We now return you to the music of Ramon Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel situated in downtown New York.
What were you doing 76 years ago today? You certainly weren’t playing Words With Friends on your Smartphone, were you? No Siree Bobby! Nor were you using a computer or watching a television. You might have been gathered around your living room radio where you tuned in for the weekly broadcast of The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio show. If you had, you would have heard a 23 year old Orson Welles and company doing a dramatic re-enactment of portions of H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds.” The clever part of their interoperation of the material was creating news bulletins that would interrupt regular programing to report on an alien invasion of Earth in the Eastern part of the United States. Well you know how this story goes….people thought the faux news reports were real. The next day there was much outrage due to the broadcast. I must say, I can see why. With a definite sense of anxiety in their voices, the radio players dramatically described the events as they unfolded, “Ladies and Gentlemen this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed” and “Highways to the north, south and west are clogged with frantic human traffic.” Okay, those sentences seem pretty benign. Sure. But then, the program turns up the heat:
“Ladies and gentleman I have just been handed a message that came in from Grover’s Mill by telephone from, just one moment please: At least 40 people including 6 state troopers lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover’s Mill; there bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition.” Now, I am always up for a good hoax or prank, but imagine hearing about casualties caused by an other-worldly force in a neighboring town. What would you do? I suppose I would take to Social Media to see if others were hearing the same news I was. Wait, It’s 1938! Sweet Baby Jesus, Panic and terror ensue. Welles tried to get the last laugh at the end of the program by closing with this: “Remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight; that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is inhabitant of the pumpkin patch and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian, it’s Halloween.” Unfortunately, it was a real nightmare for Welles, The Mercury Theatre on the Air personnel and CBS executives. People simply had not known that it was a fictitious, dramatic radio play. Talk about getting tricked, suckers.
To hear this original radio broadcast 76 years later to the day that it aired was a real treat on All Hallow’s Eve Eve. LOL. Treat–get it? Eve Eve? Ha Ha Ha. I crack myself up.
365, Album of the Day 2014 