The Pittsburgh Press (December 31, 1944)
Radio to bid 1944 farewell
Dancing tonight, football Monday
By Si Steinhauser
If you are inclined to dance the old year out, all you need do is turn on your radio about 11:30 ET tonight and dance until you are so tired you can’t dance any longer.
WJAS will join the CBS dance across the country and sign off at 3:00 a.m.
KQV will string along until 2:00 a.m.
KDKA goes along until 3:00, and WCAE until 4:00 a.m.
There will be prayerful farewells to 1944 on WCAE at 10:30 with Bishop Oxnam, president of the Council of Churches of Christ in America, as speaker.
Tomorrow is “football day” with four games on local stations and a fifth, the Rose Bowl, daddy of them all, avoided by KDKA. Manager Joe Baudino felt last year and still feels that local interest in the Rose Bowl is below par so he won’t broadcast it. But he will give scores at the end of each quarter.
Here’s the lineup:
| 1:45 | WJAS | Orange Bowl, Georgia Tech-Tulsa. Ted Husing at the mike. |
| 2:00 | WCAE | Cotton Bowl, Texas Christian-Oklahoma. Bill Slater at mike. |
| 2:45 | KQV | Sugar Bowl, Duke-Alabama. Harry Wismer at mike. |
| 4:45 | WCAE | East-West, Ernie Smith at mike. |
| 4:45 | NBC (but not KDKA) | Rose Bowl. S. California-Tennessee. Bill Stern working his eight consecutive and NBC’s 18th consecutive description of this game. |
If you have an all-wave set you will find the Rose Bowl game all over the shortwave dial since it will be broadcast around the world to servicemen. On standard dials you may find the game on WTAM Cleveland, or WLW Cincinnati. Key station for the network is WEAF New York.
Rose Bowl broadcasts are taken as a matter of routine by radio-sports fans and probably only those in radio recall that the broadcast of this game on Jan. 1, 1927, was the first broadcast on the Pacific Coast to the Eastern Seaboard. The Rose Bowl game is not sponsored. The other four are, all by one firm, using 1,460 stations during the day. The games will be different, the ad blurbs the same.
Other important events of the New Year’s first day:
| 7:00 | WJAS | Jack Kirkwood launches his own madcap show. Lillian Leigh (Mrs. Kirkwood) will co-star. |
| 8:30 | WJAS | Gracie Allen and George Burns move to Monday night. Charles Boyer will be their guest. |
| 9:00 | WJAS | Cecil B. DeMille presents Laraine Day, John Hodiak and Marsha Hunt in Bride by Mistake. |
| 10:00 | WJAS | Guy Lombardo moves from Saturday to Monday in a new series. |
Andrews Sisters fans will celebrate today when the trio launches their own commercial with Bing Crosby, their first guest. KQV is the station, 4:30 the time. George “Gabby” Hayes will be their permanent foil and Vic Shoen, who has accompanied the girls on all the recordings, will lead the orchestra.
Bill Goodwin is off the Burns and Allen shows for keeps. Harry von Zell will replace him. Goodwin becomes the comedy star of Frank Sinatra broadcasts.
Pittsburgh’s Dr. Fritz Reiner will conduct the Cleveland Orchestra broadcast of Brahm’s Symphony No. 2 in D Major over WCAE at 7:00 tonight.
Quentin Reynolds takes over as air editor of Radio Digest on WJAS at 9 o’clock.
At 6:00, Paul Whiteman will present an hour-long version of Show Boat with Charles Winninger in his original stage role of “Cap’n Andy.” Helen Forrest will sing the late Helen Morgan’s role of “Julie” and Kathryn Grayson will be “Magnolia.” Allan Jones will be “Gaylord Ravenal.”
As a special feature for music lovers, the Telephone Hour will present Fritz Kreisler in his third broadcast Monday night at 9:00 via KDKA.
The year had its high-spot laughs and its tragic moments on the air. Funniest laugh, we think was provided by Charlie “Finnegan” Cantor of Duffy’s Tavern when he kissed Dorothy Lamour then mumbled, “I wasn’t impressed” and on second trial commentated. “Just confirmed my opinion in the first place.”
A lot of people said a lot of words on the air, millions and millions of them. Bob Hope touched the hearts of everyone who heard him on D-Day Plus One and for those who didn’t hear him, we had his words copied from a recording. Bob adlibbed on that fateful Tuesday night as American boys scrambled up the shores of France:
What’s happened during these last few hours not one of us will ever forget – how could we forget. We sat up all night by the radio and heard the bulletins, the flashes, and voices coming across from England, the commentators, the pilots returning from their greatest of all missions, newsboys yelling in the streets and it seemed that one world was wending and a new world beginning – that history was closing one book and opening a new one, and somehow, we knew it had to be a better one.
You sat there and dawn began to sneak in and you thought of the hundreds of thousands of kids you’d seen at camps in the past two or three years. The kids who screamed and whistled when they heard a gag and a song, and now you could see all of them in 4,000 ships on the English Channel, tumbling out of thousands of planes over Normandy and the occupied coast in countless landing barges crashing the Nazi gate and going on through to do the job that’s the job of all of us.
The sun came up and you sat there looking at that huge black headline: that one great black word with the exclamation point, INVASION! The one word that the whole world has waited for – that all of us have worked for. We knew we would wake up one morning and have to meet it face to face, the word in which America has invested everything these 30 long months, the efforts of millions of Americans building planes and weapons, the shipyards and the men who took the stuff across, little kids buying war stamps and housewives straining bacon grease, farmers working around the clock, millions of young men sweating it out in camps and fighting the battles that paved the way for that headline that morning.
Now the investment must pay for this generation and all generations to come. And folks, what a wonderful thing it is that no matter the price, the reward will be greater than the sacrifice. We hope that thought can go along with a prayer tonight – the prayer of a whole nation – “GOD BLESS THOSE KIDS ACROSS THE ENGLISH CHANNEL.”
Now to steal from Fibber McGee: “May your ’45 really be loaded.”