← Harold's Old Time Radio
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- [00:04]
Alexander Walcott
Alexander Walcott, the town choir. The sound of his bell is a signal that he has taken up his stand once more at the great crossroads of the world. Ladies and gentlemen.
- [00:16]
Mark Warnold
Tonight your old town FR has something on his mind, such as it is. I know it's my job to tell you the news, as I noted in the passing crowd, to talk of people I've seen, plays I've just attended, books I've just read, jokes I've just heard. But tonight, for a change, I have a pilgrimage to propose. I jingle my bell in the hope that all who feel as I do about such things, all who find solace in the remembrance of things past, will go with me. I want to make a little journey in opposition to that mysterious and relentless factor we call time. The other day, the bottomless pit of learning named H.G. wells dug up a new book. It's the product of his prophetic soul. It's entitled the Shape of Things to Come. It's a guess at the future. Now, my soul is not prophetic? Your town crier is no gypsy queen like Mr. Wells. You could cross my palm with silver or even paper and hear no news of tomorrow. It's hard enough, heaven knows, to see the shape of things past. But we can try. Tonight I'm inviting you to come along with me. Back through the years. Of course. You've read what A. Edward Newton of Philadelphia describes as the greatest little book in the world. It was written 90 years ago by Mr. Dickens, and it's called A Christmas Carol. If you belong to that vast community which loves the Christmas carol. I don't have to tell you how that mean old man named Scrooge encountered one night a ghost, the ghost of Christmas past, who took Scrooge back through the years and through the windows of a miserable schoolhouse, let him see, sitting on a bench, the hungry and lonesome little boy he used to be. Why don't we go on such a journey tonight? Come on. Are you ready? I seem to hear the music of an earlier day coming faintly down the wind. Are you ready? Let's go back through the years, back through the Depression, back through the boom, back to that smug time which someone had the impertinence to call normal things. Back to the armistice, back to the war. 1915. 1914, 1913. Here we are. December, 1913. November. October. 20 years ago this month. 20 years ago this minute, now we are standing, you and I, on a high platform, outside of space, outside of time. Onlookers of the universe, watching the world as it used to be. Do you hear the music of that day. The songs we used to sing. The measures to which we danced. The bunny husk and the turkey trough and the grizzly bear. October 1913. We're looking through the window of a building in New York. It's the hive from which the New York Times emerges. Up on the third floor, a bespectacled young man of 26 is banging away on a typewriter. I hardly recognize him. His name is Alexander Wolkett. He doesn't know much. I look at him and think of all the time he's going to waste in the 20 years ahead. And all the pounds he's going to put on. Things that will be commonplace to any child of 1933 are Miles and years outside his knowledge. Think of the things he knows nothing about. This 1913 reporter. Why, he's never heard of Calvin Coolidge. He's never heard of midget golf. He's never seen or heard a radio. He's seen a Ford, but he's never heard a Ford joke. To him, it's inconceivable that a civilized nation would ever send bombing planes across its frontier. To rain destruction on helpless homes. Where the poor incredulous wretch will live to see submarines deliberately sinking passenger ships in mid ocean. He'll live to see the incompetent rulers of the world out Herod. Herod. By killing 10 million of the world's youth. But as you watch him there in 1913, he doesn't know it. He's never dreamed of the transatlantic telephone. He's never seen a concrete road or played a game of mahjong or worked a crossword puzzle. He has a lot to learn, the poor Schlemihl. October 1913. October 6th. Not nearly 20 years ago this month, but 20 years ago this very night. What's happening? Well, up in Albany, we're impeaching the governor of New York. In a few days we'll fly him out. On their way to Boston are 2,000 bankers gathering for a convention. What will they do there? I'll tell you what they'll do. A mild measure called the Owen Glass Bill is on the carpet in Congress. These banker chaps will denounce it as confiscatory. They'll call it downright socialism. Bless their heart. If we could go to their convention and tell them what's really ahead of them. They'd die of apoplexy. Up at the polo grounds, the first game of the 1913 World Series has just been played. It's the Athletics against the Giants this Afternoon. The Athletics won the first game, 4 2, thanks to Frank Baker, who hit a curve of Marquardt and knocked it for a home run. He brought Eddie Collins in too. On the other side of the world, in the Russian town of Keith, the bilist trial is on. It's another chapter in the ancient story of the Jews. A chapter which some of us had thought of has closed in