Radio Before The Internet

Back in the day, a radio buff like me could sit up late at night to hear radio stations as far away as San Francisco, Spokane (Washington), and Oklahoma City. Listening to those stations brought me joy although it could be a frustrating experience because of the static and the fading in and out of the radio signals. How clear they sounded depended on the station's distance from my home, which at the time was in Southern California. Stations like KOGO and KFMB in San Diego came in clearer because they were in a city closer to the Los Angeles area.

If the Internet had existed in the 1960s, I would have been able to hear all the disc jockeys I read about in the national music magazines like Teen Life. Among those deejays would have been Jerry Blavat (Philadelphia), Ron Riley (Chicago), Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsburg (Boston), Johnny Rabbitt (St. Louis), Hal Jackson (Newark, New Jersey), and Murray the K (New York). I would have had a ball.

It's possible now to hear many of these radio personalities via archived airchecks on YouTube and other websites, but it's not the same as hearing them in real time. Unfortunately, many of these deejays are no longer alive.

One of the deejays I was able to hear clearly was Wolfman Jack when he had yet to become a household name. He played R&B (or soul music) on a super powerful Mexican station, XERB. At the time I thought he was black because of his gravelly, down-home way of talking. I later learned he was a white guy whose real name was Bob Smith. That didn't bother me, he became one of my favorite deejays.

True Crime On The Radio

I can't recall on which old-time radio show I first heard an episode of the true-crime series, Somebody Knows. It was either Hollywood 360 (nationally syndicated) or The Golden Age of Radio (on New York's WBAI-FM).

Somebody Knows, which ran on CBS, was the forerunner to such shows as Unsolved Mysteries. Per my sketchy notes, the episode I heard concerned a 39-year-old  Boston cab driver named Samuel I. Paris, who was robbed and killed in April 1948.The episode aired on August 10, 1950. "Through narration and dramatizations," reports the CD/DVD website Amoeba.com, "the known facts of unsolved crimes were presented and listeners who provided information leading to the conviction of a criminal" would be given a cash reward.

According to the website, only two of the eight episodes are available on recordings. As an old-time radio fan, especially of detective and mystery shows, I would love to hear not only those two episodes but those of another show Wanted, the rival of Somebody Knows, that ran on NBC. Wanted, according to Amoeba.com, "avoided dramatizations all together [sic]" but instead used the recorded "voices of DAs, newspapermen, police, prison officials, witnesses, etc."

What I would like to know is how many of these cases were ever solved.

Living Past 100 And Still Working

I recently heard a story on New York's all-news Ten-Ten WINS about a barber in upstate New York who's 107 years old. And he's still cutting hair.

A story about people living beyond one hundred years is still newsworthy because so few people make it that far. Most people if they live to old age are more likely to die in the 85 to 115 age range. (The ones called super centenarians are the ones who die within the 116 to 125 age range.)

With that in mind, I'm looking forward to reading Keep Moving: And Other Tips and Truths About Aging by Dick Van Dyke (Weinstein Books, 2015). Van Dyke, the comic actor, is in his nineties and still working. And I hope he will continue to work when he's past a hundred.

A Gay History Website

I just learned today of a website via 1010 WINS, an all-news radio station in New York. The website is called makinggayhistory.com. Actually, it's a podcast of past interviews with gay and lesbian luminaries such as educator and activist Joyce Hunter. The interviews are from historian Eric Marcus's archives. I intend to visit it frequently.

There Are No LGBT Programs On National Public Radio

William F. B. O'Reilly, a consultant for Republicans and a newspaper columnist, stated in his column (published in amNew York, the free daily newspaper, on April 6, 2017) that "National Public Radio [is] home to New York's liberal intelligentsia." If National Public Radio (also known as NPR) is so liberal or progressive, why isn't there a weekly one-hour national and international news and public affairs program dealing with LGBT issues, events, and personalities? If I'm mistaken, and such a program exists, I would like for someone to let me know. I would love to tune in. WBAI, the listener-supported, and progressive, Pacifica station in New York, has a weekly show called Out FM that has been on the air for several years.

Re-Creating The Pearl Harbor Attack On The Radio

Yesterday was Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, the 75th anniversary of the Japanese air attack that pushed the United States into the second world war.

On Pearl Harbor Day in 1965 or 1966, I was in my teens and living in Southern California. I recall that a local radio station, whose call letters I don't remember, did a re-creation of the broadcast day in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

This re-creation included actual programs, news bulletins, and probably commercials, from that time. This brought the event to life for me, a person not alive when the attack happened. I remember being riveted to the radio.

I wish some enterprising radio station would do something similar during future Pearl Harbor Remembrance Days.

Concentration Camps For People With AIDS?

The following brief transcript is from a tape recording I made off the radio of an interview that New York talk show host Barry Gray did with Dr. Stephen Caiazza, on WMCA, in June 1989. Dr. Caiazza (pronounced ky-ay-zah) specialized in caring for people with AIDS and died in 1990 of complications from the disease himself at the age of 46.

Barry Gray: "We are coming close to what someone suggested to me a couple of years ago. I thought he was just kidding. He said we're going to wind up where everybody with AIDS is going to be behind barbed wire in a concentration camp."

Dr. Stephen Caiazza: "Fortunately--unfortunately, I think, the numbers are so astonishingly high that will never happen. The jails in the city of New York are already running at a hundred and four percent of capacity. And that's for convicted felons.

"Where are we going to put these concentration camps? In your backyard?"

Barry Gray: "In Gracie Mansion [the New York mayor's official residence]."

