Reveille with Beverly

One of the unintended, perhaps unimaginable and certainly unexpected, consequences of American participation in World War II was the spread worldwide of American popular culture, in particular music, which has retained its influence ever since, cementing America's cultural dominance, but also American accents, idioms and lively slang, which most of the world had never heard.  And that music!  Who had heard anything like it before? Rocking clarinets, jiving coronets, wailing trumpets, swinging trombones and boogie-woogie pianos. Solid senders all!

This happened through the creation of the Armed Forces Radio Service, which set up AM broadcast stations in 54 countries, from Egypt to New Guinea, Australia to England, as well as making shortwave broadcasts that reached everywhere on earth, all filling the airwaves 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.  The purpose of the network was to be a morale booster for American troops overseas, most of whom were young, in their teens and twenties, so it broadcast the popular music of the day, swing and jazz from Tommy Dorsey, Cab Calloway, Glen Miller and Louis Armstrong, as well as comedy skits, radio plays and news of the home front.

Jean Ruth, aka Beverly of the Reveille.

The most popular AFRS  show with the GIs was "Reveille with Beverly," hosted by Jean Ruth, the world's first global disc jockey and the inventor of the listener-request format. Her broadcast was heard from Alaska to New Guinea, South Africa to Scotland and in all the ships at sea and planes in the air. Her show became so popular a movie was made about it.

When she was a 22-year-old student at the University of Colorado, Ruth convinced a local radio station to let her host a program aimed at draftees at local army camps. Shortly after she went on the air the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor and her show, first called "Beverly at Reveille," became hugely popular and was picked up by KNX in Los Angeles, then by Armed Forces Radio when the service was created in 1942.  Besides being broadcast in the States over AM radio and world-wide on shortwave, her program was recorded on big aluminum 78rpm disks able to handle an hour broadcast and flown to local AFRS stations around the world. So the program she recorded on Monday morning in Los Angeles would be heard in Nadzab, New Guinea, Foggia, Italy, and Framlingham, England, Tuesday morning.

Between 1941 and 1945, Ruth’s dawn broadcast reached an estimated 11 million allied servicemen daily, not to mention any number of foreign civilians. Her jumping and jiving show was even sometimes used as a replacement for the dawn bugle call that traditionally jarred troops out of their racks. Instead, they could wake up to some hot licks from Woody Herman as Jean would lilt, "Preach your sermon, Herman!"

After the first opening tune, Ruth would begin her show with her signature opening, “Heya, fellas, it's the USA. We’re ready with the stuff that makes you swing and sway."

Ruth posed for cute pin-up shots that she autographed and mailed to the boys overseas. Army Air Force crews voted her “The girl we’d most like to be trapped in the turret of a B-17 with.”

Armed Forces Radio (and long since Television, too, so AFRTS) is still going strong, reaching 168 countries worldwide these days, although it was renamed American Forces rather than Armed Forces in 2017.  I used to listen to it growing up as a Navy brat living overseas, especially in Japan -- Far East Network, Tokyo, 810 on your dial! -- but FEN was disestablished a while back and the service is now called American Forces Network Tokyo.

From the beginning AFRS has had a shadow audience of foreigners who listen to the

Those crazy AFRS boys! They made a movie of this -- Godzilla!

broadcasts.  I recall reading some years ago that FEN Tokyo had an audience of American servicemen numbered in the thousands while the number of Japanese nationals listening  was about a million and a half.  The mayor of Tokyo reportedly once complained that FEN played too much rock and roll and should play more classical music. The head of FEN responded that the station's audience was American servicemen, average age 19, who were away from home for the first time, in a strange foreign country, and the role of FEN was to provide something familiar to them, and play the music that they liked and had listened to at home. 

I can remember as a kid listening to the little spots FEN had scattered throughout its programs, rather like ads would be on a commercial radio station.  I think some of them must have been quite old, maybe decades.  Of course, they had up-to-date items as well, but these others were the ones I looked forward to listening to.  I learned how and when the time zones were established in the US, about the Pony Express, the Kentucky rifle, Sergeant York and Robert Smalls, and all sorts of people, events and things in one-minute featurettes. 