the Middle Ages. Here in America we shake our heads and say. But what can you expect of darkest Russia? Who can dream on this 1913 night that 20 years later an ultra modern country under the spell of Amin erotic. Will revert to such barbarism as poor old Russian ever dreamed of? But over in England. England. That was when Russia and Germany were not England. That will be when they no longer exist. Over In England, the 1913 gossips are saying that Sir Rufus Isaacs will be made Lord Chief Justice. And the gossips are right. While we're in England, let's look around us. What's this that's been going on down at Wimbledon? Why, the Davis cup has just been won by a young Californian named McLaughlin. The English are a good deal upset by this. They say it isn't fair to serve as hard of all as McLaughlin does. They? They say it isn't cricket. And of course, when you come right down to it, it isn't. It's tennis. Up in London, an American mining engineer whose work has carried him to many parts of the world. Has now taken a house in Bruton street and settled down as a resident of England. He intends to spend the rest of his life there. But he is miscalculating. Something will happen to prevent it. His name is Herbert Hoover. In Berlin, the Kaiser sits on his throne. His gleaming sword. In its case, his beard is yet unsprung. It is his proud boast that he has kept the peace of Europe for 5 and 20 years. He and he alone. And even as he says so, even as he struts his little stage. There sounds from the wings a sardonic laugh. It's the future giving him what will one day be known as the Raspberry. Let's look out to sea. What is that gleaming ship which has just left Liverpool. And will reach her harbor in New York before the end of the week. With all lights shining in the night. She is like some great golden galleon. On her hull is painted the word Lusitania. Someday she will head for this same port and never reach it. What is that humbler vessel traveling the same ocean lane? It's the Volturno, four days out from Rotterdam and bound for Canada. In another four days, she will go up in flames. And though a dozen ships will be summoned by wireless, 150 of those unsuspecting passengers will never see Canada or any earthly home again. Put back, Volturno. Put back while there's yet time. On our way From Paris is Mrs. Pankhurst, the English suffragette. At Ellis island, some immigration official will make her conspicuous and himself absurd by treating that magnificent woman as an undesirable alien and forbidding her entrance to this country. From New York he's named, and 20 years later, there will come to him a chance to. To make it greater. His friends call him Frank Roosevelt. In that Washington where he's an eager newcomer. Final arrangements are being made for President Wilson to press a button. Later in the week, it will send a current several thousand miles to blow up with dynamite some rather important dirt and stone. That dirt and stone is the last obstruction at Panama. In another week, the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific will meet. Hurrying to Panama to see this constellation is a beautiful young patron who has inherited the right ceremony. Her name is Alice Longworth. Great things are expected of the canal. The Hamburg American Line is already advertising a world cruise for January 1915, promising that its ships will go through the canal. At least that's what the advertisements say in the 1913 newspaper that lies here on my desk. As it happens, the Hamburg American Line is promising something which it will be unable to perform. Down in the northeast side are the remains of the Five Points Gang. Four of that gang have just been put to death at Tsing Si for the murder of Herman Rosenthal. But there are others left, among them a young Italian newsboy who calls himself Alons Brown. Later he will shift to Chicago and resume the name of his forefathers. You'll hear from him yet. You'll know him as Al Capone in one of the temples of Keith vaudeville. There is, in this same October, a wandering English act called the Dragon Carnot Pantomime Company. In the poop is a young Cockney comedian, 24 years old, who is unknown to fame. He's had a tough life ever since he was a kid. It's his one great ambition someday to get $5,000, go into the country and raise pigs. Backstage after his act comes some agents from the Keystone Comedy Moving Picture Company. They deal in these newfangled things called movies, which are on view at Nickelodeon's all over the country. They offer the little Cockney a handwatch. And whereas he has his Doubts. He thinks that maybe if they keep their promises and don't go bankrupt, he'll have that pig farm after all. He needn't worry. I wish I could go back in that dressing room and tell him so. His name is Charles Spencer Chapman. Out in Chicago, in one of the neighborhoods where the rich folks live, are two kids. One of them eight or nine, I should say, and the other a little younger. Everything that money can give them, they will have. Everything that loving and gentle parents can provide will be provided. Everything that school