We've come a long way from the days when it was suggested that people with AIDS be tattooed to easily identify them or be put in concentration camps.

Today such sentiments would be considered ridiculous, barbaric, and inhuman.

However, we should keep in mind that in Donald Trump's America anything is possible.

A Nigerian Short Story Heard On The Radio

I heard the Nigerian writer Teju Cole's short story, "Modern Girls," read on public radio's Selected Shorts via New York's WNYC on September 13, 2015. It is set in a school for girls in Nigeria during the early 1970s, around the time of the Biafran war. The quality of Cole's writing is so good that I want to read the story myself  as well as his other work, both fiction and nonfiction.

Correcting A Museum Error

 I wrote and e-mailed the following letter to Stephen Petrus, the curator of the "Folk City" exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York on August 19, 2015. This exhibition focuses on the folk music scene in New York in the 1950s and 1960s:

Stephen Petrus, Ph.D
Museum of the City of New York
1220 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10029

Dear Mr. Petrus:

In the "Mapping Folk City,1935-1965" section of the "Folk City" exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, I noticed a factual error. The address of Pacifica radio station WBAI was given as 359 East 62nd Street, which was an old church building. As someone who became involved with WBAI in the late '60s, I can tell you that the station did not move to that location until sometime in the mid to late '70s.

In 1968 when I produced two half-hour black history programs, WBAI was located in a cramped town house on East 39th Street, near Park Avenue. From there it relocated (very briefly) to 62nd Street, then to 505 8th Avenue, and finally to 120 Wall Street (alas an address I never got to visit).

The station is now in Brooklyn after operating for several months out of City College's campus station WHCR [in Harlem] due to its evacuation from the Wall Street area after experiencing the wrath of Hurricane Sandy.

Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith

P.S. A heartfelt thank you for putting together such a beautiful and informative exhibition. I hope a lot of people get to see it before it closes next year.

Note: The blog post about the "Folk City" exhibition was published on August 1, 2015.

Remembering Broadcaster Pepsi Charles

The recent passing of historian and Egyptologist Josef ben-Jochannan caused me to wonder what became of Pepsi Charles, a former host and producer at WBAI, the Pacifica listener-supported station in New York. It was on her show that I first heard Dr. ben-Jochannan. I later interviewed him for a class assignment in 1975 when I took an evening course in magazine writing at Hunter College.

In December of that year, I did a one-hour program called "Langston Hughes: The Man and the Writer" for Pepsi Charles' weekly radio show. The guests I invited to speak on Hughes were Raoul Abdul, a former Hughes editorial assistant and at the time a music columnist for the New York Amsterdam News and Milton Meltzer, a friend of Hughes and a biographer. I was supposed to get a copy of the tape but, alas, she never provided one to me.

Doing a Google search, I learned that Pepsi Charles, a resident and community activist in Plainfield, New Jersey, died in 2002.

The Plaintalker II, a hyperlocal blog about Plainfield, in a March 12, 2009 post, had this to say about her: "Pepsi's interests and concerns ranged from cultural advancement of the community, recognition of African history and symbolism, the needs of urban youth, appreciation of all the arts and a deep spirituality that was an example to her friends and acquaintances."

Richard Durham, Black Radio Dramatist In The 1940s

One writer I would like to know more about is Richard Durham (1917-1984), a Chicago-based black radio dramatist (probably the only one in the 1940s) who wrote all the episodes for three series: Destination Freedom, Democracy U.S.A. , and a black soap opera, Here Comes Tomorrow.

During Black History Month this year, Max Schmid, the host of The Golden Age of Radio on New York's Pacifica station WBAI played the episode of Destination Freedom that dramatized Harriet Tubman's role in helping slaves escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad.

If there isn't a biography of Richard Durham, there should be. His work was an important contribution to old-time radio and to people's awareness of and appreciation for the achievements of  people of African descent.

Durham deserves to be as well-known as historians Carter G. Woodson (the father of what was then known as Black History Week) and J. A. Rogers.

A Radio Talker Who Reads Five Books A Week

One talk show I regularly listen to is The John Batchelor Show, heard nightly on WABC-AM 770 here in New York. Although Batchelor is a conservative commentator and I am a liberal, I like his show and find it very compelling because of the range of topics and guests (which includes liberals like Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the editor of the Nation magazine.)

In a 2006 New York Times article titled "He Takes the Shout Out of Talk Radio" that is linked to his Wikipedia page, it was pointed out by the author, Anahad O'Connor, that Batchelor "reads up to five books a week." I would love to learn his secret to reading that many books in such a short time while maintaining a busy schedule. I'm reading several books at once but it takes me forever to complete them. Maybe he's taken a special speed reading program that has helped him read twenty books a month. If he has, I'd like to know what it is and subscribe to it.

Is Radio Drama (In The United States) Dead?

I recently received from HarperCollins a review copy of a paperback psychological thriller called The House on the Cliff by Charlotte Williams, a British author. The one thing that struck me was her back page bio which noted that Williams "works in radio drama, writing original plays and adaptations."

I love radio drama.It has for a long time been known as the "theatre of the mind" because it allows listeners to use their imaginations as they gather around their radios. Unfortunately, radio drama is a dying art in the United States. I hope some enterprising radio producer or broadcast station will make an attempt to revive it. The late radio producer Himan Brown in the 1970s tried to with the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre but failed. That was probably because the productions were too much of a throwback to radio as it was done in the 1930s and '40s rather than doing something innovative or experimental.