Archives for December 20, 2004

I made it to Smalltown, U.S.A., in one piece. More in due course, but for the moment I’m taking it easy.

Later.

“Class presidents and football heroes, he had finally come to learn, required careful and suspicious watching. They were like the potted hyacinths and daffodils that he sometimes bought for Sylvia in midwinter–spectacular but they often yellowed around the edges once you brought them home. The same was true with bright young men who had come along too fast. They were tired because of premature effort, or else overconfidence had made them arrogant. At best the cards were stacked against someone who made good too young. Willis could see now that he had once been in this same dubious category. He could no longer wonder, as he once had, that Mr. Beakney had made no effort to keep him. In fact Mr. Beakney must have been relieved to let him go–gray suit, trimmed hair, polished Oxfords, sharp mind and everything–because he had come along too fast for the age of twenty-nine.”

John P. Marquand, Sincerely, Willis Wayde

Veteran readers of this blog know that I’m a great fan of old-time radio, and I like nothing better than to spend an otherwise uneventful morning leafing through some detail-packed book whose subject is the shows of the Thirties and Forties in which my parents delighted. Today I’ve been amusing myself with Gerald Nachman’s Raised on Radio, which bears the extensively informative subtitle “In Quest of The Lone Ranger, Jack Benny, Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Shadow, Mary Noble, The Great Gildersleeve, Fibber McGee and Molly, Bill Stern, Our Miss Brooks, Henry Aldrich, The Quiz Kids, Mr. First Nighter, Fred Allen, Vic and Sade, Jack Armstrong, Arthur Godfrey, Bob and Ray, The Barbour Family, Henry Morgan, Our Gal Sunday, Joe Friday, and Other Lost Heroes from Radio’s Heyday.” (If none of these names rings a bell, go here and start nosing around. You can listen for free to one show from each series.)

I just ran across the following paragraph, which is so evocative that I wanted to share it with you. It describes the on-air efforts of radio horrormaster Arch Oboler, best known for the series Lights Out:

Oboler was a speedy writer who, at his own dinner parties, would excuse himself at 11 P.M. and return at 1 A.M. with a finished script. He often got ideas from listening to sound-effects records, and took special delight in devising grotesque effects. His scare tactics included the sound of a man frying in the electric chair (sizzling bacon), bones being snapped (spareribs or Life Savers crushed between teeth), heads being severed (chopped cabbages), a knife slicing through a man’s body (a slab of pork cut in two), and, most grisly of all, somebody eating human flesh (wet noodles squished with a bathroom plunger). Oboler cooked up a delicious pantryful of terror. The series’ most celebrated audio effect–a man being turned inside out–was achieved by turning a watery rubber glove inside out to the accompaniment of crushed berry baskets, to simulate broken bones.

Eeuuww! Foley “artists” be damned: that was the golden age of sound effects.