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Living 1949 49-01-02 (01) Leaving 1948
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Living 1949 49-01-02 (01) Leaving 1948
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Nicole Byer
We interrupt this program to bring you an important Wayfair message. Wayfair's got Style tips for Every home. This is Nicole Byer helping you make those rooms. Flyer Today's Style TIP when it comes to making a statement, treat bold patterns like neutrals. Go wild like an untamed animal. Print area rug under a rustic farmhouse table. From wayfair.com Ooh, fierce. This has been your Wayfarer style tip to keep those interiors superior. Wayfair Every style, every home. Today living 1948 becomes living 1949. This the year 1949 is the year of the Ox on our ancient Eastern zodiacal calendar. The Year of the Ox represents the virtue faithfulness and and this year, according to our ancient beliefs, if one has faith, everything will come out all right. Living 1949 bowing in for NBC and its affiliated stations with this initial program of the new year holds its radio mirror high to reflect for you signs of our times as man continues his unending pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. The title of our first drama document of living 1949 leaving 1948 and here no worse for the passage of time. Your narrator, Ben Grauer. A happy 1949 to you America, and a passing glance at 1948 through the eyes of syndicated columnist Frederick Oatman. I wish the year end review writers would quit kicking about 1948 as years ago it struck me as being first class. An outfit figured out a system of making female shoes of salmon skin. The Agriculture Department published a book on how to crack nuts without cracking thumbs. The $2 shirt is returned now. If 1949 can do better than that, that'll be wonderful. Me, I'd be happy with another 1948. How many people feel like star eyed Mr. Oatman at this return of the year is not our concern today. Our only concern this year for faith is to check our position on a course charted for us 172 years ago by Thomas Jefferson. We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How jealously man guards these rights was demonstrated for us recently in the kind of way a guy can understand the place. Flatbush Court in Brooklyn the complaint I tell you Judge, the landlord shut off the hot water right when I was in the middle of my bath. The magistrate's ruling. A landlord has no right to dictate how many baths a tenant may take. Human rights come before property rights, life, liberty and the Pursuit of happiness. Then three unalienable rights. Let us this year of the arks, this year for faith measure the state of our world through them. Unalienable right Number one, Life. Life begins with birth, except for destined kings. For such as these life begins long before with news of their expected genesis on every public tongue their future course pre charted like the course of ships. And so sign of our times is not that on November 14th this sound broke the autumn air of London as this sound broke the nervous stillness of Buckingham Palace. Nor that the prince who thus announced himself was named I christened thee Charles Philip Arthur George. But the significant sign was that two weeks ago the officials of the food ministry came to the palace and to his father said Prince Philip, here is his royal Highness ration book. Yes, preliminary to the unalienable right of life in England is that even a newborn prince, in order to survive, must have, like any other child in the kingdom, a green covered ration book entitling him to extra milk, cod liver oil, concentrated orange juice. While life began for the future leader of Great Britain on this side of the ocean, the man took a new lease on his political life. A four year lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue said his position looking ahead for Harry S. Truman. The chief will come out of this job all right, but it will cost him years of his life. To help lighten at least one of the President's burdens, a man with experience, one Herbert Hoover, takes the witness chair before a congressional committee. Do you think, Mr. Hoover, that raising the President's salary to $200,000 a year should be recommended? Replies the ex President in effect. Well, I certainly think we should do something. But if we do that, it will put the President in a new tax bracket and after taxes we'd only have $70,000 left anyway. Proving that at the turn of 1949, as Poor Richard put it once before in 1749 and as a certain unidentified comedian has just learned it from the bureau of internal Revenue. In this world nothing is death and taxes but a happier certainty and a brighter sign people in one part of the country at least are finding not in their news columns, but in the AD 1949 Roadster sedans, coupes fully equipped under list price immediate delivery while elsewhere free Christmas clearance. Every shoe we have formally up to 18.95 prepare 20 to 50% off. Apparently the shoe is now on the other foot and even houses. With the housing shortage far from