Editor’s note: Wellesnet veteran Glenn Anders (aka Alex Fraser) is quite possibly the only member who actually heard that famed Martian broadcast all those years ago. We asked him to write something about his memories of that night in 1938, when he was just a seven-year old lad, living a peaceful, uneventful life in the Midwest. Here is his recollection:
NEWS ANNOUNCER: Enemy now in sight above the Palisades. Five — five great machines. First one is crossing river. I can see it from here, wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook… A bulletin’s handed me… Martian cylinders are falling all over the country. One outside Buffalo, one in Chicago, St. Louis… seem to be timed and spaced… Now the first machine reaches the shore. He stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers. He waits for the others. They rise like a line of new towers on the city’s west side… Now they’re lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out… black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They’re running towards the East River… thousands of them, dropping in like rats. Now the smoke’s spreading faster. It’s reached Times Square. People trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They’re falling like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue… Fifth Avenue… one hundred yards away… it’s fifty feet…
It would have been a Sunday evening, after dinner, in Northeastern Ohio, far from Grovers Mills, New Jersey. The air was growing chilly, and the last leaves of the Maple trees on Swan Street were fluttering on their branches. The Yankees had beaten the Cubs four straight in the World Series earlier in the month, and in mid-November, Kate Smith would be introducing “God Bless America” to the public, for Armistice Day. Overseas, the Nazis had carried out Krystalnacht against their Jewish population, and Winston Churchill was speaking of the possible necessity of war with a ruthless nation a few hours away by air.
For most of the citizens of Geneva, Ohio, such events were distant. Not so in my home, where my father, “Scotty” Fraser, a five-year veteran Cameron Highlander machine gunner of the First World War, when not climbing sixty foot poles for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, listened to the ballgame, the football game, the opera, Charlie McCarthy, Fred Allen, or most of all, the news from the BBC, on our brand new Philco console radio, standing in its place of honor near his chair. My father, a gentle man, sat by the hearth, reading his beloved True Detective Stories, a cigarette burning in his giant blue ashtray, a glass of California Muscatel and soda at hand.
The last tomato had been harvested, the lily bulbs taken from the ground, and listening to Churchill (not yet Prime Minister) on the shortwave transmission of the BBC, my father began to have arguments with my mother about rejoining his regiment.
But that would be far from Geneva, and only vaguely disturbing to my life on that Sunday.
Tomorrow night was Halloween, and the kids on the block were looking forward to “trick or treating.” We were still in the final ebb of the Great Depression, and children did not have money for fancy costumes and elaborate makeup. One flour sack with a few holes for over the head, and another to hold the boodle, mostly homemade cookies and candies, had to make do.
I would have been lying half on our precious Persian carpet, half on the hardwood, near my father’s chair, “reading” my latest Action Comic Book, featuring the new hero Superman, glancing occasionally at a clipper ship making way under full sail toward me, emblazoned on a card table artfully arranged to easily mask the unused opening of our red brick fire place. I would have been drawing part of the time, for I did not really read for years after a fall down the cellar steps when I was five.
There would have been no doubt that we would eschew Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen, the radio craze at that hour. The sustaining CBS program, the Mercury Theater on the Air, had promised early in mid-summer a dramatization of Treasure Island, a favorite novel of my father’s youth. And though that promise was postponed, and others disappeared entirely, we had become habituated to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 in B-flat minor, which came to symbolize the approaching presence, accentuated by our radios’s huge base speaker, of the mysterious but comforting Orson Welles.
As one who actually heard “The War of the Worlds” on that late Fall day of 1938, so long ago, in Ohio, I can tell you that there was nothing on the radio in the late thirties which compared with the Mercury Theater on the Air. The only other program of its kind, on a regular basis, was The Columbia Radio Workshop broadcasts. And Welles was involved with those programs, too, as were the directors who may have been an influence on him, Irving Reiz and particularly, William N. Robson.
And so, a seven year-old boy was lying on the floor, feeling the vibrations of our mighty Philco pulsing through him, its somehow Egyptian green eye dilating slowly down upon him, observing all of us, as we heard:
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles…
ORSON WELLES: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.
ANNOUNCER: …for the next twenty-four hours not much change in temperature. A slight atmospheric disturbance of undetermined origin is reported over Nova Scotia, causing a low pressure area to move down rather rapidly over the northeastern states, bringing a forecast of rain, accompanied by winds of light gale force. Maximum temperature 66; minimum 48. This weather report comes to you from the Government Weather Bureau. …We now take you to the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.
MUSIC: SPANISH THEME SONG (A TANGO)… FADE-OUT
Of course, from the start, we knew that we were listening to a radio program, but gradually, I stopped my doodling, my father lay down his magazine on the hearth, my mother came to stand by his chair, as she did in thunder storms. For half an hour, we were hypnotized by the Philco’s encompassing green eye, its now Martian eye, and the drama of the destruction of the entire East Coast of America. It was as if a cold winter wind had gradually blown in off the Nickel Plate Railway, right through the door, when Ray Collins ended the first half with: “2X2L… 2X2L Calling CQ. Is there anyone out there?… Is there anyone there?…”
We all relaxed a bit in the second half hour, and were a little puzzled by the repeated interruptions by CBS and WTAM announcers to stress that we were listening to an entirely fictionalized dramatization.
I would not say that people in Geneva did crazy things that night. After all, living as we were in a different time zone, my father and wiser heads of family knew that if the East Coast were already gone, we were still here. Besides, “The BBC Radio Newsreel” at 9 p.m. did not mention the Invasion of Earth by Little Green Men.
And yet, along with the town, we talked about the program for days afterward, as did the radio correspondents, the newspapers, and all kinds of magazines.
Many years later, early of a Sunday morning in January 2004, I was listening to weekend Talk Show Host John Rothman on San Francisco’s 50,000 watt clear-channel KGO-AM Radio Station. Rothman, in honor of the landing of NASA’s “Spirit” robotic rover, devoted an hour to the event. For the first time, Man had established combined interactive cybernetic communication from a robotic vehicle on the ground of the Martian Planet to a mother ship, and in almost real time, communicated from “Spirit” to that mother ship in orbit around the planet, back here to earth: a superb achievement for Science.
In a sense, America, mimicking its actions on Earth, had invaded Mars.
Justly admirable, and much more memorable, at first Martian blush, than had been our foolishly bellicose preemptive acts on Earth over the preceeding year.
(Typically, we have all but forgotten our tremendous scientific achievement of 2004, but we shall rue our invasion of Iraq for decades.)
Strange it may seem now… next New Year’s Eve, 2009, to sit within my peaceful study in San Francisco looking back at the incredible events of the last 70 years. Strange it may be to think back to October 30th, 1938, when it seemed implausible that America would ever invade anyone, certainly not on manufactured evidence, of the kind Adolph Hitler would use the next year to invade Poland. Strange to watch children playing in the streets. Strange to see young people beginning to swell in the cold, damp plazas, our economy and world reputation in shambles, shouting out: “Hell, yes! Bush must pay!”. Strange to remember pictures of that marvelous machine, NASA’s Spirit robotic rover, a triumph of American, of Human Science raising its peculiar head to peer out on the ruddy Martian landscape.
“Strange when I recall the time when I first saw it, bright and clean-cut, hard, and silent, under the dawn of that last great day:”
On Sunday evening, October 30, 1938
I remain obediently yours,
Glenn Anders