BW - EP153—001: Independence Day 1944—Norman Corwin From CBS To Pearl Harbor

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

Tuesday, July 4th, 1944. It’s been twenty-nine days since the Allies first stormed the beaches of Normandy. They’ve continued to slowly push inland, but the battle for control of the Caen has raged onward. CBS is there with up-to-the-minute news. On Saturday July 1st, A counterattack by German Panzer Corps failed to dislodge the British Second Army around Caen. When OB West Gerd von Rundstedt phoned Berlin to report the failure, Chief of Staff Wilhelm Keitel asked, “what shall we do?” Rundstedt replied, “Make peace you fools!” He was fired the next day. Meanwhile the U.S. 133rd Infantry Regiment captured Cecina in Tuscany, Italy. They’d enter Siena on Monday the 3rd. At the same time Allies and Japanese forces began battling in New Guinea and The Battle of Imphal in India ended in Allied victory. On the morning of the Fourth, Minsk, the last big German stronghold on Soviet soil, finally fell. This kind of war created a need for fast news relays, so much so that for the first time, news was being recorded on the battlefront. On Independence Day 1944, needing to push further inland from Normandy, the task fell to the 79th and 90th Divisions as well as the 82nd Airborne, all of whom had to assault uphill and around a large marsh in the low ground, while twelve Nazi divisions lay in wait, including several Panzer units. The troops fought yard by yard, making slow but steady progress at a high cost. The 90th Division alone lost over 500 men that day. This same day, General Omar Bradley had artillery units in the US First Army open fire on the German lines precisely at noon. Some units fired red, white, and blue smoke shells at the Germans. The message was clear: The Americans were in Western Europe and they wouldn’t be leaving until victory was achieved. ____________ The man you just heard was Norman Lewis Corwin. He was born on May 3rd, 1910 in Boston, Massachusetts. The third of four children, his mother Rose was a homemaker, and his father, Samuel, a printer. Norman graduated from Winthrop High School, but unlike his brothers, he did not attend college. Instead, he got a job at the Greenfield Reporter as a Cub newsman at seventeen. Corwin was later hired by the Springfield Republican where he worked as an editor. He became known for his column "Radiosyncracies." His first exposure to professional Radio broadcasting came with an opportunity to air an interview regarding one of the human interest stories he'd written. Station WBZA soon needed a newsreader and sought to have the position filled with someone from the local paper. Corwin got the job. By 1929 Corwin fashioned his own broadcast over WBZA, a combination of piano interludes interwoven with Corwin's original poetry readings. He called the program Rhymes and Cadences. In 1931, Corwin traveled to Europe with his older brother, witnessing the growing fascism, social and religious unrest, and political turmoil. It helped shape his broadcasting career. In June 1935, he went to Cincinnati to work at WLW. He soon learned that any on-air reportage of collective bargaining efforts were grounds for immediate dismissal. Objecting, he was fired. Eventually he got the ACLU’s backing and got the policy changed. Corwin came to New York, finding work as a publicist for 20th Century-Fox. He soon proposed a poetry and music program for WQXR. The program was called Poetic License, and it wasn’t long before both NBC and CBS took notice. A few days shy of his twenty-eighth birthday in 1938, CBS hired Corwin as a director for One-Hundred-Twenty-Five-Dollars per-week. Within a few months he directed his first Columbia Workshop experimental drama, “The Red Badge of Courage,” airing July 9th, 1938. On the night of Sunday October 30th, 1938, Corwin was rehearsing the pilot for a new program, Words Without Music. Downstairs, Orson Welles was broadcasting his infamous Mercury Theater “War of The Worlds.”