solved proving hard to sell in one far western city builders are using this command and I'll tell you what I'll do besides selling you this three bedroom house for 13,000. We'll throw in a new Crosley station wagon as a gift free. But falling hardest are the luxury items. One Fifth Avenue specialty shop advertised raffle a meat scarf to the lucky winner. Be sure to come. And the people who are the ones who buy these luxuries, one of them from Miami, where they gather for sun and fun. Reports are in the first five days at Tropical park attendance was off 10,000. As for the betting, so help me, we were down a million smackaroos. This whole wonderful, almost unbelievable business. At last a downward turn in prices was summed up by a hard hit Louisiana fur trapper. His words numbered five, but they spoke volumes. Deep money. She's gone. But reminding ourselves again of this unalienable right called life, just how to pursue it is sending puzzled thousands to booksellers of the land with such questions. Do you have a copy of how to Stop Worrying and Start Living? And may I have Peace of Mind? Peace of Mind, still a best seller after two years, showing that at the dawn of 1949 there is not only no peace without, but little enough peace within. So while some try earnestly to face up to the personal complexities of living, others among us seek solace by happy flight into one or another kind of never never land. Witness that current literary smash, a comic book named the Life and Times of the Shmoo. Al Capp, great Shmoo father, has turned a shmoo crazy with what a psychologist has called a super animal, as indeed it is. For the Shmoo gives grade A milk already sealed in a bottle, tastes like steak when broiled, chicken when fried. His eyes make good suspender buttons. You can use them for building material. And most bestest of all, the peculiar critter dies happy. In the words of a New York Times reviewer, the world this cartoonist has made is a utopia, staggeringly different from and with all the appropriate disrespects to the world we know. While well fed Americans divert themselves with the incredibly edible schmoo, other peoples face the new year in a world so bitterly real they have no time for utopias. A world with a population now totaling 2 and 1/4 billion, which according to some food experts is 1 1/2 billion too many. If we want everybody to have have our standard of living, consider the case of 40 million of them. The 40 million who live in England, the nation closest to us, perhaps in kin and sympathy. Here, a citizen of the empire on which the sun once never set, today gets four basic weekly rations. Bacon and ham, one or two slices. Cheese, one and a half ounces fats, nine ounces three of butter, the rest margarine and cooking fat. Meat, 20 cents worth about a pound a week. Sugar, 10 ounces. Milk two and one half pints for grown ups, 12 to 14 pints for babies and sick folk. Eggs, one or two. Studying a group of British women who've been undergoing such deprivation for 10 years, an English doctor reports Mary seemed incapable of thinking or speaking clearly and would make remarks like I can't seem to remember anything these days. You suppose she remembers a certain woman in another land? A woman whose standard of living has been somewhat altered from another day. Mrs. Benito Mussolini, widow of the late dictator, in striking contrast to the block long palace she once occupied in Rome, lives today in shabby poverty stricken surroundings, tending we have one dozen chickens. If the British with their austerity, or for that matter the Americans with their schmooze, remember Signora Mussolini at all, it's probably with little concern for her fate or that of her dozen chickens. It was a motion more immediate, a world more real and near at hand, which brought to the boiling point one British charwoman who upon receiving a raise of 1 farthing, 1/10 of a cent per week, sat down and penned the following greeting to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. A Happy Christmas and New Year. I wish for you, sir Scaffoldia from one whose Christmas couldn't be. Lena, an insulted government woman cleaner. And while millions wonder how to live at all, up comes an expert in Chicago this time to tell us we all ought to live longer. Viewed as a biological machine, the human body should last much longer. Its worry and poor eating habits that are cutting the lifespan. People really have no excuse for not reaching 100 to 115 years of age. I should live so long. Thus Maisie of Brooklyn soured on the pursuit of living in 1949. Perhaps Maisie and the rest of us too would better realize how grateful we should be for longevity USA regardless of its span, by listening to this essay written in a class in English by a pursuer of any kind of life at all, newly come among us. Then the big Statue of Liberty came to our eyes. So long we had dreamed of United States, my husband, my children and I. Everywhere in the shops are food and clothing, many things to buy and on the streets much people. But we do not understand why they do not smile. Why are they not happy and