There was also a series of one-minute spots about different small towns and cities across the US, telling what they were like, mentioning local streets and stores and what was going on there (or had been a long time ago).  I still remember the ending sentence, which said, "But if you are from (Hometown), you already know this; we just wanted to remind you that it's still there."  That ending just so charmed me, and I wanted to visit each one of those small towns.

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Photos of Jean Ruth's first radio show when it was still in Colorado from an early 1942 issue of Life magazine.

An episode of Reveille with Beverly.
It's a solid killer! Stomp your feet as you listen to Artie Shaw give!
I hear ya talkin', man!  What goes?  Get in that jump groove! Rock it!

If you liked that episode, enjoy a romp and stomp session with another hour of Beverly putting the needle in the groove and spinning those hot licks and mellow melodies.  It's coming to you but fast!

 

Change

 

 “I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads.
In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again.
Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned.
This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time we would never remember, never think about again. 
For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.”

~ Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

 

 

 

The World has need of you

 

                                     













                                         




                                           
                                                                
                                          everything here
                                          seems to need us
                                                     ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple.
~ Ellen Bass from "Like a Beggar"

 

 

 

That's life

 Preparation for adulthood.

But then...

... or a husband

Practical education

Boeing & UAL were part of the same corporation.

 I ran across this 1936 ad for the Boeing School of Aeronautics in an old magazine the other day and it made me wonder why, with so many industries suffering from a shortage of skilled workers, those industries unable to find qualified personnel, don't open their own trade schools to train people in the exact expertise they need in their business? Perhaps they could even offer tuition-free courses in exchange for the student agreeing to an obligation to work a few years for the company before being free to work where he or she chooses -- something like the way the armed forces do it with skills they need like medical doctors, dentists and oral surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists and lawyers.

An example of this is the Navy offering to pay all costs for qualified personnel to attend the medical school of their choosing, in whatever specialty they want, only requiring in return that the individual serve in the Navy the equivalent number of years that they spent in internship.  The Navy also offers a signing bonus and monthly stipend to the student.  I'm sure other services offer similar programs.  Why can't civilian corporations do the same?

While looking up the Boeing school I found that Curtis-Wright also had its own technical school as did other airplane manufacturers such as Consolidated and Douglas.  These schools trained engineers, mechanics and pilots, with no obligation to work for the parent companies but certainly offered jobs by them.  Among the courses available at these schools were:

• Aeronautical Engineering
• Post Graduate Aeronautical Engineering
• Master Aviation Mechanic
• Specialized Engine
• Specialized Airplane
• Specialized Sheet Metal
• Aeronautical Drafting
• Aircraft Blueprint Reading

Looking at some of the graduates, I was impressed by their subsequent careers.  For example, Peter Bowers, the famous aviation historian, who worked for Boeing as an engineer for 36 years during that company's most innovative period. His only post-high school education was the Boeing school.  It was clearly all he needed.  Then there was Peter Buller, who went to work with deHaviland  Aircraft of Canada, involved in designing the Chipmunk, Beaver, Twin Beaver, Otter, Caribou, Buffalo, and Dash 7.  He, too, got all he needed to have a very successful career at the Boeing trade school.  Why can't we implement the same system today, by-passing the horrifically expensive, time-wasting, politicized universities?

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 The cost of the airplane in this ad in today's dollars would be about $27,000.  So just about anybody could buy an airplane to play in the skies with in those days, same as you could buy a boat or RV to enjoy on your days off today. I've been told that the main reason general aviation aircraft are so expensive and so few are produced compared to the past is because of restrictive government regulations and most especially because of litigation. Apparently, there was a huge surge in lawsuits against light plane manufacturers in the 1990s that forced many small makers out of business and decided the survivors to focus on corporate clients who employed experienced professional pilots, rather than cater to the weekend pilot.  

 

 

 

To observe

Sometimes a single photo can be as rich in meaning as a novel.

 

 

 

 

Time and Music

 

“The devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles, flees before the sound of music almost as much as before the Word of God. Music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men. Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful.”
― Martin Luther  

Dance, sing, listen to music and forget the world.

 

Enjoy this flash of light between the two great darks. No matter how much we want it to, it doesn't last. 

“Tout homme peut avoir dans sa destinée une fin du monde pour lui seul. Cela s'appelle le désespoir. L'âme est pleine d'étoiles tombantes.”
~ Victor Hugo