I Hid It Under the Sheets: Growing Up with Radio

Jerry Eskenazi, sports writer for the New York Times, among other papers, relates what it was like growing up in New York in the pre-war years. His mother was divorced, and worked full-time, making young Jerry somewhat of an outcast, although he grew up under the watchful eye of his immigrant grandmother. Radio became his solace in the hours at home alone after school. Like all kids in Brooklyn, he discovered and enjoyed baseball, especially when he realized that Ted Williams was also the child of divorced parents. With considerable glee, Eskenazi writes of his introduction to the [then] rough-and-tumble world of newspapering, first at the New York Mirror, then at the Times. Along the way to writing this book, he compares radio memories with Tom Brokaw and Colin Powell. Although the book is nominally radio nostalgia, it paints an excellent picture of the way both radio and newspapers shaped the American experience in the pre-TV era. An interesting companion book to this would be Stud's Terkel's autobiography, Talking to Myself. Terkel, fully a generation older than Eskenazi, grew up in Chicago in similar circumstances (an immigrant family), and by the time Eskenazi discovered radio, was a bit player on many of the latter's favorite shows.

This is a very enjoyable book. It's a little difficult to categorize -- a memoirs that revolves around radio. If you are looking for an encyclopedia of old time radio, this is not it. This is radio as heard through the ears of one boy at one place in time. But it also presents a window onto what this device was in people's lives in a different error. There is a lot of information on the history of broadcast radio, the range of shows on air in the 40s and 50s and who listened to them, but this book is more about the role it played in the author's life (including a lot of coincidental meetings between the author later in life with many of his childhood on-air heroes). It is particularly poignant because the writer was the only child to a single mother and found himself relying on the radio for company.

The 1930s, 40s, and early 50s were the age of Radio. This is when most of America would tune in nightly for their favorite comedies, mysteries, westerns, science fiction, adventure, news, culture, and entertainment programs for children and adults. This was the ultimate era of "theatre of the mind" entertainment that took place in front of the glow of a radio dial. I Hid It Under The Sheets: Growing Up With Radio is Gerald Eskenazi's personal account and recollection of radio's broad impact on his generation and explains how and why it became such a major factor in shaping American and Americans during the years of the Great Depression, World War II, and the first decade of what was called the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union had the power to exterminate the human race in a nuclear holocaust. I Hid It Under The Sheets is a simply fascinating, original, and highly recommended contribution to mid-twentieth century American Cultural History library reference collections and supplemental reading lists.