Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

An old woman was sitting at a table at a big star-webbed carbon mike with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a crystal ball in front of her. An old man stood nearby holding a sheaf of papers in his hand.

  “ . . . and a listener writes ‘Dear Madame Sosostris—’ ”

  Carmody went to the intercom and pushed down the button. He held up his badge. “United States Government, Federal Radio Agency, Radio Police!” he said.

  They both looked up.

  “Cheese it, Pa! The Feds!” said the woman, throwing off her shawl. She ran to the racks of glowing and humming pentodes on the far wall, throwing her arms wide as if to hide them from sight.

  “Go arrest some bootleggers, G-Man!” yelled Pa.

  “Not my jurisdiction. And Prohibition ends May 1st. You’d know that if you were fulfilling your responsibilities to keep the public informed . . .” said Carmody.

  “See, ladies and gentlemen in radioland,” yelled Pa into the microphone, “this is what happens to private enterprise in a totalitarian state! The airwaves belong to anybody! My great uncle invented radio—he did!—Marconi stole it from him in a swindle. Government interference! Orville Wright doesn’t have a pilot’s license! He invented flying. My family invented radio . . .”

  “ . . . you are further charged with violation of nineteen sections of the Radio Act of 1929,” said Carmody, continuing to read from the warrant. “First charge, operating an unlicensed station broadcasting on the AM band, a public resource. Second, interfering with the broadcast of licensed operations—”

  “See, Mr. and Mrs. Radio Listener, what putting one man in charge of broadcasting does! Ma! Crank it up all the way!” Ma twisted some knobs. The sky outside the radio station turned blue and green again. Carmody’s hair stood up, pushing his hat off his head. His arms tingled.

  “SOS!” yelled Pa. “SOS! Help! Help! This is station MAPA. Get your guns! Meet us at the station! Show these Fascists we won’t put up with—”

  “We’ll add sending a false distress call over the airwaves, incitement to riot, and breach of the peace,” said Carmody, penciling on his notes, “having astrologers, clairvoyants, and mediums in contravention of the Radio Act of 1929 . . .”

  The first of the axes went through the studio door.

  “ . . . use of the airwaves for a lottery.” Carmody looked up. “Give yourselves up,” he said. He watched while Ma and Pa ran around inside the control room, piling the meager furniture against the battered door. “Very well. Resisting arrest by duly authorized Federal agents. Unlawful variation in broadcast power—”

  “Squeak! Squeak! Help!” said Pa. Dalmas had bludgeoned his way into the shrieking power room and threw all the breaker switches. Ma and Pa turned into frantic blurs as all the needles dropped to zero. The sky outside went New Jersey dark and Carmody’s hair lay back down.

  “Good,” he said, still reading into the intercom. “Advertising prohibited articles and products over the public airwaves. Broadcast of obscene and suggestive material. Use of . . .”

  The door gave up.

  “Book ’em, Dalmas,” he said.

  * * *

  “Two minutes, Mr. Hoover,” said the floor manager. He waved his arms. In a soundproof room an engineer put his foot on a generator motor and yanked on the starter cord. Then he adjusted some knobs and gave an okay signal with a circled thumb and finger.

  Hoover sat down at the bank of microphones. A four-by-eight-foot panel of photosensitive cells lowered into place in front of him. In a cutout portion in its center was a disk punched with holes. As the panel came down the disk began to spin faster and faster. The studio lights came up to blinding intensity. Hoover blinked, shielded his eyes.

  Carmody and Mallory stood in the control room behind the engineers, the director, and the station manager. Before them on the bank of knobs and lights was a two-by-three-inch flickering screen filled with lines in which Mallory could barely make out Mr. Hoover. Carmody and the other chiefs had turned in their reports to Hoover an hour before.

  “I never thought he’d take this job,” said an engineer.

  “Aw, Hoover’s a public servant,” said the director.

  The STAND BY sign went off. Hoover arranged his papers.

