Remember being shocked by the Hindenburg Disaster? No? The blimp caught fire on approach to an airfield in New Jersey, an event captured on film. The grainy newsreel had a voice over narration highlighted by the phrase, “oh, the humanity.” The shocking part for people back then was the film itself, a visual record of a tragedy. The bulk of information then was distributed in newspapers and on radio. Orson Welles scared the crap out of everyone with his 1939 Mercury Theater of the Air presentation, War of the Worlds. People panicked, ran screaming into the streets. This also occurred in New Jersey, just a few short years before my father arrived in the Garden State for basic training at Fort Dix. He was an MP and spent a large part of the war wrangling Afrika Corps prisoners, smoking Luckies, and sticking his head into newspapers. JP always read the papers, the Philly papers, the New York papers. He took four thousand German POWs on a train ride through Texas. The Germans used old newspapers to make maps, maps he confiscated. Desperate for a good read, he examined three month old copies of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Army Intelligence took everyone’s newspapers away. JP channeled Duke Ellington before the radio was seized.
Thoroughly disoriented, the German POWs arrived in Upstate New York. They were held in a fort built for the French and Indian War, whose outcome is a little blurry. American Intelligence delivered newspapers with most of the articles snipped out. JP was three months behind the news for the duration, not even sure who won the pennant in 1945. It wasn’t the Phillies. After the war, he read the paper first thing every morning, always in search of the late breaking news in the morning editions. He was determined never to be in the dark again after four years of censorship.