Chapter 15 Radio

The first commercial radio station began broadcasting in 1922 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Six years later, when I was born, there were many stations.  I don't know when we got our first radio, but we had one as long as I can remember.  That first instrument in my memory was a dark, rectangular wooden box with four or five control knobs on it and a separate round, metallic speaker about 16 inches in diameter.  I don't recall listening to the radio much at that time.  Ruth and I were more into cranking up the phonograph where we could predict what would be played.

            
In 1936, for Christmas, Pa brought home a brand new Zenith radio built into a neat wooden console about four feet tall.  It was fascinating because it had a lighted dial with a round green "eye" at the top of the dial which vacillated in brightness as the sounds were being produced.  The Zenith name had that electrified "Z" which I believe still identifies that company.  Since our home did not yet have electricity, the radio depended on battery power.  We had a wind-blown propeller, called a Windcharger, placed on a high pole in the yard to keep the battery charged.  In periods when the wind was quiet for several days, the battery would run down and the radio would not operate.  A couple of years later when we got electricity in the house, we got a new and even fancier model radio. 

Radio soon became a prominent part of our lives. We listened to the news in the morning and in the evening.  Even then the soap operas, so-called because their advertising sponsors were usually soap companies like Proctor and Gamble promoting the dazzling white washes that their product would guarantee.  After all, you would like to have the wash you have hanging on the line to be whiter and brighter than your neighbor's, wouldn't you?  Among those unending serials were:  Stella Dallas, One Man's Family, As the World Turns, and others. 

           
In terms of sheer volume of listening time, however, baseball was the sport that got the most attention.  We listened to the World Series games, All Star games, and, when not busy hoeing cockleburs, Canadian thistles or weeds in the garden, I would sometimes catch the regular season games too.  Dutch Reagan, later to become President Ronald Reagan, was a sportscaster for the powerful WHO station broadcasting from Des Moines, and would give play-by-play descriptions of the Cub games.  Since I was a Cardinal fan at that time, however, I would usually try to listen to Gene Schumate describe the play of the Redbirds with guys like Ducky Medwick, Pepper Martin, Terry Moore, Marty Marion and those fabulous pitchers, the Dean brothers, Dizzy and Daffy.  I had become a die-hard Cardinal fan because so often their pictures could be found on the back side of the Wheaties boxes in those days.  Incidentally, both Reagan and Schumate broadcast the games by teletype from their studios hundreds of miles from the ball park.  The teletype would give a skeleton description of the game which would come into the studio via typed words.  The sportscaster, then, would add all the color and dramatics from his imagination, sometimes creating drama that had not actually occurred.  Canned crowd noise was added to make the game a bit more realistic, the volume of which was turned up or down as the occasion demanded.  In the last summer I spent at home, 1951, I was able to pick up the real play-by-play of the Cardinal night games from St. Louis as broadcast by a young announcer, Harry Caray, who had the habit of saying "Holy Cow!" every time Stan Musial or Enos Slaughter, or one of the other Redbirds would put one over the fence.
           
There were kid programs too.  Every day after school I would listen to Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy.  Then, if I got my chores done in time--and I saw to it that I did--I could also listen to Captain Midnight and his exciting adventures as a pilot.  For a couple of box tops of Wheaties and 25 or 50 cents, we could send in for a ring with a little mirror in it.  This would permit you to view, unnoticed, an enemy who might be sneaking up on your rear.  There was a hiko-o-meter which, by placing on your belt, you could measure how far you hiked.  That was great for searching for lost treasure if you had a map with the distances measured on it.

In the evening, the family regularly (weekly) listened to comic programs like Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, and the Bob Hope Show. George Burns and Bob Hope, at this writing nearly 60 years later, are still active in the entertainment business.  We also listened to shows of a different type, like the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, and a popular quiz show, Battle of the Sexes, which pitted the intellectual strength of males against females.  But my favorite, never-to-be-missed program, which aired on Wednesday nights, was a show called Gangbusters, depicting real-life accounts of criminals and their activities and how law-enforcement agencies, the good guys, had been able to bring them to justice them.  The story of John Dillinger, the most notorious criminal of the 1930's, was continued for several weeks, describing, finally, his death at the hands of the FBI as he left Chicago's Biograph Theatre on the near north side.  At the end of the program, a "most wanted" bulletin would be issued, usually concluding with the words, "He is armed and considered dangerous.  If you have any information of the whereabouts of this man, please notify your local law enforcement agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately."  Now, this was the real world, with true-to-life drama.  How much more exciting could it get?

Music on the radio was varied to suit the tastes of many listeners.  Fortunately, it had its share of what we then called Western and Hillbilly music.  WHO in Des Moines broadcast a Barn Dance every Saturday night as did WLS in Chicago.  In my high school years I began to tune into the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville, and, if the signal was clear enough, would be enthralled with the singing of Eddie Arnold, Ernie Tubb, Roy Acuff and others.  This was the big band era and we also listened to the dance music of Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Goodman, Lawrence Welk and, especially, the "champaign music" of Guy Lombardo.

Religion, too, had a place on the air waves.  My mother listened every Sunday morning to R.R. Brown from WOI in Omaha, and later, in the 1940's, to Peter Eldersveld of the Christian Reformed Church's Back To God Hour.