  ON THE AIR blazed in big red letters over the control booth. The announcer at his mikes at the side table said:

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Station WRNY and it’s 11:00 P.M. in New York City. Tonight, live via coast-to-coast hookup on all radio networks, the Canadian Broadcasting System, and through the television facilities of WIXA2 New York and W2JA4 Washington, D.C., we present a broadcast from the head of the new Federal Radio Agency concerning the future of the airwaves. Ladies and gentlemen of the United States and Canada, Mr. Hoover.”

  The graying, curly-haired gentleman looked into the whirling Nipkow disk with the new Sanabria interlaced pattern and pushed one of the microphones a little further from him.

  “I come to you tonight as the new head of the Federal Radio Agency. After the recent elections, in which I lost the Presidency to Mr. Alfred Smith, I assumed that after eight years as your Secretary of Commerce under the last two administrations I would be asked to leave government service.

  “Imagine my delight and surprise when Mr. Smith asked me to stay on, but in the new position of head of the Federal Radio Agency. If I may quote the President: ‘Who knows more about raddio than you, Herbert? It’s all in a turrible mess and I’d like you to straighten it out, once and for all.’

  “Well, tonight, I’m taking your President’s words to heart. As chief enforcement officer under the new and valuable Radio Act of 1929, I’m announcing the following:

  “Today my agents closed down fourteen radio stations. Nine were violating the total letter of the law; five were, after repeated warnings, still violating its spirit. Tomorrow, six more will be closed down. This will end the most flagrant of our current airwave problems.

  “As to the future,” Hoover pushed back a white wisp of hair that had fallen over his forehead, “tomorrow I will begin meetings with representatives of the Republic of Mexico and see what can be done about establishing frequencies for their use. They were summarily ignored when Canada and the United States divided the airwaves in 1924.”

  The station manager leaned forward intently.

  “If this means another division and realignment of the frequencies of existing stations, so be it,” said Hoover.

  The station manager slapped his hand to his forehead and shook it from side to side.

  “Furthermore,” said Hoover, “under powers given to me, I am ready to issue commercial radiovision/radio movie/television licenses to any applicant who will conform to the seventy-line thirty-frame format for monochrome . . .”

  “He’s gone meshuggah!” said the engineer. “Nobody uses that format!”

  “Quiet,” said Carmody. “Mr. Hoover’s talking.”

  “ . . . or the one-forty-line, sixty-frame format for color transmission and reception, with the visual portion on the shortwave and the audio portion on the newly opened frequency-modulated bandwidths.”

  “Aaiiii!!” yelled the station manager, running out of the booth toward the desk phone in the next office.

  “He’s crazy! Everybody’s got a different system!” said the director.

  “No doubt Mr. Hoover’s in for some heat,” said Mallory.

  “To those who say radio-television is too primitive and experimental to allow regular commercial broadcasting, I say, you’re the ones holding up progress. The time for review is after new and better methods are developed, not before. This or that rival concern have been for years trying to persuade the government to adopt their particular formats and methods.”

  He looked into the whirling lights, put down his papers. “I will say to the people of those concerns: Here is your format, like it or lump it.”

  Then he smiled. “For a wholesome and progressive future in America, dedicated to better broadcasting for the public good,
this is the head of your nation’s Federal Radio Agency, Herbert Hoover, saying goodnight. Good Night.”

  The STAND BY sign came back on. The blinding lights went down and the disk slowed and stopped; then the whole assembly was pulled back into the ceiling.

  In the outer office the station manager was crying.

  * * *

  Mr. Hoover was still shaking hands when Carmody and Mallory left.

  Early tomorrow they had to take off for upstate New York. There was a radio station there with an experimental-only license that was doing regular commercial broadcasts. It would be a quiet shut-down, not at all like this evening’s.

  As they walked to the radio car, two cabs and a limo swerved up to the curbing, missing them and each other by inches. Doors swung open. Sarnoff jumped out of the NBC Studebaker limo. He was in evening clothes. The head of CBS was white as a sheet as he piled out of the cab throwing money behind him. One of the vice-presidents of the Mutual System got to the door before they did. There was almost a fistfight.

  There was a sound in the air like that of a small fan on a nice spring day. Overhead the airship Ticonderoga was getting a late start on its three-day journey to Los Angeles.

