Corey's Ramblings: January 2018

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Your World Adventure Awaits On Old Time Radio: Visiting India with Ports of Call (1936)

For the fourth entry in my series of Old Time Radio programs that feature adventure, lets head back to 1936 and get on a grand voyage to exotic ports of call. And the program is... Ports of Call. This is a cool series that I first learned about only last year as I wanted to see how the world was depicted on Old Time Radio during the 30s, 40s, and 50s. This is a great way to keep our voyage going.

Visit to the Mahatma Gandhi Ashram at Sabarmati
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India (November 19, 2017)
Here are all my pictures from that day at the Ashram

My second entry is this series featured World Adventurer's Club (1932), a 15 minute program from a company called Transco (or Transcription Company of America). Another program they are responsible for is what we are featuring today. Ports of Call was a series of transcribed 30 minute programs produced in 1935 or 1936 that took the listener to all the corners of the globe. From the Digital Deli article:

Ports of Call was a Transco-produced 30-minute 'musical travelogue' of sorts. Often billed in the newspaper listings of California as either 'musical' or 'drama', the fifty-two Ports of Call programs were more a combination of travelogue, geography lesson, World Music, and docudrama.

The program was likely first aired in California and ran periodically through 1937. Also from that article on the Digital Deli: "The subject forty-three countries we can currently account for represented every predominant ethnicity, language and region of the modern world of the era. The pure escapism that the series provided, as well as an undoubted element of nostalgia for the various ethnicities that comprised the great melting pot of our post-Depression nation, were an equally compelling attraction for West Coast listeners."

The episode that I want to feature today was the voyage to India. The program takes you on a dramatized voyage into the history of India with an interesting twist. I was fortunate to visit India this November, so the country is often on my mind. This program provides a very Western-focused approach to the history, starting with the British East India Company and its role in governing the colony of India. We also learn about the building of the Taj Mahal and the 1756 episode that would be known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. But what I am most interested in is the portrait and treatment of Mahatma Gandhi and his rise to prominence in 1920.

In my travels to India, I visited Ahmedabad and was able to visit the Ashram where he lived and where his movement that lead to Indian independence in the 1920s. That brings us back to this program. From the world view of 1936, his work was a failure. Mahatma Gandhi was not able to deliver on his promise of independence that lead him to fame in the teens and 20s However, it did lead him to prison. That is where this story left him. While no program can know the future, it is very interesting to see how he was identified as one of the figures they wanted to showcase and how much more important he was to become.. Move forward Learn more about Gandhi from the Wikipedia.

There are lots of country in this excellent series and I will revisit this again. I hope you enjoy these episodes.

India from Ports of Call

Here are some links to Ports of Call:

Your World Adventure Awaits On Old Time Radio

Corey's Old Time Radio Links

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Your World Adventure Awaits On Old Time Radio: Traveling to Africa in The Heart of Darkness on Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre (1938)

For the third entry in my series of Old Time Radio programs that feature adventure, lets head back to 1938. Well, maybe we should phrase this differently - let's head back to 10th Grade. For it was in 10th Grade English that I first read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This is one of the greatest novellas of all time and served as the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's brilliant 1979 film Apocalypse Now. The story takes into the heart of Africa and into the heart of men as we travel in search of the mysterious Mr. Kurtz. And while Coppola is one of the most well known directors of all time, maybe one of the very best directors is someone who brought this story to radio back in 1938. And that director...must be Orson Welles.

Well...its Dark! Harvest Moon Over Dana Point (California) - October 26, 2015

Let's go to Africa with the Mercury Theatre On The Air - the brilliant program from Orson Welles. It was Welles' success on the New York stage of the same name that brought him to radio. After a tryout with Mutual Network, Welles moved his Mercury Theatre On The Air to the CBS Radio Network, where he became well known for excellent adaptations of some of the world's finest literature. In the weeks before the Mercury Theatre broadcast their version of the Heart of Darkness, they featured stories such as The Count of Monte Cristo, Thirty-Nine Steps, A Tale of Two Cities, among others. But maybe more interesting is the very week before this broadcast, Welles and his acting troupe put on a performance that may be the most famous one that ever went out over the air. That of course was the October 30, 1938 broadcast of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. So skip ahead one week - on November 6th, 1938 - it was like nothing ever happened.

