A Non-Manifesto, Revisited

AUTHOR'S NOTE---A correspondent addressing me directly, rather than by way of the comments option in these spaces, asks me why on earth I do this in the first place. Had he asked at the outset, almost a year ago, I could have pointed him to the following, which I republish on the chance that anyone else beyond my normal ten readers might ask the same question. With one or two minor alterations, it appears precisely as I wrote it in July 2006.---JK.

“the easiest way to get into radio,” wrote Fred Allen (or fred allen, as he signed those letters not signed “f.a.,” Faljek Prink, Mr. A., or other appellations), “is to become a quiz contestant. when it is your turn and you come to the microphone whip out a revolver, kill the master of ceremonies and take over the quiz program yourself. a lot of listeners will be grateful to you for killing the m.c. and good will is important if you hope to survive in radio . . .

“if you do not want to spend twenty or thirty years in the theatre getting ready to go into radio, you can cut down a few years through becoming a quiz kid and growing up in the business. another good and easy way to get into radio is to be born the son of a sponsor.”

I wasn’t a quiz contestant who shot the M.C. at the microphone. (I have wanted to shoot the occasional program director.) I wasn’t a quiz kid growing up in the business. Nor was I born the son of a sponsor. My father worked for Nationwide Insurance, and Nationwide had its share of commercials on the air in my childhood. (“The man from Nationwide is on your side,” an opinion of which my father’s elder brother thought so highly for its revealed truth that he walked out of Nationwide and went independent when the opportunity knocked.) But the syllogism would be:

a) Father works for Nationwide insurance.
b) Nationwide Insurance advertises heavily on radio.
c) Father's are the children of a sponsor.

Beyond clients about whom I may have forgotten, my father’s contact with radio consisted of listening at the dining room table or in the car or, as best as I could tell, in his office. The home listening was probably the same as the car or office listening---music, news, baseball games. There was a night the whole household huddled up by candlelight in Mother and Dad’s bed with a large portable transistor playing all night. Oh, we were big on family togetherness, but candlelight radio required extraordinary circumstances. The big Northeastern blackout of 11 November 1965 qualified.

By that time, too, the closest thing to classic, old-time radio I can now remember getting was a) what was left of Bob and Ray; b) what was left of Rambling with Gambling (there was a hell of a lot of it left, as things turned out); c) the news of one or another old radio star’s passing; or, d) old radio stars lingering on television still. (Circa 1965, that would have been Ozzie and Harriet, Jack Benny, Garry Moore, Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, Robert Young—no, on second thought: Father Knows Best was canceled in 1960, and Young was still four years from board certification, ABC's in fact, as Marcus Welby, M.D.)

And my parents were Saturday Review readers, but at age ten my reading was somewhere between school assignments and the sports pages, and thus I didn’t learn for years that Goodman Ace (for whose urbane, absurdist classic radio show this journal is named and I am handled) was a regular Saturday Review columnist. When he wasn't Perry Como's head writer, that is. (The magazine was called, originally, The Saturday Review of Literature. Goodman Ace loved to say he thought it a complete coincidence that they dropped of Literature within a fortnight of hiring him in the first place.)

But I did spend a few of the 1990s in radio, mostly as a news anchor, news reporter, and occasional sports commentator. And I did it, entirely, for small-city stations that wouldn’t have rated even a mild rebuke from Henry Morgan. Bad Henry saved his ammunition for the big armadas---like NBC and Life Savers candy. (Not to mention most of his former co-stars, and practically anyone who got to within a nautical mile of his radius, if you have ever fallen upon his occasionally scabrous anti-memoir, Here’s Morgan: The Original Bad Boy of Broadcasting. Howard Stern is just a pottymouth elk compared to that cape buffalo in a vacuum tube shop.)

The nearest I got to classic radio by my own hand and voice was during those 1990s, when I suggested and got the chance to crank out a New Year’s Eve show based on an ancient radio broadcast. During one of my frequent secondhand shop prowls, I had found a copy, on vinyl, of New Year’s Eve Radio Dance Party 1945, on Radiola Records. My primary interest then was adding to my jazz library. The show piped live performances of Harry James, Count Basie, Gene Krupa, Jimmy Dorsey, Les Brown, Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington, on an Armed Forces Radio Network hookup from their various New Year’s Eve hotel and ballroom dates.

(It also piped in Freddy Martin, Carmen Cavallero, and Guy Lombardo, none of whom could be accused of playing jazz. They had big bands and big followings, though. And if you could find a New Year’s Eve party in those or many other years without an auld lang from Lombardo’s syne, it was probably among the penguins in Antarctica, which seems a terrific waste of fine tuxedos.)

I rolled up a two-hour fiftieth-anniversary show that opened with an hour of other selections from the Radio Dance Party players, some of them, anyway, then the Radio Dance Party itself, closing with Benny Goodman’s haunting closing theme, “Goodbye,” and splicing in a few ancient radio commercials. (There was someone missing from the original Radio Dance Party. Major Glenn Miller would have been part of it, I’m sure, but for a previous rendezvous that Destiny’s mean widdle kid sister insisted he keep with and in the English Channel. I settled for making the Miller American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force part of the pre-Dance Party portion of the show, thanks to the then-new set of their final recordings.)

Dearly would I love to say the show was an overwhelming hit. Realistically must I say it was barely a modest hit, in a modestly small city. And I would do it again tomorrow, assuming it was New Year’s Eve and I could catch another program director asleep at the board. Until then, I settle for listening.

Nostalgia had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even born when the Radio Dance Party bands were alive and working. Or when classic radio itself was in the prime of its life. And the nice thing about that is that I could listen to the music, or to the various quarter- , half- , or full hours of classic radio, without falling back wistfully to those good old days at the bathtub still, the soup kitchen, the Dust Bowlers’ Tour, the malt shop, Roseland, the canteen, or the island beach wishing Jennifer O’Neill had cradle-robbed me instead of Gary Grimes in Summer of ’42.

I still listen that way. With apologies to the journal that first composed the rhetorical formula I now derive, this journal stands athwart nostalgia, yelling “Art!” And that holds whether reviewing a particular old show’s episode, a freshly exhumed book or script, a freshly minted set of classic shows, an old (if not necessarily classic) movie based upon a classic radio show, or perhaps, too, a freshly written script. For a radio show that doesn’t yet exist, except in the folds of my mind. And, perhaps, in yours, too.