04 November 2019

War of the Worlds


'War of the Worlds'
by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune
Monday, November 4th, 2019

The sun had set behind the Jacksonville hills. Sunday was almost over, and the boy had not finished his homework. If only he could listen to Charlie McCarthy on the radio.

Charlie McCarthy

With a click, the Crosley radio in the living room corner began to hum. An announcer’s voice faded in. “The makers of Chase and Sanborn Coffee bring you Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.”

The boy, pencil in hand, stretched out on the carpet and began his homework. But then — a woman began to sing. Time to turn to something else until Charlie came back.
As his mother entered the room, she heard what sounded like a news reporter.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed. ... Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out.”
Mother turned up the volume.
Radio Cast, War of the Worlds, October 1938
Snake-like creatures were coming out of some sort of cylinder and, with streaming jets of flame, burning barns, cars, and people. 
A government official who sounded like President Roosevelt confirmed that this was an invading army. Was this the long anticipated attack of the Nazis?
A neighbor woman was banging on the door. “They’re wiping out the East Coast!” she screamed. “We’re next!”
The mother called the Mail Tribune. A reporter assured her that the newswires were quiet and nothing was happening.
She turned back to the radio, where a reporter was pleading, “Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone?”
There was a pause and then another announcer. “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of 
“The War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells.
 

The next day, Oct. 31, 1938, newspapers laughed at those “elite easterners” who had exposed their ignorance.”
Mail Tribune humorist Arthur Perry poked fun at “those hometown half-baked morons” and reported that “everybody scared by that radio broadcast on Sunday is now back from the hills and out from under the barn.”
The Ashland Tidings reported that City Attorney Frank Van Dyke had called the police station three times, worried that the Granite City was in danger.
Not everyone thought the Sunday evening panic
 was humorous. 

In a long Mail Tribune editorial, Editor Robert Ruhl defended hysterical radio listeners, reminding smug readers, “It is always so easy to be wise AFTER the event. BUT do you remember that extraordinary broadcast of the burning
Zeppelin that graphic, breath-taking eye-witness account?”
The Hindenburg Zeppelin had crashed only a year and a half before, but the horrified reporter’s voice was still fresh in everyone’s memory. “Oh, the humanity!”
The Tidings called the panic “making a Mount Ashland out of a mole hill.”
In an unscripted epilogue given the night of the broadcast, 23-year-old Orson Welles had apologized. “We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed CBS. You will be
relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business.”
Could Martians really invade the Earth? Reporters sought assurance from science.
“It is a remote possibility,” said University of Oregon astronomer Hugh Pruett. “But don’t be alarmed. Mars is so far away it would take hundreds of years for a space ship to travel that far.”
Years in a spaceship, perhaps, but what if they traveled on imagination?
Writer Bill Miller is the author of “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com.

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