Swing, Music, Swing

July 23, 2013September 19, 20144 Comments

Before hip hop, before rock ‘n’ roll even, there was a kind of music that worried parents, threatened American values, and was predicted to bring down Western culture as we know it. It was called swing.

Fast-paced, with its roots firmly embedded in jazz, and rising to popularity out of the African American music scene, swing was all the rage, not only in the 1930s but the ’40s, too. Swing music had its own stars, like Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman.

This audio with photos gives a fine sense of what swing was like:

Even cartoon star Betty Boop gets swingin’ with a new character named Sally Swing (I think Sally is voiced by actress Rose Marie):

However did we survive such decadence?

Coming up next: Dancing to swing music. The rage and the glory.

Wrong-Way Corrigan–Wacky or Wily?

July 16, 2013September 19, 2014

So the story goes, Douglas Corrigan set out for the west coast from New York’s Bennett Field but ended up in Ireland instead. Did this wild pilot have the world’s worst sense of direction, or was he pulling a fast one?

It’s July, 1938. Airplane mechanic Douglas Corrigan proposes a solo flight across the Atlantic in an airplane he basically dug out of a junkyard. Traversing the ocean is difficult, but nothing new; Charles Lindbergh already succeeded in crossing “the pond” back in ’27. But still, Corrigan’s jazzed about doing it for himself.

The aviation hotshots say no. His plane can’t possibly survive such a trip, which of course means Corrigan wouldn’t survive either. It’d be suicide! Only a fool would take such a chance.

What happens next is the stuff of laughter and legend. Instead of his original proposed eastbound flight, Corrigan files a flight plan from N.Y. To L.A., westward. Then, once he’s in the air he gets turned around, and the next time we hear from him, twenty-eight hours later, he’s landed in Ireland. What happened? Was he so thoroughly mixed up that he could fly for so long without noticing he had flown east instead of west? Was he such a dingbat that he didn’t notice the lack of Nebraska below the plane for the entire 28 hours?!

I bet you can guess what I think really happened. What’s your opinion?

Source: This Day in History

Carol Brendler is the author of Radio Girl, a historical novel for young adults, published by Holiday House in 2013.

Don’t Touch That Dial! Early Radios

July 9, 2013September 19, 20142 Comments

Q. When the first radio was invented, was there anything out there to listen to?

The first radio broadcast was just a guy playing a violin, singing and reading and it happened in 1906 in Massachusetts. I guess it’s considered a broadcast because it was a one-way communication (unlike the wireless telephone, which was two-way), but was anybody listening? Who had a receiver back then? Hardly anybody. (Some ships did, and they say some sailors caught the broadcast that evening. Woo.)

But real radio broadcasting, with stations and licenses and call letters and audiences listening at home–that didn’t really get going until after the Great War. Here’s more.

Radios became, like, the biggest thing since the invention of the bicycle back in the early 1920s when people finally started to take notice of this incredible new technology. Try and imagine how weird it must have been to hear a voice or live music coming into your parlor from somewhere far away–without wires! I mean, it must have seemed pretty freaky.

The first radios that actually were popular with the public (with the early adopters, in today’s parlance) were crystal sets.

A small crystal radio set.

Fashionable 1920s ladies pose as if listening to a fine Edison console.

Often homemade, crystal sets didn’t look much like radios as we think of them. There weren’t any speakers so you had to use earphones or these unwieldy horns to hear anything. After a while, someone figured out how to amplify the soundwaves and radios no longer needed earphones or horns which meant that the whole family could listen together from anywhere in the room.

Soon, manufacturers came to realize that people wanted their prized radio sets to be beautiful enough to display in their parlors, like a piece of furniture. That’s when radios got pretty.

This is very much like the one my grandma had in her sitting room. We weren't allowed to touch it.

This is very much like the one my grandma had in her sitting room. My dad thinks theirs was a Stewart-Warner brand. We kids weren’t allowed to touch it. It sat on the floor (a console radio, like the Maloneys’) and it was maybe four feet tall. I wish we still had it.

Here’s a handsome tabletop “cathedral” model, an Atwater-Kent from about 1931: