• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: When radio wasn’t

October 1, 2012 by Terry Teachout

SUSPENSE%20%282%29.jpgI’ve been so preoccupied with Satchmo at the Waldorf that I haven’t been paying nearly enough attention to this blog. I meant, for instance, to write a lengthy posting about something important that happened fifty years ago yesterday and is now almost entirely forgotten. Alas, I didn’t have time to do it justice, so merely mentioning it today will have to suffice: CBS pulled the plug on the last two surviving network radio dramas, Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, on September 30, 1962.

Both series had had long and successful runs–Suspense made its debut in 1942, Johnny Dollar in 1949–but the lights started to go out on old-time radio drama as early as 1948, the year when TV finally got going in earnest. The surprising thing, truth to tell, is that it lasted as long as it did, all the way into the Age of Camelot.

radio-show-1.jpgThe ranks of those who remember what golden-age radio meant to those who grew up with it are shrinking by the hour. I’m far too young to qualify, of course, but I’ve always been fascinated by what is now called “old-time radio,” and in 1996 I wrote a column for the now-defunct magazine Civilization in which I tried to explain how central it had been to American life in the first half of the twentieth century:

Once upon a time there was radio, and it was beloved. Nobody loves TV: we take it for granted, like air or water. Radio was different. America is a big country, so big that newspapers and express trains did little to shrink it, and for most of its long history it was intensely provincial, simply by virtue of its vastness. Unless you were rich enough to travel, you knew only your town and the places nearby; the rest you read about in books, or visited once in a blue moon. But then radio came along, and all at once Americans could hear each other, no matter where they lived. You twisted a knob on the Atwater Kent in the living room in Dubuque or Diehlstadt, and suddenly you could hear Fred Allen cracking bone-dry jokes in a studio in Manhattan–or Ed Murrow standing on a London rooftop, listening to the German bombers roar through the night sky. And all of it was live: it happened and you heard it, just like that.

Indeed you did–but a time eventually came when ordinary people started to take the miracle for granted. In due course it was superseded by yet another, gaudier miracle, and that was that.

I wonder who (if anybody) was listening to the CBS Radio Network on the night of September 30, 1962. A couple of months ago I wrote a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal in which I argued that 1962 was the year in which the world of postmodernity first started to take recognizable shape. I cited the premiere of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as an example of how America was in the process of breaking with what I called “the earnest, self-confident tone of postwar culture.” How amazing, then, to think that Virginia Woolf opened on Broadway just thirteen days after Suspense and Johnny Dollar breathed their last. Sometimes–maybe most of the time–nothing much happens when worlds collide.

SUSPENSE%20%281%29.jpgForgive me for quoting myself yet again, but I wrote a sentence in the introduction to the Teachout Reader that strikes me as worth recalling in this connection: “I feel the temptation to live in the past, but one can truly live only in the moment, and the last thing I want to do is end up like the pathetic narrator of ‘Hey Nineteen,’ the Steely Dan song about a no-longer-young baby boomer who tries to tell his teenaged girlfriend about Aretha Franklin but discovers that ‘she don’t remember/The Queen of Soul,’ subsequently realizing that ‘we got nothing in common/No, we can’t talk at all.'”

I still feel that way, but it doesn’t stop me from listening to old episodes of Dragnet or Gunsmoke (both of which were better on radio than on TV) and wishing that I could turn back the clock to a time I never knew. The English language needs a word whose definition would be “nostalgia for that which one has not experienced.” That’s how I feel about the lost world of old-time radio. No, I wouldn’t want to live there, but I have a feeling that it would be a very, very nice place to visit.

* * *

To listen to the final episode of Suspense, go here.

To listen to the final episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, go here.

Jeff Kallman takes note of the golden anniversary of the end of network radio drama.

A scene from Woody Allen’s Radio Days:

Filed Under: main

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

October 2012
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Sep   Nov »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in