Above: I Can Hear It Now -- Edward R. Murrow.
The vinyl in question belongs to Edward R. Murrow. The newsman’s mark on radio eventually made its way to vinyl, and that vinyl eventually made its way to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, which is how it eventually made its way to me.
“A voice can cut through the hazy fog of time,” he tells us, and the voices do indeed cut through: you hear Mayor LaGuardia. You hear the Hindenburg disaster. You hear Chamberlain. You hear the match where Joe Lewis clocked a Nazi, where Lou Gehrig declared himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, and Elmer Davis announce the onset of war.
And the war marches briskly through: cities and countries fall. Dunkirk is declared as a noun “that will live as long as the english language.” Wilke challenges FDR on the prospect of running for a third term. An unexpected panorama greets the lead up to Pearl Harbor: a musician was tuning up in Carnegie Hall when it happened. Gerald Nye was ‘addressing America First-ers in Pittsburgh.’ A sailor is addressed, to, and informed that -- retroactively -- he was about to be killed. And the bomb whistled and exploded.
The bomb siren is called “a shimmering wail” bouncing off “the echo chambers” of a “bombed city’s dead buildings and deserted docks.” We are informed that when a Howitzer explodes, “the jungle screams back.”
There is the warning sound of the D-Day armada, and you realize upon hearing it that that is the sound whooping in the background of the trailer for Rogue One. Words like “bazooka” and “molotov cocktail” into the common lexicon.
You hear Eisenhower announce the beginning of D-Day is prosaic terms and De Gaulle announce it in flowering terms (though the Belgian announcement was much more straightforward.) The King of Norway “weeps.” FDR dies. Rayburn whispers with Truman. A prayer is offered up to the Enola Gay and civilization. 78,150 dead. The bomb is described as “charging up” from “the bowels of the earth.”
The panorama ends with Murrow asking whether or not we’d walked through midnight towards the dawn. The vinyl crackles -- and proceeds to silence.