Sunday
A Sunday afternoon, and then it wasn't
American radio was playing dance music, a symphony and a football game. Inside twenty minutes it became a war service — and then, that evening, went back to comedy because nobody had written a rule for what else to do.
Opening the day…
The night of
Before 2:22 pm ET
Sustaining Sunday programming: Sammy Kaye's Sunday Serenade on NBC Red, the University of Chicago Round Table debating Canada at war, the New York Philharmonic due at three, and on Mutual the Dodgers and the Giants at the Polo Grounds. Nobody listening in the continental United States knew anything had happened at Pearl Harbor; the attack had begun at 7:48 am Hawaii time, 1:18 pm in New York.
2:22 – 3:00 pm ET
The White House gave the news to the press at 2:22 pm ET. Mutual broke into the football game first; NBC and CBS followed within minutes, John Charles Daly reading the bulletin over the top of CBS World Today. These are the recordings people remember: a few seconds each, read flat, with the programme still audible underneath. Within half an hour the bulletins had moved on to Manila, to Burma, and to a Washington correspondent guessing at what the President would do next.
3:00 – 5:00 pm ET
The Philharmonic went on the air and was cut into repeatedly. Kaltenborn took the microphone. Shortwave circuits to Honolulu were opened and lost — the KGU Honolulu report is a telephone line to a besieged island that Army censors closed while it was still speaking. This is the hour radio invented the modern rolling news broadcast, live, without a script, in front of everybody.
5:00 – 7:00 pm ET
Local stations begin carrying their own bulletins — Pittsburgh, Seattle, a sabotage warning on WJAS. At 6:45 pm Eleanor Roosevelt, in a sponsored Sunday-evening talk for the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, spoke to the country before her husband did: the first member of the administration to address the American people about the attack.
7:00 pm – midnight ET
Jack Benny at seven. The Fitch Bandwagon. Chase and Sanborn with Edgar Bergen. Inner Sanctum. Sherlock Holmes at half past ten. The networks made a decision that reads strangely now and made complete sense then — the schedule continued, with news inserted between the acts and the comedians opening on the news before the sketch. Listen to the top of these programmes and you can hear performers working out, in real time, how funny they are allowed to be.
Where this comes from