gay in this country, country where there is such plenty, why do they not smile? Pursuit of living in this Year for faith, unalienable right. Number two, liberty. In the pursuit of liberty, there hangs over every nation the ever present fear engendered by the US USSR struggle, says the New York Times. Now there seems to be an acceptance of the east west rivalry almost as the international way of life. In China this conflict can be heard in gunfire. China, which once heard its George Washington Sun Yat Sen say on his deathbed, you shall never yield to the enemy. Now, in spite of itself finds its position echoed in three words of an aged woman rocking in tearless grief before the ashes of her home. All is lost. All is lost. Not having known peace for years, wracked now by civil war, China trembles to the retreat of its defenders as they fall before the communist armies. To a merchant watching the tattered soldiers march southward. It is an old, old story. So many troops, suddenly they are marching. Where? Wo putang. Wo putang. I do not understand. I do not understand. Confesses a railroad manager to Time magazine's Fred Gruen. You Americans are on top of heaven. We Chinese are 18 levels down in hell. To this America, atop of heaven comes Madame Cheung in a non secret appeal for aid. Truly a sign of the times is to be found in this double meaning quote on her prospects by one of Chiang's secretaries. We hope Madam is home by Christmas. It is so cold in Washington. Europe, however, is hot, hot with a cold war. A cold war replacing World War II that comes into sharpest focus in the air over disputed Berlin. Here in the central tower of Temple Hope Airdrome where US planes land food and fuel for the city the Russians have severed from the west by rail and road, Americans actually give voice to our own pursuit of liberty. Give me an ETA on EC84. Flour coming in on EC72, 0800. Roger. Give me the white and I'll come in like a bite. Ease are down. Wind is now north northwest. I've got the white. I'm coming in like a boy. Hey, the talk and take it down. I want to get some shut eyes. Come in Charlie 84. Come in Charlie 84. And these sounds were heard all the way to the English House of Commons. None of us can accept surrender. We must face the risk of war. The alternative policy to shrink from the issue involves not merely the risk, but the almost certainty of war. The world family of nations known as the un, whose chief concern continues to be that threat of war, through its agency called UNESCO, gave evidence of the scope of its task when it momentarily paused in its struggle to build international accord and focused its attention upon musical discord, the sour note in the amicable discussions, the true pitch of note A on the musical scale, complained Dr. Hermann Zeissel of Austria. Practically no country is adhering strictly to the musical standard of a pitch established in 1885 in Vienna. I propose an international conference to examine again the tuning fork and settle this question of absolute musical pitch in the interest of international harmony. To this proposal, strangely enough, the Russians offered no counterpoint. In spite of a record of 29 vetoes, the UN General assembly, the first to be held on the European continent, closed its session a few weeks ago with the usual fireworks from the chief Soviet delegate, Andrei Vashinsky, who, angered by the farewell speech of the chief US Delegate, John Dulles, shouted, this session has produced no successes whatever and has been dominated by those who are inciting a new world war against the new democracy. Said Secretary General Trigvali wearily. The assembly has made only a bare beginning in comparison with the unsolved conflicts of the great powers that continue to curse the world. He looked forward to New York and April for a fresh start. The United nations organization has more than world problems to worry about. Destined to be a thorn in its side is a newborn rival called by its founder the organization to encourage people to quit organizations purpose so they can spend more time in church. Motto be a quitter Password when asked to join, say no Demonstrating still another form of liberty 1949 strangest twist to this liberty business was observed by the Washington Post with regard to women's fashions. Editorialize the Post. The liberated lady of this season mincers along on six inch steps, her head tightly bound in a helmet like hat that makes her head ache and her forehead red. The women of the world have expended a lot of time and tears in their fight for freedom and equal rights. Now having won them women wise, they have changed their minds and seem to be turning them in for a mess of buttons and bows. One thing, however, is sure. This threshold of the new year freedom of speech has been given new words of encouragement in a Maryland court decision concerning Then your honor, he turned around and he called me a screwball. The judge ruled the term screwball may signify one, a crack brain, crack pot, crank, queer, duck and a nut or two, a stupid or insane person like batty, bughouse, crazy, boob, dippy, screw