January 2011

The distinguished author and lecturer, and moderator of The People’s Platform and Invitation to Learning , recalls a terrifying experience for a tyro political analyst back when radio was young.

For those who are interested in the development of radio, I think this incident will be amusing. Once in the early days I was in the studio talking into the microphone. There was only one other person, the engineer, placed so that I could hear anything he said. Things were extremely primitive; it was in an old hotel. Somebody came in and said to the engineer, “Bill, do you know that you’ve forgotten about your car? You know, the last time you parked it down there, you got a ticket. You better move it.”

And Bill said, “Well, I’ve got this man on the air; I can’t go down there and move my car, it might take me quite a little while.”

Vice-president of the National Broadcasting Company, one of the founders and later president of the National Association of Broadcasters, William S. Hedges came into radio through journalism. As president of the Radio Pioneers in 1949–50, he helped Columbia launch the radio history project. He appears in this excerpt as a young reporter on the Chicago Daily News .

In January, 1922, I got into radio, and this is how it happened. I was called into Henry Justin Smith’s office one day and he tossed a radio section of the New York Globe to me and said, “Take a look at that.”

I said, “What for?”

He said, “Do you think we should have a section like that?”

I smelled trouble and so I said, “No.”

He said, “Very well, now that you are on record, you are in charge of the radio activities of the Chicago Daily News . You’ve just been made director of the Daily News radio service.”

Milwaukee-born Hans von Kaltenborn, Spanish War veteran, Harvard graduate and former tutor to Vincent Astor, describes his earliest experiences with the instrument that was to make him famous. He was at the time radio beckoned a member of the staff of the Brooklyn Eagle. Later Kaltenborn organized the Radio Pioneers, the club which launched the project of recording radio history through the reminiscences of the men and women who had developed radio.

The first radio talk I ever made was in 1921. I was a director of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and one of its officers. There was a good deal of talk about this new invention which made it possible to hear a human voice at a distance. I had developed a crystal receiving set in my own home and had experienced that marvelous thrill for the first time—to be able to pull sounds down out of the air.

It was a great event in the upstate New York villages of the Finger Lakes country, during the late 1840’s, when George J. Mastin came to town with his “Unparalleled Exhibition of Oil Paintings.” First there appeared broadsides on barn doors and in tavern barrooms describing the fourteen huge paintings (8 x 10 feet, most of them) and promising a religious and historical lecture by Mr. Mastin explaining the paintings; there would also be clog dancing by the Erin Twin Brothers, comic songs and a demonstration of phrenological reading.

No artifacts of the early days of the Republic possesses, to many eyes, more antique charm than the decorated chinaware which graced the shelves and tables and lined the wainscottings of the newly prosperous Americans. Strangely enough, nearly all of them were fabricated abroad, in far places like China or in the potteries of our then recent enemies in England. Foreign merchants and manufacturers were quick to grasp the opportunity presented by a new market, beset with a craving for household luxuries but unable to satisfy it from local American sources. Little ceramic tableware was produced here, either in the colonial or in the early republican eras. And thus the foreign potters, many of them exquisite craftsmen, decorated their products with many a patriotic scene or personage they had never beheld with their own eyes. It was a skill well calculated to fill the need and excite the taste of the Americans, and the wares they made have been copied and avidly collected for over a century.

Freedom is a word that has had many meanings. In all its disguises it has been relentlessly pursued, but perhaps it has been longest hunted under its most artless aspect—the simple notion of individual liberty and unrestraint. Jean Jacques Rousseau reduced this ancient and naive dream of individual freedom to concise statement in 1750, mistakenly choosing primitive man, the noble savage dancing in the forest primeval, as his example; but a half century later a phenomenon began to emerge in western America that in many respects brought the dream remarkably to life. This was the free trapper, the Rocky Mountain man.

The mountain man first appeared with the Lewis and Clark report of beaver swarming in the streams of the western mountains. He lived a brief uproarious generation and vanished in the early 1840’s when the market for beaver dwindled and vanished, and the beaver nearly disappeared with it, almost trapped out.