1949 And Today’s New-Media Revolution
Readers know my wistful feelings about the plight of newspapers, given the sea-change in our world due to technology. While I am current with the latest ways to use technology to enhance life, and love the limitless ways it entertains, such as with mp3 players and blogs, I am also a product of another time. I still play phonograph albums, and enjoy scanning the AM radio dial searching for hard to hear stations. I readily admit to having nostalgic feelings for things that I really do not consider a part of our past, since I still use them. (After all how can they be old-fashioned and out of date if they were a part of my childhood….because it they are old…..then does that make me……can’t/will not finish that statement.)
All that comes to mind after reading a piece from this weekend’s newspaper, about 1949 and the nation’s transition from radio to television.
But on Jan. 11 of that year, television in America turned a technological corner when eight stations on the East Coast and seven Midwestern stations were linked via the first long-distance coaxial cable. All at once it was possible for a significant slice of the American public to watch network TV programs live. Within a matter of weeks, Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater,” previously known only to those who lived within range of one of NBC’s nine East Coast affiliates, was being viewed in 24 cities by an audience of almost 4.5 million. In May, Time magazine put Berle on its cover: “As the clock nears 8 along the Eastern Seaboard on Tuesday night, a strange new phenomenon takes place in U.S. urban life. Business falls off in many a nightclub, theater-ticket sales are light, neighborhood movie audiences thin. Some late-hour shopkeepers post signs and close up for the night. . . . On big-city bar rails along the coast and in the Midwest, there is hardly room for another foot.”
“Maybe we old people can’t adapt successfully to video,” said Jim Jordan, the star of “Fibber McGee and Molly.” Most of them, including Jordan, couldn’t, while those who could jumped ship as fast as they could. So did their fans: Only 786,000 American households tuned into a radio show on any given night in 1950. Jack Benny and Bob Hope, the two most popular radio comedians, made their TV debuts that year. Twelve years later, CBS’s “Suspense” and “Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar,” the last nighttime radio drama series, were canceled. Network radio was dead.
Fred Allen, one of the many radio greats who was unable to establish himself on TV, groused about his failure in “Treadmill to Oblivion,” his 1954 autobiography. Like today’s old-time radio buffs, he argued that radio was superior to TV because the listener “had to use his imagination. . . . When television belatedly found its way into the home, after stopping off too long at the tavern, the advertisers knew they had a more potent force available for their selling purposes. Radio was abandoned like the bones at a barbecue.” But Allen was gnawing on sour grapes. The truth is that network TV was neither intrinsically better nor worse than network radio. It was simply different—in a way that ordinary Americans preferred.
