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Select an hour above to read the programme log for that block of the evening.
The studio doors close at 5:55. We are on the air at 6:00 sharp.
The studio doors close at 5:55. We are on the air at 6:00 sharp.
Filaments warmed at five-forty. Antenna mast iced briefly during the cold front but tested clean at half past. We carry six full hours tonight — six hours of programmes that go out once, into the dark, and cannot be brought back. Every cough on Mrs. Pendleton's piano bench will reach Fall River. Every cue I miss the orchestra hears as silence. We do this together and we do it right the first time, because there is only the first time.
Mr. Daugherty's pickup-microphone has been swapped for the spare. Studio B is dressed and waiting. Reception cards from last evening sit on my left — twelve as far west as Cleveland, one from a steamship moored at Halifax. Use the bank below to walk the night with me.
— H. M. Calloway, Evening Shift SupervisorTo the night men and women of WXYZ —
I climbed to the antenna this afternoon and stood beside the mast with my hand against the copper. It was cold. The wire hummed faintly, the way a kettle hums before it boils. I think about that hum often. Right now, this minute, a farmer in Vermont is putting his children to bed and the youngest is begging for one more hour because the orchestra has not finished. A widow in Pawtucket is sitting nearer her receiver than her stove, because we are warmer than her stove. A ship's wireless boy off Nantucket is copying our station identification onto his log because he can, because we go that far.
We are doing something no generation before us could do. We are putting a violin into a kitchen in Maine and a tenor into a parlor in Ohio at the very same instant. There is no record of it afterward. Tonight's broadcast belongs only to tonight, and to anyone who happened to be listening. That is the bargain. That is what makes it sacred work.
Do it carefully. Do it warmly. Do it as though every isolated listener is the only one — because to themselves, they are.
— Theodore P. Hartwell, Station Manager[type BROADCAST again to close · or press the ×]