On the fifth week of this program series (August 8th, 1938), instead of presenting a single story on their hour long program, they opted for three short stories. Citing the success and popularity of that experiment, they decided to do it again. The two stories were Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and excerpts from Clarence Day's Life With Father. Those two stories could not seem more different. And since we are focusing on adventure - we probably just need to talk about Heart of Darkness. Welles opens up the broadcast with a great telling of a traumatic event in the life of the young author (which I am not completely sure was not elaborated by Welles for dramatic effect). The brilliant story that was published in 1899 while the author was in his 40s needs no elaboration. Charles Marlow is the narrator of the story and he tells of his adventures traveling up the Congo River into the heart of Africa. The focus of his story was his search for an ivory trader by the name of Mr. Kurtz. Besides being tremendously successful as an ivory trader, he is very mysterious. Maybe mad. The story follows Marlow as his searches for Kurtz on behalf of his company.

This great production takes up more than half of the episode and features Ray Collins as Marlow. Welles plays the mysterious and allusive Mr. Kurtz. Other members of the acting company that day include Alfred Shirley, Alice Frost, Anna Stafford, Arthur Anderson, Dan Seymour, Edgar Barrier, Frank Readick, George Coulouris, Mary Wickes, Mildred Natwick, and William Alland.

This is a great entry that will hopefully take you on an adventure far beyond the walls of your home - but without the fear that space aliens from a different world are on their way. I hope you enjoy this.

Mercury Theatre On The Air (November 6, 1938)

Read the Heart of Darkness - from Project Gutenberg

Here are some links to Mercury Theatre On The Air:

Your World Adventure Awaits On Old Time Radio

Corey's Old Time Radio Links

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Your World Adventure Awaits On Old Time Radio: Visit to the Frozen North from World Adventurer's Club (1932)

It is cold today in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Very cold. Then again, it snowed yesterday in Charleston, South Carolina - so things are bad all over. So with that - I was thinking that we would take an adventure somewhere where it is cold...very cold. This is the second entry in my series of Old Time Radio programs that feature adventure - especially world travel.

206/365/3493 (January 3, 2018) - Squirrels in Ann Arbor on a Cold and Snowy Winter's Day at the University of Michigan (January 3, 2018)

Cold Squirrel at the University of Michigan - January 3rd, 2018

We have jumped into the Netflix series The Crown that chronicles the life of Queen Elizabeth II (and it is great). During the second season, Prince Phillip is on a world travels and his personal secretary shares letters of their adventures with a club where they are read aloud. That conjures up nicely what I think these types of clubs might have been like - both real and imagined. So during the height of the Great Depression, a radio program was devised to take the listener far from their world and into one of pure adventure. In 1932, a series of transcribed (or recorded) programs from a company called Transco were created under the name the World Adventurer's Club. These brief 15 minute programs enabled the listener to visit far off lands and live through thrilling adventures of bravery and heroism. No doubt they were enhanced on radio as the were likely in real life.

From the Digital Deli article, they have some nice things to say about the genre and time:

Sitting atop the pecking order of world adventurers, the various Adventurers Clubs, Explorers Clubs, and Geographic Societies of England, Germany, France, the Orient, and America presided over their respective nations' most intrepid and herioc adventurers. Most of the organized clubs went to great lengths to compete for the first reports of these world adventurers within days or weeks of completing their independent trimphs of derring-do. Indeed, several of those clubs funded some of the more challenging adventures--and adventurers--of the era. Fiction novels were famous for citing the underwriting of one or more Adventurers Clubs as the framework behind novels such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around The World in Eighty Days, and Journey to The Center of The Earth.

The organized adventurers' clubs, in addition to underwriting adventures of their own, provided venues throughout the world for vetting--and exploiting--the more important accomplishments and discoveries of their era.

The stories all tend to start the same way. First with a musical opening (sometimes with a male chorus contributing a song), and then an opening. This is how the opening for today's episode started:

And now we take you in fancy to one of the most famous institutions of its kind...the World Adventurer's Club.

Here we meet men who have braved every danger the world has to offer. Men who have battled the polar seas and the tropical jungle. It is the custom of this club to hold a series of informal meetings in which one member is called upon to tell the most thrilling experience of his career. And now, the World Adventurer's Club extends a cordial invitation to you to draw up your chair and hear a story of the Royal road to adventure.

