West Coast D-Day Radio Round-Up

I've written about 1944 West Coast D-Day radio coverage a few times in the past in these I STILL LOVE RADIO posts:

Bob Hope Sat Up All Night By The Radio (JULY 2009)

NBC Radio Coverage of D-Day (JUNE 2010)

So, this year it seemed like a good time to produce a segment for KUOW-FM as part of the series "This NOT Just In":

This NOT Just In: D-Day On The West Coast

In other news, the CBC Radio One Vancouver coverage of the riots that followed Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals was excellent. I hope to prepare a post (with links to a decent aircheck) sometime in the next few weeks.

Radio Earthquakes, Rural Basketball, Less News

Here's a very short post with links to three recent pieces for other sites:

1. How the 2001 Nisqually Quake rocked LIVE RADIO in Seattle (for the SeattlePI.com), including in-studio video re-enactments by Dave Ross of KIRO and Steve Scher of KUOW.

2. A surprising "discovery" of rural high school basketball on the air near Spokane, WA, for the Aircheck Blog at the Western States Museum of Broadcasting.

3. Ruminations for Crosscut.com on KPLU recently dropping hourly NPR newscasts.

That's all for now . . .

BBC World Service Coverage of Egypt Situation

This is a short post to commend the BBC for putting radio to work doing what it does best in its coverage of the developing situation in Egypt: live reports from journalists on the scene, expert analysis from a range of qualified and articulate speakers, and live phone-ins from regular folks around the world.

Good old terrestrial BBC radio broadcasts to Egypt were even more critical a few days ago, when Internet service there was disrupted by the government, leaving Facebook and Twitter off limits and useless.

In many cities around the US, public radio stations carry the BBC on one of their HD subchannels. Via the web, you can get the live BBC World Service radio stream here.

Whatever audio appliance you use, get it now and leave it on to witness aural history as it unfolds once again.

Challenger, Columbia and The Media

With the double anniversaries of Space Shuttle tragedies in the past week, it was worth going back and looking at the media coverage of the failed launched of the Challenger and the pre-landing disintegration of the Columbia.

How Seattle radio station KIRO covered the Challenger (with help from CBS) is the subject of a piece published by Crosscut.com last Friday.

NPR host Scott Simon's recollections of covering the breaking story of the Columbia make up the bulk of a freelance radio piece I produced last week.

It seems like the Columbia was lost twice: once on the morning of February 1, 2003 in the skies over Texas, and again in the vortex of other news that week that has made this Shuttle tragedy an orphan of recent history. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met at Camp David to discuss Iraq the very same morning the Columbia was lost, and Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council regarding weapons of mass destruction a few days hence (and both of these events were key to the run-up to the Iraq War about six weeks later).

And, finally, a round-up of links to decent YouTube clips of Shuttle disaster coverage is included in this post for Aircheck (the blog I edit for the Western States Museum of Broadcasting).

January I STILL LOVE RADIO Round-Up

It's been a busy winter so far, and I've been slow to update things here at ISLR. Here's a round-up of recent activities:

1. Continuing to write about radio and TV for the Western States Museum of Broadcasting's AIRCHECK Blog

2. Wrote a piece about the demise of Seattle's Smooth Jazz FM station for Crosscut.com

3. Wrote a piece about Fisher Broadcasting fending off a takeover from a Canadian firm for Crosscut.com

4. Produced a piece for KUOW FM about radio coverage of John Lennon's murder, and a piece about post-Pearl Harbor radio blackouts on the West Coast

I'm also excited to be working on a large-format photographic history of Seattle broadcasting for Arcadia Publishing (for publication later this year), working with the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) collection and grateful to Dave Richardson, who generously provided me with the research he gathered for his 1980 book Puget Sounds.

Several individuals from Seattle's radio and TV past and present have already provided or pledged photos from their personal collections, and I'll be doing more reaching out in the next few months. Please let me know if you have photos you're willing to share, or if you know of images that would be a good fit for this project.

Seattle Radio Theatre's New Facebook Page

This item just in from the Self-Serving, Self-Promotional Desk of I STILL LOVE RADIO: we've just launched the Seattle Radio Theatre Facebook page.

The page includes images from last year's production of It's A Wonderful Life (the Lux Radio Theater version); a video clip and a link to complete audio of the October 2010 production of Dracula (the Mercury Theater version); and details about our upcoming Christmas production.

This year's live holiday broadcast will take place on Friday, December 10 at 8pm at Town Hall Seattle.

And Now For Something Not Completely Different: More BBC Cover Art

As promised, here are more covers of BBC Hand Books/Year Books from the World War II era (and immediately afterward). I don't have a complete set of dustjackets, and am missing the middle years of the war (if you have the dustjackets for 1942, 1943 and/or 1944, please let me know--I'd love to see the artwork and include in a subsequent post--please scan and send my way if you can).

It's interesting to examine the progression in how the war was perceived, as depicted on these covers.

The earliest edition shown here (from January 1940) is fairly obvious in its depiction of common implements of the Phoney War--a radio (though not one of a size you'd likely carry with you over to France), a helmet, a kit bag. By January 1941, one could argue the war (which had taken a turn for the worse in the previous months) isn't even acknowledged, though the radio tower seems to be the only source of light (hope, optimism, etc.) for the otherwise darkened globe.

By January 1945 (in spite of the Battle of the Bulge), the Allies are well on their way to victory, and the cover art already looks pretty victorious.

The 1946 edition is, perhaps, the most haunting--a solitary dove of peace takes flight above a bombed-out city. By 1947, the cover art is almost jubilant, with fairy musicians floating about and above the crowded London streets (though if you look closely, you'll see that a "lorry" has pinned a pedestrian on the street in front of Broadcasting House--not sure what that's all about).

For more radio-related cover art, please check out these earlier I STILL LOVE RADIO posts:

THE ART OF RADIO

RADIO WITH PICTURES

REMAINDERS: MORE RADIO COVER ART