When people today speak of the intoxication of space/time travel, they forget. It's actually been here for years. It all began with the Golden Age of Radio....!
Youngsters sometime ask what made the Golden Age of radio so golden. Those of us who were there to spend that gold usually explain it this way. In the 30s and 40s, radio was a one-time-only treasure chest of first-time surprises. In today's exotic age of communication technologies, surprises come so fast, they're hardly surprising anymore....!
But now return with us to those early days of yesteryear when a family's only real communication with the world outside its front door was the daily newspaper, the weekly gossip over the back fence, and the occasional letter from Uncle Harry or Cousin Emily. Suddenly, just about the time the Great Depression struck the land low, something helped buoy it up. It was those green-eyed consoles in our living rooms, and orange-faced cathedral sets next to our beds. Wondrously permitting our isolated imaginations to travel right into the magic box, coming out the other end with people and places we had never dreamed possible.
There were greater adventures inside them than even emperors dared dream. Symphony orchestras from Paris and Vienna....dance bands from New York and Chicago...world leaders from Roosevelt to Churchill to Hitler all right there next to us...not to mention a galaxy of daily soap operas to wring our psyches dry plus a constellation of evening comedies and dramas with headliners few of us could afford even from a balcony seat.
Look at it this way. The American family of the 30s and 40s was almost as isolated as the under-the-stars Buffalo Bills and the by-candle-light young Abe Lincolns. Shuttles, computers and Iphones today are really not the revolution. For all their dazzling sophistication, they're simply Act Two. Act One was these 20 transformative golden years when the human family for the very first time in history was able to flip a switch and behold the entire planet snuggled inside their own home.
Fire changed the world. Farming changed the world. The wheel changed the world. Now it was radio's turn. Only by then, changes were piling up so fast, radio's revolution got a little lost amid the giant electronic waves that it had itself unleashed.
So here almost a century later, it may appear as if radio were only one rung up the great electronic ladder. But, you see, it was the first rung! Helping make the rest of the ladder possible!
For those of us who were there -- with Jack Benny, Red Skeleton, Fibber McGee & Molly, the Lux Radio Theatre, the Quiz Kids, Gabriel Heatter, Walter Winchell, Easy Aces, I Love a Mystery, Ma Perkins, Kate Smith, Helen Trent, Lorenzo Jones, Pepper Young's Family, Jack Armstrong, Captain Midnight and Lets Pretend -- we were for the first time in the history of our inquisitive species free to walk and laugh and cry with people, places and time we never met. Yet we knew each of them like the cherished scratches in Mom's kitchen table!
Gold is where you find it. Especially when you find it for the first time. This bright but brief Golden Age was the very first time mankind's astonishing space/time travel was launched. An extraordinary moment which -- not surprisingly -- subsequent generations keep re-discovering to their enormously giddy delight.
Talk about bridging the generation gap!
Who would have ever thought a little Italian inventor named Marconi would stumble upon the invisible waves in the planet's ethers which -- if properly captured -- could suddenly snap the chains of isolation between here and there? Then and now? Knowing proud Italian mothers, probably SHE did!
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Radio in those days was my entrance into the wider world. The wonders of what we can find on our tv and computer screens today are essentially Radio 102. Only with radio, the pictures were even more awesome. Kids, you had to be there....!!
ReplyDeleteI'm one of those "kids." I think I really missed something.
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