I’m doing this new thing on Twitter, starting the day’s incessant babble with a This Day in History. It is so useful when radio announcers do it, I figure why not bring it to the new format. It really sets the tone. Much like radio announcers.
I never did this day in history on the radio. It was dumb then, too. But, if you find the right things, pull the right threads and put things together just right …
And here were today’s things:
1991: Operation Desert Storm began
1961: Eisenhower warns of the military-industrial complex
1949: America’s first sitcom airs
Draw your own conclusions what these things mean. I’ve no idea.
Back then the talent did their own promotional spots. If you consider what she’s shilling you have to marvel at how things have changed.
Mrs. Goldberg seems to run the thing — she created the radio program prior to television, of course she’s the central figure. The dialog moves quickly, but the style would be lost on a contemporary audience. But dig this first exchange:
“A gangster killed a man in a telephone booth … ”
That’s just the beginning of the first sentence of the episode.
Alabama inaugurated its new governor and other elected officials today. There was a parade. There were clouds, but then a great clearing out by the sun just before Gov. Bentley address the crowd.
There were other speeches, and a flyover, and singing. There was also artillery. I watched it on television. The advisor of my master’s thesis was one of the studio analysts.
Our new governor, it seemed, had to wear an ID lanyard. That’s going to be my lasting impression, I’m afraid. If ever there was a man, and ever a day for a man to note require a brightly colored cloth necklace with a plastic sleeve containing information about his name and title, this would have been that day.
The new lieutenant governor is very excited. Kay Ivey has a perfectly shaped south Alabama accent. I always enjoyed interviewing her when she was the treasurer and I was still reporting. She had nice answers and delivered everything in her lovely tone. I thought she’d jump out of her shoes today.
The new state auditor could not be there for the ceremony. She was welcoming home her son. He’s an army captain who’s been deployed in Afghanistan. This isn’t a problem because her husband sits on the state Supreme Court. He swore her in later today. They have another son who’s a mechanical engineer at the huge steel plant in Mobile. That’s an interesting dinner table.
Spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening writing. Writing, rewriting, moving blocks, reshaping words of clay, lumping it together and rolling it between my fingers. Finally I made a lumpy little ashtray — or something — out of it. It’ll be around on Thursday, I think.
And that’s it. That’s enough, says my mild, persistent headache.
The quote? That’s Eisenhower. It doesn’t strike you so much as rhetoric as an old man who has seen a thing or two and who knows a thing or two. Fifty years ago tonight he said that. It was a Tuesday, and that was his last big speech before leaving office on Friday. You wonder if he went to bed the rest of the week, hoping we’d listened.
