Old Time Radio: The Way It Wasn’t

I’m a huge fan of Old Time Radio. With all the political news going on, it’s been a nice way to relax. I have two old time radio podcasts and am working on a third that will be even better.

Anyway, I was curious if there was old time radio news. I did a Google News Search. And yes, there was Old Time Radio news, but one item had a twist. A resident of Brookline, Mass. gave a collection of 4,000 original Old Time Radio Recordings to Boston University.  I’m not talking about the ubiquitous public domain MP3s that are available on dozens of Internet sites but the genuine recordings.  As could be expected, the collector, Van Christo was an exuberant fan of the medium.

However, the author of the piece, Mr. Richard Griffin couldn’t quite leave it alone, but rather decided to take a swipe at old time radio in totem.

As a fervent listener in my boyhood, I share this appreciation of old-time radio. However, my nostalgic feelings are mixed with thanks for a maturity that makes many of the programs seem naive.

American adults who ate up the old programs were products of a simpler time in our history. They lived in an era when people were willing to accept unsophisticated shows that today would seem lacking in credibility.

So Old Time Radio programs only thrived because people back then were rubes. Today, of course, we have gone through such a cultural evolution and instead of such low brow unbelievable tripe as Sherlock Holmes and Dragnet, we can now enjoy such high marks of more recent TV shows and movies such as Howard the Duck, Big Brother, Maury Povich, Thre Ninjas Knuckle Up, Dumb and Dumber, and Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place.

Of course, it could be fairly pointed out that I cherry picked movies and TV shows and ignored such fine films as Braveheart.  But this is exactly what Griffin procedes to do:

Would we really be scared nowadays by the Shadow? Would we laugh at the cornball humor of Senator Claghorn?

Mr. Griffin admitted earlier in the piece to being afraid of the Shadow as a child.  However, the point wasn’t for the listener to be afraid of the Shadow, but for the bad guys to be afraid. If as a young boy, Mr. Griffin was afraid of the Shadow it’d be the equivalent of being afraid of Batman. 

Of course, it was different for children. The old-time radio shows really did feed their imaginations, almost always with wholesome material. I do not regret having listened to the classic shows of my growing-up years.

But, still, I cannot imagine the same fare feeding my imagination now. I would still enjoy the galloping William Tell overture that introduced the Lone Ranger, but how could I thrill to this character’s simple-minded conversation with the faithful Tonto?

And would contemporary women relish “The Romance of Helen Trent” with its promise of love for females over age 35? Or would either gender identify with the moralistic crime fighters in programs like Gangbusters?

The old radio shows often relied upon ethnic descriptions that would embarrass us today. The great Sunday-evening comedians – Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Fred Allen – relied on stereotypes that today’s audiences would find unacceptable.

In the midst of this, there’s a nugget of truth about what Mr. Griffin said. Old Time Radio was a product of its time.  Adventures of Superman in its early days was very flawed on this count. It had some cringeworthy moments with ethnic stereotypes present. It didn’t help that Mutual didn’t use any actual ethnic actors, just White guys who couldn’t do a believable foreign accent if their life depended on it. There were even characters referred to as “half breeds.”  

The way you enjoy something old that has some politically incorrect things is to acknowledge what’s problematic but to enjoy the show. How do people like Griffin enjoy anything from the past?

How can you enjoy Shakespeare knowing the anti-semetic undertones of the Merchant of Venice?  How can one find anything positive in the character of FDR after he interred 100,000 Japanese Americans? How can one like the Founding Fathers knowing many held slaves?

And could any good American admire the racist who said, “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people”?

Of course, we wouldn’t tolerate such a bigot, we would not venerate or praise him. Who was the bigot who made that offensive statement so we can know what name we should blot from any memorial that mentions him?

Abraham Lincoln.   

The danger in making ourselves the judge of our ancestors is that we cut ourselves off not only from the bad things they did, but the good.

For example, while Superman in its early days had some racial descriptions that would make anyone with commonsense blush,  in 1946, Superman took on the Ku Klux Klan and played a key role in their demise.  Before Jack Webb redefined the police drama in Dragnet, he took on racism in One Out of Seven. (listen to Webb take down racist Senator Theodore Bilbo.) 

In addition, while its true that Allen, Benny, and Cantor featured some racial stereotypes, it is not fair to say they “relied” on it as if they were merely 1950s White versions of Chris Rock. 

And in some cases, it’s also unkind. On Cantor’s Wikipedia entry, this anecdote is recounted:

In the 1950s, he was one of the alternating hosts of the television show The Colgate Comedy Hour, in which he would introduce variety acts and play comic characters like “Maxie the Taxi.” However, the show landed Cantor in an unlikely controversy when a young Sammy Davis, Jr. appeared as a guest performer. Cantor embraced Davis and mopped Davis’s brow with his handkerchief after his performance. Worried sponsors led NBC to threaten cancellation of the show; Cantor’s response was to book Davis for two more weeks.

Yeah, that Eddie Cantor was some racist. Griffin concludes his piece by saying:

It was not television alone that killed off the radio programs of my youth. So did World War II, and the GI Bill that followed it. The veterans who took advantage of the new educational opportunities helped transform America. And the prosperity that followed would also change national tastes.

The shows that entertained us so memorably at an earlier stage would no longer fit our new post-war society. Now we were ready for something different.

To make this statement requires a selective grasp of the facts.  Many radio shows went on to be TV hits including Dragnet, Gun Smoke, and even a man he singled out for criticism, Jack Benny had a sixteen year run on television.

As to the idea that somehow more education leads people to not be fans of Old Time Radio, I took a Survey of listeners to the Old Time Dragnet Show and of my listeners, 56% were college graduates, with 21% holding graduate degrees, and 41% earning more than $100,000 a year. My listeners come not only from the United States, but around the world. In the past week, I’ve had people download the show from China, France, South Africa, Australia, and Pakistan. Old Time Radio is hardly the domain of uneducated rubes.

I think, perhaps Mr. Griffin hasn’t heard the best old time radio available. There are some shows that truly only a mother (or a hard core old time radio fan) would love, but then there are other shows that are better than the best modern entertainment has to offer. No, the shows aren’t perfect. They have one flaw. They were made by human beings, who are too often merely products of their time. We all are that way, and I’m reminded of the scripture that with what judgment we judge we shall be judged. If we condemn past by the standards of the present. Then we will be condemned for what we do in the present, by the standards of the Future.