***When Radio Ruled The Air-Waves

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin

Josh Breslin always, when talking about his place in the sun, made a point to explain to whoever would listen (mainly me over a scotch, or seven) that he was a first generation child of the television age, although in recent years he said he had spent more time kicking and screaming about that fact than watching the damn thing. Of course I too am a first generation child of the television age, although I do not take that as a special emblem of some kind of wisdom about the world since virtually everybody who is now AARP-worthy, in the process of applying for Social Security benefits, or is dipping into some 401k retirement fund is in that same category. I don’t take my status as a child of television that is except, that is, when I perhaps had more scotch and got all rum brave in battling Josh’s foolishness. But here I will let the remark slide since I have the big picture to look at.

What got Josh on his high-horse most recently about his place in the television age sun was his purchase of a little compilation of Decca hits and standard tunes from the 1940s and early 1950s. He had bought the thing in a nostalgic fit as a valentine offering to the radio days of his parents’ youth, parents who came of musical age (and every other kind of age as well) during the Great Depression of the 1930s and who fought, or waited for those out on the front lines fighting, World War II. His relationship with his parents, his second generation parents, from up in Olde Saco , Maine was to say the least rocky (as was my relationship with mine except they were not second-generation but about fifth and of course did not live in Olde Saco but down by the shore in North Adamsville in Massachusetts) and before their respective passings was still strained (ditto mine) so I was surprised that he would pick up such a compilation, much less as some kind of posthumous valentine peace offering to the departed..

Those selections when he played them for me one time when we were driving to New York City got me to thinking that I was just old enough though to remember the strains of songs like the harmonic–heavy Mills Brothers Paper Dolls (a favorite of my mother’s) and The Glow Worm (not a favorite of anybody as far as I know although the harmony is still first-rate) that came wafting, via the local Adamsville radio station WJDA, through our big box living room radio in the early 1950s. One could hardly get away from it when my father had been drinking and was nostalgic for his Marine Corps times during World War II or my mother was weepy about something, about some lost thing that had escaped her grasp, her dreams, facing the hard reality of three growing boys and not enough to go around. It seemed they, or maybe the Andrews Sisters, be-bopping (be-bopping now, not then, you do not want to know what I called it then), on Rum And Coca-Cola or tagging along with Bing Crosby on Don’t Fence Me In were permanent residents of the airs-waves in the 1950s Markin household.

But see, I like Josh (hell, we met in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, yes, capitals, 1967 when rock, serious, mind-bending rock, was breaking out over the known world), am also an unapologetic child of Rock 'n' Roll but those above-mentioned tunes were the melodies that my mother and father came of age to and the stuff of their dreams during World War II and its aftermath. The rough and tumble of my parents raising a bunch of kids might have taken the edge off it but the dreams remained. In the end it is this musical backdrop, the backdrop behind the generation musical fights that roiled the Markin household in teen times, that hit a chord and made this compilation most memorable to me.

Just to say names like Dick Haymes (I think my mother had a “crush” on him at some point), Vaughn Monroe, The Inkspots (who, truth, I liked even then, even in my “high, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly days, especially on If I Didn’t Care and I’ll Get By-wow), and Louis Armstrong. Or songs like Blueberry Hill, You’ll Never Know, A- Tisket- A Tasket, You Always Hurt The One You Love and so gather in a goodly portion of the mid-20th century American Songbook. Other talents like Billie Holiday, The Weavers, and Rosemary Clooney and tunes like Lover Man (and a thousand and one Cole Porter Billie-sung songs), Fever, and As Time Goes By (from Dooley Wilson in Casablanca) came later through very different frames of reference. But the seed, no question, no question now, was planted then.

Let’s be clear, since Josh likes to make such a big deal about it, going back to that first paragraph mention of television - there something very different between the medium of the radio and the medium of the television. The radio allowed for an expansion of the imagination (and of fantasy) that the increasingly harsh realities of what was being portrayed on television did not allow one to get away with. The heart of World War II, and in its immediate aftermath, was time when one needed to be able to dream a little. The realities of the world at that time seemingly only allowed for nightmares. My feeling is that the songs contained in that compilation probably touched a lot of sentimental nerves for the World War II generation (that so-called ‘greatest generation’), including my growing-up Irish working- class families on the shores of North Adamsville. Nice work, Josh.