  Mallory pulled away from the curb heading back to the hotel where Dalmas and the other agents were already asleep. He reached forward to the dashboard, twisted a knob. A glowing yellow light came on.

  “Geez, I’m beat,” said Carmody. “See if you can’t get something decent on the thing, okay?”

  * * *

  Nine years later, after his second heart attack and retirement, Carmody was in his apartment. He was watching his favorite program, The Clark Gable-Carole Lombard Show on his new Philco console color television set with the big nine-by-twelve-inch screen.

  He punched open the top of a Rhinegold with a church key, foam running over onto his favorite chair. “Damn!” he said, holding the beer up and sucking away the froth. He leaned back. He now weighed 270 pounds.

  Gable was unshaven; he’d apologized at the show’s opening; he’d come over from the set where they were filming Margaret Mitchell’s Mules in Horse’s Harnesses to do the live show. They’d just started a sketch with Lombard, carrying a bunch of boxes marked Anaconda Hat Co., asking Gable for directions to some street.

  Then the screen went black.

  “Shit!” said Carmody, draining his beer.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” said an announcer, “we interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you a news bulletin via transatlantic cable. Please stand by.” A card saying NEWS BULLETIN. ONE MOMENT PLEASE. came up onscreen. Then there was a hum and a voice said, “Okay!”

  A face came onscreen, a reporter in a trench coat stepped back from the camera holding a big mike in one hand.

  “This morning, 3:00 A.M. Berlin Time, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the Chancellor of Germany seemed to have reached an accord on the present crisis involving Germany’s demands in Austria.” Past his shoulder there was movement; flashbulbs went off like lightning. “Here they come,” said the newsman, turning. The cameras followed him, picking up other television crews with their big new RCA/UFA all-electronic cameras the size of the doghouses trundling in for the same shot.

  Onscreen SA and SS men in their shiny coats and uniforms pushed the reporters back and took up positions, machine guns at ready, around the Chancellery steps.

  Atop the steps the Prime Minister and the Führer, followed by generals, aides, and diplomats of both countries, stepped up to a massed bank of microphones.

  “Tonight,” said the Prime Minister of Great Britain, “I have been reassured, again and again, by the Chancellor, that the document we have signed,” he held up a white piece of paper for the cameras, and more flashbulbs went off, causing him to blink, “will be the last territorial demand of the German nation. This paper assures us of peace in our time.”

  Applause broke out from the massed N.S.D.A.P. crowds with their banners, standards, and pikes. The cameras slowly focused into a close-up view—while the crowd chanted, Seig Heil! Seig Heil!—of Herr Hitler’s beaming face.

  “Bastid!” yelled Carmody and threw the empty beer can ricocheting off the console cabinet.

  A few minutes later, after the network assured viewers it would cover live any further late-breaking news from Berlin, they went back to the show.

  There were lots of wrecked hats on the street set, and Gable was jumping up and down on one.

  Lombard broke up about something, turned away from him, laughing. Then she turned back, eyes bright, back in character.

  “Geez, that Gable . . .” said Carmody. “What a lucky bastid!”

  Introduction: Mr. Goober’s Show

  I WROTE THIS ON A BLAZING HOT January day when the temperature was in the high thirties.

  I’m talking 1997. I’m talking Perth, Australia. And I’m talking centigrade, not that wussy Fahrenheit stuff.

  It was 6:00 A.M. and already hot. I’m down there as Guest of honor at Swancon. I have to read a story at 4:00 P.M. And it’s Australia Day.

  Never fear. I’d wanted to write this one a long time. I sat down and started writing it. I had to leave the room at 1:00 P.M. to be on a panel. (During the middle of that panel, the entire rest of the convention came into the room and sang “Waltzing Matilda” to me—the words to which I took out of my billfold where they’d been—every billfold I’d ever owned—since I’d cut them out of a 1959 Life magazine article about On the Beach.) Words failed me. They still do.

  Then back to the room, scribble scribble scribble, hey, Mr. Waldrop? Then I read the story at 4:00 P.M. (prefaced by an explication of Joe Dante’s movie Matinee, which I think went straight to video in Australia—nothing to do with the story; I just thought they should all go out and buy a copy of the flick).

