Sept. 11, one year later

["David W. Harris" <dwh@totalnetnh.net>]

Observations from spinning the dial a week ago...

A noncommercial station going commercial-free for a day!  What will they
think of next?  I didn't realize it until sometime in the afternoon when
I heard a recorded announcement from the GM thanking listeners for their
support, but NHPR went through September 11 without any of the usual
clutter of underwriter announcements.  NPR programs also lacked such
announcements and the sole PRI program I caught that day, Marketplace,
also forwent underwriters, even dropping their usual theme music which
incorporates GE's "We bring good things to life" jingle.  I suppose
other public stations also joined the commercial-free parade but I heard
local underwriter announcements during an afternoon break on WBUR.

I avoided most of NPR's 9/11 specials (they provided many, many, many
hours of special coverage to member stations) but cannot praise the
Sonic Memorial Project enough.  This montage of audio clips takes
listeners from lower Manhattan's early days to the aftermath of the
terrorist attacks and it's one of those magnificent productions that
moved me in a way I cannot imagine a television show trying to cover the
same territory could possibly do.  A 20-minute version of "September
Stories" ran on All Things Considered and CBC Radio One's This Morning
last week; I also recommend the hour-long program narrated by Paul
Auster which many stations aired in special time slots.  Both can be
heard at <http://sonicmemorial.org/public/stories.html>.

Among New Hampshire stations dropping music for network coverage of New
York ceremonies in the morning were WLNH, WHOM, and WOKQ or WZID (fact
is, I don't remember whether I stopped on 95.7 or 97.5!).  Down in the
Bay State, the biggest format breaker of the morning seemed to be WQSX,
which kept going until just beyond noon with listener call-ins, coverage
of ceremonies, Lee Greenwood, and more.  While "God Bless the USA," "God
Bless America," "America the Beautiful" and "Amazing Grace" got a lot of
spins Wednesday morning, U2 seemed to be the group of choice on rock
stations.  Both WXRV and WGIR-FM were playing "One" around 10 of 9,
presumably right after a moment of silence, and WBCN used "Where the
Streets Have No Name" as the first song after Howard Stern ended.

I surprised myself by spending a couple hours with Stern last Wednesday
morning.  The few times that I've checked out his show in the past I've
always found him talking about himself...boring!  That was also true
early Wednesday during the live portion of his show, but the end of the
program was a re-broadcast of the show from a year earlier, more or less
in real time.

I was listening to WBZ on that morning we all remember.  When I tuned in
around 9:06, having been alerted to the news by a co-worker, coverage
from WCBS was on the air and the half-hour that followed was a confusing
barrage of unbelievable information interrupted by a pitch to "traffic
on the 3's" followed by silence because of overburdened phone circuits.
Listening to Stern's re-broadcast brought back the confusion, the fear,
the disbelief, the misinformation, the horror of that morning.  Stern
and his gang also added a fair amount of uninformed
speculation--something I don't remember WBZ providing a year ago but my
co-workers certainly provided some.  [Off on a tangent--I heard more
uninformed speculation during a brief stop at WRKO later in the morning
last Wednesday--it seems to be a staple of some talk shows--never let
the facts get in the way of a good rant.]

By the time the Stern re-broadcast ended around 10:40, four airliners
had crashed, two of the world's tallest buildings had collapsed, the
Pentagon was in flames, there were reports (erroneous) of other
explosions and fires in D.C., and everyone was wondering what terror the
next half-hour would bring.  Stern's crew was having trouble getting
phone calls to go through and some of the cast didn't sound too sure
about whether they were going to get home that day.  The show really
brought back the horror of that morning.

I remember how we 7th-graders in Mr. Joseph's history class laughed our
butts off when he told us about a 1938 broadcast that led many people to
think a Martian invasion was going on.  This confirmed our adolescent
knowledge that our parents (or grandparents) were really, really
stupid.  It's now believed much of the audience joined the Columbia
broadcast as the first "news bulletins" from Grover's Mill, New Jersey,
were coming in, having tuned over from Edgar Bergan and Charlie McCarthy
on NBC as that show went to a musical break.  After listening to those
bulletins of one unbelieveable event after another on WBZ last September
11, I am much more sympathetic to those misled people of 1938.  It's not
the way Mr. Joseph told it, but it is now believed that nobody actually
died because of the Martian invasion hysteria.  Alas that the horrors
heard a year ago proved all too real.