Bookaholic

I was digging through boxes of tapes that desperately need weeded out, sold, trashed, or… when I rediscovered my old radio tapes. I used to do a radio show on the local campus radio station — yes, at that time they invited community members to propose programs, and I did with a partner. The partner soon left, but I continued with a show called Sound Art, Sound Text, which combined whatever I chose to play from the record library (yes, LPs, remember those?) with some talk, some reading and eventually more.

On the basis of what little I knew about radio, I was also hired on as the graveyard shift person on an all-classical local station, in which my major duty was to change giant 2-3 hour reels and keep the canned music flowing, and occasionally read a story or two off the AP wire. In other words, I had a lot of time on my hands. The result of this is that I conceived of, and executed, a plan to create a radio serial (just like in the old days), in this case based on the Beecher family. I had run across two volumes of their round-robin letters, so the material for “dialogue” was set up. I wrote the narrator pieces to set the background, and created the scripts.

Then, since I spent time at the campus station, I would drag in anybody who was walking by in the hallway to read a role for me, which was recorded on reel tape. Actually I chose five friends to voice the major continuing characters: Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the father Lyman Beecher. In all, there were 57 parts, some of them tiny, and it stretched to 28 half-hour episodes. There was a lot of cutting and splicing of reel tape before I could convert it to cassette tapes (remember those?). This was in the Eighties, way before computers or the Internet were widespread.

OK, OK, I’m coming to it. I transferred all 28 episodes to mp3 files, uploaded them, each with the script (and you may notice some places of going off-script) scrolling down. I haven’t figured out how to regulate or coordinate the audio with the text (hint, hint).

And while I was doing that, I found four other radio scripts, but only one other did I find the audio (Margaret Fuller). These two are posted at www.bandannabooks.com/19th. I also included other pieces that bear on the 19th Century, which I have published or helped to create. The Izak Starfisher experimental radio group was three of us doing some interesting things, most of which never aired.

It surprised me that so much of my effort was focused on the Nineteenth Century, but it still fascinates me, and I hope that others might continue to be curious enough to see where we came from and how we got here. Anyhow, enjoy.