We continued to read the daily newspaper, the Des Moines Register, of course, but radio broadened our world considerably.  The newspaper had its comic strips which were regularly enjoyed, but radio brought us comedians and music and drama such as had not been available before.  To the present generation radio may seem rather primitive and dull, but actually, with the aid of sound effects and a vivid imagination, radio drama was, I believe, every bit as exciting as it was after television became the popular media vehicle in the early 1950's.  Music could be enjoyed perhaps even better without the distractions of the visual being added to it.  Today, radio is largely talk shows and music, areas where the imagination need not function intensively.  But when I was young, to borrow the title of a country song, "I saw it all on the radio."
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Chapter 14 The Party Line

The telephone of my childhood years was really quite a marvelous invention.  It was only a bit over 50 years old in my day and most of my kind of people were utterly amazed to think that a voice could travel in(?) over(?) through(?) a wire for so many miles.
            
The telephone of the thirties and early forties was a brown, varnished, rectangular box attached to the wall with the longer dimension in the vertical position.  On the left hand side a black receiver hung on a two-pronged device which acted as an on-off switch:  "Off" when the receiver was hanging; "on" when the receiver was taken off.  On the front were two bells resembling a pair of all-observant eyes, and, just below them, a mouthpiece protruding like a horn.  On the right hand side of the box was a small crank-like handle by which we could "ring" other people or get in contact with "central."  Central was a telephone operator in town who made all the connections at a switchboard.  Central was always--I mean, always--a female.  Clearly, this was a woman's job.
            
Operator in Richardson Texas
For most calls we would first have to get in contact with central.  To do so, we would crank the handle briefly producing one short ring and she would respond with "Number, please".  After telling her the number she would connect our line to the line of the other party and ring the phone of that party.
             
People in the rural areas, and possibly also in the towns, were on party lines, meaning that several homes would be connected to the same phone line on which the signals would be transmitted.  There were at least 12 homes connected to our party line.  Each home had a different ring signal to identify who should answer the phone which would ring in all the homes at the same time.  Our signal was 2 longs, meaning the phone would ring two long rings.  Others would have a short and a long; or a long and a short; or a long, short, long; or two shorts and a long, etc.  Five longs was a signal from central meaning that everyone on the party line should pick up their phones and listen.  Five longs usually consisted of important announcements made by the town, or perhaps by some business in town announcing a sale or some other event that everyone should know about.  If schools were to be closed for a blizzard this would be announced with the five longs followed by the message.
            
If you and the party you wished to call were on the same line you could ring the person directly by cranking the handle the appropriate lengths and times to send that signal over the line.  Now, of course, since all these homes were on the same line, any person could listen in to the calls directed to any other home.  We always knew that a short-long-short was the Ed Johnsons, and two longs and a short was the Thoresons, etc.  And, since the parties talking had no way of knowing who was listening, it was an accepted practice to listen in and get filled in on the latest gossip occurring in the neighborhood.  Now, I say it was an "accepted practice."  That doesn't mean it was totally polite to do so, but the clicks being heard from receivers being lifted to listen in were so common that everyone really expected to have other listeners.  If one wished to pass on something very confidential on the phone, one would have to listen to the number of clicks being heard.  This would indicate how many people were listening.  Then, by commencing to talk at length about trivial matters, the receivers would often go back on their hooks producing similar clicks.  When the clicks from the "hang-ups" equaled the number which were heard at the beginning of the call, one could usually count on privacy.  The certainty of this privacy, how- ever, was never absolute.  It was always possible that two listeners had picked up their receivers at exactly the same time producing what would sound like only one click instead of two.  So, really confidential information was best kept for other than telephone communication.
            
There would be times when the party line would be tied up so long by loquacious persons (usually female) that the only hope of ever getting a call placed was to interrupt the conversation with a polite: "Would you mind letting me have the line for a while?  I have a very important call to make."  Invariably the conversants would hang up.  But, you had better be sure to demonstrate that your call was important for their curiosity would guarantee that they would listen in to see.  There would also be times when the number of listeners on one call would become so excessive that the phone signal would become weak and the caller would have to request that people hang up so the conversation could be understood.
            
On occasions when there was a serious illness in a home or another unusual event, more receivers than usual would be lifted.  I remember one occasion when Duane, the 17 year-old son of Ed and Sylvia Johnson, was seriously ill.  My mother listened in to a call to the Johnsons to find out how Duane was progressing.  It was a call from old Doctor Judd suggesting that they apply a hot water bottle to his hurting abdomen.  Ma had just heard recently that you should apply cold and not hot to an appendix problem, which this apparently--or at least, possibly--was.  That put Ma in a real dilemma:  Should she call Mrs. Johnson and tell her that that was the wrong advice?  Her dilemma was not that this would reveal that she had been listening in.  That could be understood and easily forgiven, especially when it indicated concern for a sick son.  The problem was:  Who was she to dispute their old physician, someone in his seventies, and a fellow member of their Methodist Church?  Now it so happened that my parents, and Ma especially, had no respect for the medical wisdom of old Dr. Judd who had lost touch with the latest in medical science and who had allegedly buried many of his mistakes.  Shouldn't one remain silent rather than dispute the advice of a licensed physician?  But, on the other hand, what if she did apply the hot water bottle and something disastrous happened?
            
If I remember, conscience won out with my mother and she did call Sylvia Johnson shortly thereafter and suggested that the wisdom of applying the hot water bottle was questionable in this situation.  I don't know how Ma's advice was received, or whether it was followed.  I do know Duane died a short time later, a consequence, however, more of his deficient production of white blood cells than of the hot or cold applications to his abdominal regions.  Duane was a classmate of brother Harold.  His death was quite a blow to the Johnson family which knew him as their only child.
           
Modern communication has come a long way since the telephones of the thirties, and much of that distance, to be sure, has been progress.  Privacy, a newly-discovered constitutional right, can now be reasonably assured in telephone conversations.  But with that advance, something has also been seriously wounded: the party line and the accompanying sense of community which it fostered.  And one may question whether the victory for privacy outweighs the loss suffered for community.


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