The story featured today is appropriate for the weather. The president of the club selects Captain Alexander Hale to share his story about adventure in the Arctic Circle. Hale was on a relief mission near the North Pole in search for another explorer who was given up for lost in a previous expedition. The difficulty was compounded when they found themselves in the middle of a storm. And if things could not get worse, there were polar bears - 20 of them. But in the process of fleeing the bears, they discovered the ship of the ill-fated Morton expedition. Such was the life of the adventurer.

These short programs are enjoyable and a perfect match for this series. I hope you all stay warm and enjoy this particular adventure.

World Adventurer's Club Program #5 - The Frozen North

Here are some links to World Adventurer's Club:

Your World Adventure Awaits On Old Time Radio

Corey's Old Time Radio Links

Monday, January 1, 2018

Your World Adventure Awaits On Old Time Radio: A Passenger to Bali from Escape (1950)

I had the great opportunity to travel a great deal over the past two years and it has given me the adventurer-bug for sure. I have little planned for 2018 - but I hope that I can fix that on the sooner side. That all being said, this year, I want to highlight a series of Old Time Radio programs that feature adventure - especially world travel. Hopefully this will be lots of fun to create and to listen to. And for my first adventure - I thought I would ask three simple questions:

Tired of the everyday routine?

Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure?

Want to get away from it all?

With that, I offer you ESCAPE! This was one of the most famous shows on the CBS Radio Network. It ran from 1947 to 1954 and, along with Suspense, Gunsmoke and various programs led by Norman Corwin (that will be covered later in this series), cemented the place for CBS to be at the Pantheon of the Golden Age of Radio. Escape featured many adapted versions of short stories that placed the characters in difficult, if not impossible adventures.

Empress of the Seas - In Port at Cozumel (October 14, 2017)

As part of our travels this past year, we took a cruise of the Caribbean including stops in Key West, Cuba and Cozumel. Our waiter on the Royal Caribbean's Empress of the Seas was named Indra - or IN (as he liked to say). He was from Bali and every evening when I ordered fish, he added that it was freshly arrived from Bali. That was not likely the case, but it is in Bali that my adventures start for this series. (BTW - We had a great cruise)!

In 1936, Ellis St. Joseph wrote a play called "A Passenger to Bali." St. Joseph was a well known and respected writer who would later make a name for himself on television. In 1938, Orson Welles's Mercury Theater produced a one hour version of the program which I might feature down the road (here is the broadcast from November 13, 1938 starring Welles). I just found out that the play had a very brief life on Broadway as well - only playing four shows in 1940 (here is the playbill). It opened on March 14th and closed on March 16th. It seems that they not have to heed Caesar's warning to beware the ides of March - but every other day!

The version I am showcasing today for my first adventure comes from Escape and was broadcast on December 10th, 1950. As the radio play opens, we find ourselves in Shanghai on a a bustling dock as the freighter Roundabout is seeking to leave for its next cargo. Captain English (played by the great John Dehner) is busy barking orders to get everything ready for their voyage. They are approached unexpectedly by Rev. Mr. Walkes (played by Lou Merrill). The Reverend understands they are headed to Bali and presents his passport and offers twice as much as should be expected for the trip to Bali. Captain English has little choice but to accept - a decision he would come to regret. On the voyage to Bali, a young stowaway - who followed the Reverend onto the ship - is met with an untimely demise. Captain English realizes that his passenger is not at all a man of God. As they approached Bali, they were informed by the customs officer that they would not be allowed to let their passenger leave the ship. He started as their passenger, but he became their burden. So it is like having family for the holidays - only 350x worse.

The production was produced and directed by Norman Macdonnell and featuring Lou Krugman, Michael Ann Barrett, Wilms Herbert, and Bruce Payne. I hope if you have travels planned for this new year of 2018, that yours go more smoothly! And I hope you enjoy this new series of Old Time Radio programs.

A Passenger To Bali (Escape - December 10, 1950)

Here are some links to Escape:

Your World Adventure Awaits On Old Time Radio

A Passenger to Bali from Escape (1950)

Corey's Old Time Radio Links