Bristol Public Library: Radio Nostlagia: War of the Worlds (Free Event)
Come listen to “War of the Worlds” with Radio Guide’s Webmaster Ed at 3 pm on Tuesday, October 20!
We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us …
No registration or admission fee. Refreshments provided by the Friends of the Bristol Public Library.
Did you know that, after this radio program first ran in 1938, hundreds of angry people sent letters to the Federal Communications Commission?
Most of those who complained also shared personal stories with the commission about how the broadcast affected them, their families, or their communities. Claude L. Stewart of Meadville, Pennsylvania, sent a telegram to the commission stating, “Mercury Theatre of air not only in bad taste but dangerous stop my wife and several other women confined to beds from shock and hysteria.” The city manager of Trenton, New Jersey, asked the commission to take action “to avoid a reoccurrence of a very grave and serious situation . . . which completely crippled communication facilities of our Police Department for about three hours.”
Read more about the dust-up over “War of the Worlds” at the National Archives’s “‘‘Jitterbugs’ and ‘Crack-pots’
Letters to the FCC about the ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast.