  This is the story that killed Omni Online. Ellen bought it; it went up March 26, 1998. They pulled the plug on Omni Online March 30, 1998. Gordon Van Gelder, in his new role as editor of F&SF, asked if he could publish it there, and pay me more money. Sure.

  The deeper you look into the history of early television, the more wonderful it is. I tell you some of the weird stuff here; the PBS Race for Television and the episode of Television that dealt with the early stuff tell you more.

  I want to thank again (besides in the acknowledgements) Andrew P. Hooper for his help in getting to me a piece of research I’d read but could no longer find. He walked his ass over to the Fremont branch of the Seattle Public Library one 38° (Fahrenheit this time) pissing-rain day, looked it up, and mailed it to me while I was in the middle of rewriting this. It got to me next day out here in Oso; I stuck it in where I needed it, and sent it off to kill Omni Online. Thanks, Andy.

  He also said he thought this would have made a great episode of the first season of the original Twilight Zone or One Step Beyond. I’d never thought about it that way but he’s probably right. Too bad I couldn’t have written this when I was thirteen years old: maybe me and Serling or John Newland could have made a deal . . . “Missed it by that much, chief.” (Only thirty-eight years, Andy. Sorry.)

  Mr. Goober’s Show

  YOU KNOW HOW IT IS:

  There’s a bar on the corner, where hardly anybody knows your name, and you like it that way. Live bands play there two or three nights a week. Before they start up it’s nice, and on the nights they don’t play—there’s a good jukebox, the big TV’s on low on ESPN all the time. At his prices the owner should be a millionaire, but he’s given his friends so many free drinks they’ve forgotten they should pay for more than every third or fourth one. Not that you know the owner, but you’ve watched.

  You go there when your life’s good, you go there when your life’s bad; mostly you go there instead of having a good or bad life.

  And one night, fairly crowded, you’re on the stools so the couples and the happy people can have the booths and tables. Someone’s put twelve dollars in the jukebox (and they have some taste), the TV’s on the Australian Thumb-Wrest
ling Finals, the neon beer signs are on, and the place looks like the inside of the Ferris Wheel on opening night at the state fair.

  You start talking to the guy next to you, early fifties, your age, and you get off on TV (you can talk to any American, except a Pentecostal, about television and you’re talking the classic stuff; the last Newhart episode, Northern Exposure; the episode where Lucy stomps the grapes; the coast-to-coast bigmouth Dick Van Dyke; Howdy Doody [every eight-year-old boy in America had a Jones for Princess Summer-Fall Winter-Spring]).

  And the guy, whose name you know is Eldon (maybe he told you, maybe you were born knowing it), starts asking you about some sci-fi show from the early fifties, maybe you didn’t get it, maybe it was only on local upstate New York, sort of, it sounds like, a travelogue, like the old Seven League Boots, only about space, stars and such, planets . . .

  “Well, no,” you say, “there was Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Space Patrol; Captain Video (which you never got but knew about), Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers; Captain Midnight (or Jet Jackson, Flying Commando, depending on whether you saw it before or after Ovaltine quit sponsoring it, and in reruns people’s lips flapped around saying ‘Captain Midnight’ but what came out was ‘Jet Jackson’ . . .).

  “Or maybe one of the anthology shows, Twilight Zone or Tales of—”

  “No,” he says, “not them. See, there was this TV . . .”

  “Oh,” you say, “a TV. Well, the only one I know of was this one where a guy at a grocery store (one season) invents this TV that contacts . . .”

  “No,” he says, looking at you (Gee, this guy can be intense!). “I don’t mean Johnny Jupiter, which is what you were going to say. Jimmy Duckweather invents TV. Contacts Jupiter, which is inhabited by puppets when they’re inside the TV, and by guys in robot suits when they come down to Earth, and almost cause Duckweather to lose his job and not get a date with the boss’s daughter, episode after episode, two seasons.”

  “Maybe you mean Red Planet Mars, a movie. Peter Graves—”

  “ . . . Andrea King, guy invents hydrogen tube; Nazis; Commies; Eisenhower president; Jesus speaks from Mars.”