Welcome to Continuous Wave, the weekly newsletter where we explore the history of broadcasting in the US and its ongoing impact in digital media today.
I’ve been trying to build to a dramatic plot point in the history of radio, when members of the Radio Writers Guild voted to strike against the entities — networks and agencies — that needed the writers’ talents but didn’t want to offer much money or credit. I promise I’m going to tell this story — but I want to get it right, and I keep encountering one more footnote to track down and one more nuance to consider. Thus we are, just like the characters in the interminable soap operas that once powered radio, on another digression. Fortunately this side quest involves the prose stylist, humorist and artist James Thurber.
Thurber is best known for his short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, about an ordinary man caught up in his own adventure-fantasies while he half-assedly runs errands with his wife. Thurber published it in The New Yorker in 1939, and Hollywood still keeps trying to turn Mitty’s imaginary life into a literally-minded movie, which misses the whole point.
Anyway, in 1948, The New Yorker gave a ton of print real estate to a four-part series by Thurber called Soapland! He enters the radio soap opera universe like a foreign correspondent — considering, each in turn, the writers, the ad agencies and brands, the actors, and the listeners. Thurber introduces readers to soap-production powerhouse couple Frank and Anne Hummert, whom CW readers also met here. The same year the Soapland series ran, Thurber compiled all the pieces, and other miscellaneous work, into a book called The Beast in Me and Other Animals. The book also features many of his iconic cartoons and quirky sketches.
The thing about Thurber by 1948 is that he was almost completely blind. A horrible childhood accident (getting shot in the face with an arrow by his brother) had destroyed one of his eyes, and it left the remaining one with a worsening condition called sympathetic ophthalmia. Thurber spent a fair amount of time in the hospital, getting operations to save his eyesight. One of his cartoons in the book hints at why daytime radio might have been something he chose to explore. If you can’t get away from it, why not write about it?
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