loose. But the use of screwball as such is not criminal. Give me an ETA on EC84. Coming in on EC72. Roger. Give me the white knock. Come in like a boy. These are down voices of American boys winging into Berlin. Another version perhaps of freedom of speech, of our pursuit of liberty, American style. In this year for faith, 1949, unalienable right number three, pursuit of happiness. In the pursuit of happiness, few holes seem barred this atomic age. In Japan, a cabinet minister pursued happiness by chasing a woman member of the parliament into a corner for a kiss. Reported the woman to her colleagues, he forced me into a corridor and embraced me. He told me, I love you. I told him he had more important business to attend to, whereupon he said, you come before business. She got away. He resigned. Winston Churchill pursued happiness with a paintbrush. Said he, happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and color, peace and hope will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end of the day. Fellow cigar smoker Jan Sibelius left no doubt where his happiness lay. On his 83rd birthday, the famed Finnish composer told an American visitor, For my birthday, what do I wish? I would be happy if I had only a box of real Havana cigars. Evidently lots of people wanted Sibelius happy. Total cigars received 83 boxes. Other routes to happiness this year of the ox. This year for faith. Well, according to the headlines, teenagers in one midwestern town are driving teachers wild with so called redouts. What's a red out? Well, the idea is to faint. What you do is you kneel down, see, take a deep breath, put one thumb in your mouth and blow without exhaling. Like this. Then too television, claimed the sociologists, we are seeing a change in our domestic architecture. The pivot of the room used to be the fireplace. Now people are turning their back upon the fireplace and their eyes upon a 10 to 16 inch screen. In Tibet, the direction taken in the search for happiness was particularly startling. The Dalai Lama, on heavy parchment enclosed in a bamboo tube, wrote this request to an export firm. I wish to buy an iron bridge. The reason only to make my people happy. But one factor so essential to the happiness of all, so highly prized, so humbly sought, remained elusive to all its pursuers. Announced a committee of wise men. We have this year found no individual worthy of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. An omission which itself serves as comment on 1949 as a year for faith. Faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why so many who fought for peace so recently are now taking another path to reach item Only one type of college shows a heavier veterans enrollment this fall. The theological seminary ex now studying for the ministry total 4,921 life, liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Faith gave them birth. Faith can keep them alive. These three unalienable rights, in the words of Robert Browning, these make humanity. These are its sign and note and character. For 172 years, they've been the guiding principles of the American way. They've brought us a measure of abundance of which all the world has been envious. Now, man with no place to hide from the atom, caught up in a maze of political turmoil, hungry as he impoverishes the very soil that nourishes him. At last, man and all the rounded corners of the earth can take heart as we did over a century and a half ago. Take heart from this. Conceived by the United nations, passed without dissent, dedicated to the people of the world. The finest sign of our time. Now, therefore, the General assembly of the United nations proclaims this Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations to the end that every individual and organ of society, keeping this declaration constantly in mind, shall strive to secure their universal and effective recognition. And the first article in this new declaration for all men everywhere to read, ponder and apply. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and should act toward one another in the spirit of brotherhood. Let us remember then that this is a year for faith. And if one has faith, everything will come out all right. Living 1949 is prepared and presented for the University of the Air by an NBC special program staff under the supervision of Wade Arnold. Scripts are written by Lou Hasam. Your narrator was Ben Grauer. And the music was conducted by Milton Katums. This program is directed by Jack Cuny. We invite you to keep abreast of living 1949 by joining us next week when we'll present a drama document entitled An Investigation into Congressional Investigations. Your new wonderful Sunday on NBC starts today. Yes, there are new laughs, great new talent and new programs. Listen for Ozzy and Harriet, followed by Horace Height in the number one spot. Then Phil Harris and Alice Fay, followed by Fred Allen in his new time 1/2 hour earlier. All these and more besides make up your wonderful Sunday on most of these NBC stations. Robert Warren speaking, Mrs. NBC Heights in the number one spot today.