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Radios and Telephones
By Abraham Lincoln
During the War Years, a radio was as rare as a telephone. Very few
people had radios or telephones in their homes.
We had an old radio my dad got during the Depression but it wasn’t much
to look at. I remember hearing President Roosevelt talking about the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Later I listened to Joe Louis in his fights when he knocked out people
in the first round.
We did not have a telephone. Sometimes, my mother would give-out Freda
and Joe Harleman's telephone number to people she knew. And when they
called mother; and they never called her unless someone died, or was
about to die, or, had just been in a terrible auto accident; mother
would know it was a life or death situation.
So, for a big, heavy-set woman, my mother moved pretty fast to get to
the other end of town to take the phone call in the parlor that Freda
closed-off with pocket doors when mom entered.
The two grocery stores had telephones and we could use them in an
emergency. Those were the phone numbers you gave relatives to use when
they needed to reach you. When they called, the grocer would send
someone to find you and tell you that you had an important phone call.
There was no foolishness on phones in those days. Phone calls meant
somebody was either dead or dying or they had been in a terrible
accident and were not expected to live. Phones were only used for
emergencies and that is why most people ran to answer the phone call.
Listening to the radio was a special event too. Radios were only turned
on to listen to programs that everyone liked. Lowell Thomas read the
news to us each evening, and on Saturday mornings the radio was tuned
to The Buster Brown Show. During the war, mother and I would listen to
Amos and Andy, The Shadow Knows, and the Great Gildersleeve.
We had to listen and let our imagination picture the people and the
scenes that we heard. It was a good brain exercise; and we were often
astonished to see one of these celebrities in a newspaper or magazine,
because they never looked the way we had them pictured.
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