and college can do will be theirs for the asking. Security, loving kindness, education they will have, and it won't be enough. Their names are Nathan Leopold and Dickie Lowe. But let me show you another kind of bowie from our gaze can sweep the country. In a public school in Washington, as a boy from the Middle west who's studying in the District of Columbia because his father's in Congress. He's a rangy fair haired kid, but he wears short pants because he's only 11. A few months ago he saw for the first time in his life an airplane. His interest in such gadgets will increase. He it would be fun if we might talk to him tonight. But which of us would have the courage to tell him all of the triumph and all of the grief, all the weal and all the woe that lie ahead of him? His name is Charlie Lindbergh. Well, the music of 1913 has died on the air. Our time is up. We must go back to the present. Back through the war, back through the peace, back through the boom, back through the depression. 1930-1931-1932-1933. Ah, that's our year. Yes, that's our year. January, June, September, October, October 1st, October 6th. October 6th, 1933. We're home again. There is time left for me only to read you a sentence. The novel written in China not 20, but 500 years ago, under the title All Men Are Brothers. It has just been translated into the beautiful English prose of Pearl Buck, the woman who wrote the Good Earth. Five hundred years ago, the author of All Men Are Brothers wrote the preface to his book. In that preface he said, so one day is over. How do a hundred years differ from it? Can anyone see? That which is passed on, it is gone. Even as I finish this very sentence, the time which is passed before it is gone. Sorrow is this to the heart. Thus a Chinese philosopher in a book written before America was discovered. Well, we're back in the present and times have changed. And while I pause for breath, listen to a Tune of today. In the 1913 medley, you heard two tunes by Young Irving Berlin, then newly arrived from Chinatown, Berlin the inexhaustible, whose song Heat Wave, sung by the dusky and incomparable ethel Waters, is 20 years later, the outstanding hit of a Thousands cheer. Listen to it. I'm often asked when I approach the microphone whether I keep in mind all the possible listeners or just one is a broadcast addressed to the world at large or to some far off friend I know to be listening in. Without answering that question, I can say that one part of this program is addressed to one particular person and all the rest of you are eavesdroppers. I've asked a number of distinguished Americans each to name a song he or she would like to have sung. The choice for next week's song was made by my old friend and classmate, Ed Wynn. Tonight's song, which Mary Eastman will sing for you in another moment, was chosen by the gentleman from Indiana. At this minute, he is sitting by his fireside in his home on North Meridian street in Indianapolis, listening with some embarrassment to what I'm saying about him. He's the author of Mr. Beaucaire and Seventeen and Alice Adams and the Immortal Stories of Penrod Scofield. His books have an infinite variety, but they're all warmed by one thing, and that is the obvious fact that he rather likes the human race. Well, the human race reciprocates. His name is Newton Booth Tarkington. The song he chose for tonight is Santa Lucia. The sound of it should bring back to him the years he lived in Rome and in that magical island in the Bay of Naples called Capre. Are you listening, Mr. Tarkington? Good. Now, Mary, pull yourself together.
- [18:20]
Mary Eastman
Soft winds are glowing here. Bonnie, breathe and joy in my heart, Joy.
- [20:09]
Mark Warnold
Ms. Eastman, in behalf of the distant and listening gentleman from Indiana, I thank you. It has been suggested that at this point each week I should make a recommendation of some book, play or picture. Any such commentator as myself is a little like the tasters employed by the Doges in medieval Venice, who all lived in daily and justifiable fear of being poisoned. Before the soup was served to the great man, it was first sampled by the taster. If the taster survived, the doge began dunking with a relish. If the taster died in agony, the soup was thrown out. Fresh soup was ordered, and, considerably annoyed, the Doge had to send round for a new taster. Well, as taster at large to the American public, I hereby report that I have just enjoyed without deleterious After Effects the new book from England called Brazilian Adventure. Brazilian Adventure by Peter Fleming. And now I note that the Easy Mark is waving his baton at me, reminding me that he has to play Music makes me.
- [21:55]
Mary Eastman
Sara Eastman saying good night.
- [22:21]
Mark Warnold
This is Mark Warnold bidding you good night. This is Alexander Walker, sometimes known as Dorothy Parker's Fat Chance, bidding you good night.
- [22:29]
Alexander Walcott
You have just heard Alexander Walker, the town choir, Mark Warner and his orchestra, and Mary Eastman. This is Don Ball, also saying good night. This is the Colombia Broadcasting System.