History of U.S. Television--A Personal Reminscence

women who had devised the radio medium from scratch barely a generation earlier.

Only with the development of independent cable television entities, largely freed of FCC regulation, and the introduction of satellite receivers on a large-scale and even a consumer basis, did television begin to emerge as a new medium of its own, not the visual mirror image of old radio.

So great was the power of radio entertainment at its zenith in the United States during the depression years of the 1930s, that the nation's activities came to a virtual standstill every weekday evening at seven o'clock for fifteen minutes with Amos 'n' Andy. Even the movie theaters-those havens of escape from the numbing experience of everyday economic realities-had to knuckle under to the magic spell of these outrageous imaginary caricatures of Negro life in America at that time. If a theater owner expected any one to show up at his box office in the vicinity of the seven o'clock PM hour-New York time-he had better reckon with the awesome competition from the Mystic Knights of the Sea, the comic heroes' mythical lodge hall in Harlem. Practically every movie house in the land closed its proscenium curtains and played that treacly theme song "The Perfect Song" on its mighty Wurlitzer Organ, while the unctuous voice of NBC's Will Hayes intoned over the Vitaphone sound system that we would all together join our beloved and beleaguered friends at the office of the Fresh Air Taxicab Company.

Andrew H. Brown-"I'se de Pres-i-dent!"-and Amos Jones, Andy's hardworking but harder-worrying partner, were the main characters, along with "The Kingfish," George Stevens, Andy's demanding but always silent lady friend Madame Queen, Amos's wife Ruby, likewise never heard from, and timorous Brother Crawford, whose wife was always "very unhappy," kept the entire nation in thrall for a decade.

No matter that all these characters and their daily antics were the spontaneous ad lib creations off-the-tops-of-the-heads of a couple of white former actors named Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden. To all America they were really Amos 'n' Andy. Amos 'n' Andy really lived; and poor, broke America laughed till it cried. They were simply a phenomenon without parallel before or since.

Of course, radio did have its serious side, too. Early news commentators, from Floyd Gibbons and Boake Carter to Lowell Thomas and H.V. Kaltenborn, did their level best to keep the American public abreast of the cataclysmic events that were unfolding in Europe throughout the decade of the nineteen-thirties. Indeed, William K. Shirer lived through the entire birth of the Nazi Thousand Year Reich in Berlin, and told every American who cared to listen what was coming.

But there were very few Americans who cared to listen. They were far more concerned with Amos 'n' Andy, Fibber Magee and Molly, and Bing Crosby, to let their radio escape machine get them interested in another miserable European war. After all, didn't we just go through that "war to end all wars" exercise less than twenty years ago?

When the war really did come to Americans, to the disbelief of three-quarters of the population, it was to their radios that they turned first to find out what was really happening.

Edward R. Murrow's This Is London Calling, during the blitzes of 1940 and 1941, was pretty thrilling stuff. You could hear the bombs going off and people dying. You could hear the air raid sirens and the ambulance klaxons. Although it was real, somehow it was not really real until that day in December 1941, when President Roosevelt intoned those words:

"Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, is a day which shall live in infamy!"