As a 1960s teen in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I took refuge in voices from the night.
The warm vacuum tubes in my small radio cast gleams through vents in the radio’s back, orangeing up the wall by my bed, as I harkened to heralds of tranquility, plucked from the ether, lulling me to sleep.
Life was fraught: exacting teachers at school, crabby parents at home, classmates who always seemed to be cooler, more knowing, more confident—some actively hostile and others petty or dismissive. My days and evenings could be a mass of anxiety, hopped up by juke jive urging me to shake, rattle, and roll, consult my friend the witch doctor, and never dare step on anyone’s blue suede shoes.
Then there was homework, a grind all its own. By ten o’clock, I was wrung out, ready for seductive sounds from the ether.
“Ether?” I hear you cry. “What’s with all this ether, O New Favorite Writer? Are you telling us you were under anesthesia?”
Not that kind of ether. Were I sedated, how could I be soothed any further by sounds coming from my radio?
No, Gentle Reader. “Ether” is a long-discredited theory of physics that is still quite useful in talking about electromagnetic radiation. Radio, television, and radar travel through space as waves. But how can they travel if there is nothing to wave? In the ocean, waves are made of water. But in the wide reaches of the cosmos, there is only emptiness. So what is it, exactly, that waves? Simple: The ether, a nonsubstantial, non-existent substance that is everywhere but not anywhere. Radio waves ride it.
Our ether today is pierced by quadrigazillions of impulses careening around, each in its own tidy compartment, apt for reception if only one has the right equipment. It’s conceivable that all these invisible things lacing through our bodies at the speed of light might be unbalancing us.
But in those days of which I speak, every human on the planet did not have a pocketable telephone-cum-data center; there were only thirteen TV channels; and geosynchronous satellites blanketing the earth with their spoor existed only in the fevered imagination of Arthur C. Clarke. Most of what burdened the ether was just broadcast, amateur, and military radio signals, a bit of commercial TV, aviation-related radar, and telephone-related microwaves. Hardly anything at all.
It was not too hard to pick out the dulcet tones of Jay Andres coming out of Chicago with “Music Till Dawn” on WBBM radio. Jay was urbane yet intimate. His voice conveyed friendliness with a kind of relaxed sophistication. He strung semi-classical, soft pop, and light jazz music together around loose verbal themes expounded with elegance. From time to time he spoke of the professional standards and sterling safety record of his sponsor, American Airlines. Before I ever took my first commercial flight, I was convinced down to my boot-tops that American was the plane to fly.
The lilting, stringy, romance-tinged music, combined with the savoir-faire of our knowing host, helped me go into an untroubled, relaxing sleep.
Much the same could be said for John Doremus, with “Patterns in Music” on WMAQ. The same kind of thing, but a different voice—maybe a bit deeper and smoother than Jay’s, not quite as friendly and informal, but still a deep comfort. Worth listening to any night.
These troubadors of the Midwestern ether played Tin Pan Alley standards, Broadway tunes, and a smattering of jazz—always in mellifluous instrumental renditions. They were high-grade professional announcers from radio’s heyday, whose plummy voices gave them large fan bases of their own.
You may think these late-night mood music programs were an odd attraction for a teenaged boy, but all I can say is, I liked them. They plucked chords in my soul. And if Jay Andres and John Doremus offered a trite or platitudinous form of radio entertainment—one could always tune to WGN and get the full treatment in the form of Franklyn MacCormack and “The All-Night Meister Brau Showcase.”
MacCormack interspersed the usual tunes with romantic—nay, schmaltzy—poetry readings. His standard opening was: “Why do I love you? I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. . . ” intoned over Billy Vaughn’s weeping strings playing “Melody of Love.” Franklyn purveyed reminiscences of old-time entertainers like Stoopnagle and Budd, as well as personal impressions of summer days at Wisconsin Dells as a guest of Tommy Bartlett. A perennial theme was the virtues of Meister Brau, a working-man’s beer from Chicago’s Peter Hand Brewing Company. “Meister Brau gives you more of what you drink beer for,” Franklyn would say. “It only tastes expensive.”
(Franklyn MacCormack was only his radio name, by the way. His real birth name was–get this–Franklin McCormick.)
While Jay Andres combined friendship with sophistication, and John Doremus delivered straight-from-the-shoulder baritone authority, Franklyn MacCormack sounded like a hale fellow well met. You could imagine him swilling a glass or two of his sponsor’s product while spinning records and looking up drippy poems to read.
They were competitors, but all-night radio in Chicagoland was a small fraternity. A few months after MacCormack’s death in 1971, John Doremus took over his nocturnal duties at WGN, sponsored now by a savings bank, rather than a beer company. What listener would want to buy a round of suds for the buttoned-down Doremus?
I’m sure I was not the only teenaged boy listening to these soporific all-night deejays. Some of my college friends shared fond memories of them as well. In fact, at our college radio station, there was a kind of competition among several of us to see who could be the best Franklyn MacCormack. I did a program called “Music in the Night,” and—guess what?—I read poetry.
If you were not there, Dear Reader, you don’t know about it, but there was a sort of magic in the sounds and impressions that reached us late at night over the lightly-trod ether of the 1960s. Ethereal? Maybe. A lifeline? Definitely.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
