War of the Worlds

[Glenn Anders]

Night Listner: One cannot argue with facts. They have a way of correcting memory.

I suppose what I mean, in my own memory of the experience that Sunday evening in 1938, is there was a feeling New York City, or Grover Mills, New Jersey, was an immense distance away from Geneva, Ohio. Coast to Coast broadcasting, though in the shiny polish of time, appears to have been well established, in actuality, was often a hit or miss experience. Not all stations in a "network" carried the same programs; substitutions were made; local programing preempted the networks for local events. Some stations stubbornly took one part of a network feed but not others.

That fact is recognized in the Mercury Theater script for "The War of the Worlds" by the casual way interludes of music and news bulletins interrupted the schedule. These were common occurences, people expected them, and families around their radios (who tended to obsessively face the speaker, as early TV audiences scrutinized the tube) waited patiently, not knowing if the interruption was a simple "technical difficulty," a failure of someone/some scheduled program to start on time, or an important announcement. It created a sense of expectancy which is hard to explain now.

In that sense, a seven year-old boy like myself, and many an adult, felt confusion, immediacy, and the belief that something going on a hundred miles away might as well be taking place on the other side of the world. I'm sure that, in October 1938, I had no real understanding of Time Zones, but events appeared to take place both at once and at a different time.

That speaks to the skepticism Todd Baesen shows in his post about whether or not people on one end of the country could actually have thought the the other end was being invaded by Martians.

I want to thank you for the link to the newspaper logs, Night Listener. One thing is clear, the fledgeling Networks certainly provided listeners with a much higher standard of quality programing than does Radio today.

We have tended to become cynics looking for the lowest common denominator, and NBC, CBS and ABC are certainly making a pretty buck on our avid seeking of cultural and intellectual decline!

Glenn