't laugh at the first (perhaps I am just sensitized to it and expecting a laugh) but they do at the second, which is not sexual, or not as sexual. It's also possible that the audience is laughing but it was muted for broadcast. Remember that everything was live in those days, and even though the actors were mostly adults, many portrayed children, and were believed to be children by the audience at home.
(Something I'll bet you didn't know: Fibber McGee and Molly's maid Beulah was neither black nor a woman; Beulah was portrayed by a white man, Marlin Hurt, and subsequently anther white man after Hurt died ; not until the character was cast for TV did a black woman assume the role; that was Ethel Waters, the first African American to star in a comedy TV series http://bit.ly/9syriO. If you listen the Fibber shows, Beulah's radio persona was respectfully played; I've yet to hear an insensitive segment, even by today's standards, where such things are easily and painfully identified.)

Back to sex (who doesn't like talking about sex?) - one of Gildy's guests at his 1943 Halloween party suggests playing a game in the dark, and Gildy asks what fun that would be and someone says they should be able to find something interesting to do in the dark (notable absence of laughter). They settle on "sardines," which is played in the dark. The game is a bit like tag, but the object is for partygoers to walk around looking for the person who is 'it,' and upon finding them, get especially close, like sardines in a can. As more and more partygoers find who's 'it,' the metaphorical sardine tin grows accordingly. Of course it leads to harmless fun resulting from who ends up hugging whom, and some painful encounters between shins and coffee tables.

There is often an unfortunate simple perspective to how one media grows out of another. Too often we hear observations presented as self-evident truths - radio started as little more than broadcast stage plays, TV started as little more than radio with pictures, the Internet started as little more than electronic books (the analogy "page" persists today).

(People often forget that TV began when film was a fully developed medium, yet the common [and trivializing] comparison is between TV and radio, not TV and film, perhaps because like radio, TV assumed the role of electronic hearth.)

But let me expose the poor logic with an example: I am little more than a bundle of my father's and mother's DNA molded by the experience of other DNA bundles in my circle, which happen to talk to me, touch me, or create artifacts that remain and influence me in their absence.

Yet that says little more than there is no thing that is not built of other things, and that seems to say nearly nothing that we don't already know.We know that children are something quite apart [from their parents], and what they are apart from is something very unique itself, and so is the page, the stage, radio, TV, etc.

Simple answers bother me. Not Occam's Razor simple, but under-thought, simplistic. Radio is more akin to the campfire and the kitchen, and TV to the stage, even though we might briefly forgive TV's comparison to radio because it involves similar technology and some of the same personalities; indeed, some of the same story lines were lifted nearly intact for TV. Lucille Ball did this from "My Favorite Husband" to "I Love Lucy."

There is something primal in the oral tradition. Something very old, woven into our DNA through hundreds of thousands of years of storytelling around a fire, connecting through flames, together exploring the singular capacity to hear and simultaneously supply the pictures in our minds.