Listen to audio

Run time: 11:05

Stream (help)

VBR M3U (Hi-Fi)
64Kbps M3U (Lo-Fi)

Play / Download (help)

(5.07 MB)64Kbps MP3 ZIP
(10 MB)VBR ZIP

Resources

WWII News BroadcastsWWII News 1945-05-06 Drew Pearson (May 6, 1945)

This is a contemporary amateur home recording of a live WWII-era radio news broadcast (see note below). This is the May 5th, 1945 installment of Drew Pearson's program of news and commentary, dealing mostly with the imminent end of hostilities in Europe. There is a gap near the end of the program where the original recorder skipped a commercial, and there is some fading towards the end of the program. The only information on the disk label is "Drew Pearson May 6, 1945 7:00 PM".


This audio is part of the collection: Open Source Historical Recordings

Artist/Composer: WWII News Broadcasts
Date: 1945-05-06 00:00:00
Source: Home recording disk digitized by old78collector
Keywords: News Programs; Radio Broadcasts; Spoken Word

Notes

This is a contemporary WWII-era home recording of a live radio broadcast. It is from one of a batch of 40 twelve-inch plastic-on-aluminum "Audiodisc" home recording disks that were salvaged from a garage, still packed in their original wooden crates. These recordings often start and stop abruptly and contain some noise and static, but with digital cleanup most are quite listenable. The only information I have about these recordings is the brief handwritten descriptions on the labels, so sometimes the content is a bit mysterious.

Individual Files

Write a review
Downloaded 673 timesReviews
Average Rating:

Reviewer: Logical - - August 24, 2007
Subject: Appreciated here
What serendipity: you present here a broadcast that aired on the very day that my paternal grandfather died (May 6th, 1945).

Coincidence: PB Welch was born the same year as Hitler, died suddenly one week after Hitler.

Coincidence: Pearson was my paternal grandmother's first cousin.
That makes him my first cousin twice removed.

I've never heard a Pearson broadcast before, so this is a treat. But it touches me to know that
he's speaking at the same time that my grandfather
had just died.

Their elder son of two sons, my uncle Paul, was in Europe at that moment. Letters did not get to Paul jr.

As late as the first week of July, '45, Paul wrote to his folks back home, "Mom, Dad, I'm coming home in August! I can hardly wait. It'll be so great to see you all again."
(He didn't know his dad was dead)

FIFTY NINE YEARS later, a call came to me from the current owners of that home that PB built,

"Reid, we had workmen here last month. They removed a faulty plaster section in the master bathroom. Something fell to the floor from the attic crawl space above."

Paul Welch Jr. had returned home from France in August.
He lived at home for year or so, taking care of his widowed mother (Pearson's cousin). Paul came home with the usual war booty souvenirs: a Lugar pistol, maps, etc.

How that Nazi SS knife ended on the floor of the bathroom, almost fifty nine years after Paul had hidden it? Why did Paul bury the dagger into the vermiculite up there?

I can guess, because I knew my grandmother's personality. She'd had enough horror. I just bet that Fern saw that dagger and demanded to son Paul,
"NOT in my house. No, you get rid of that dreadful thing right now."

And I posit that Paul put the dagger into that hiding place then and there,and forgot about it.

Paul died about the year 2000.

On May 6th, 2004, Beryl Fournier rang my home phone:

"...Reid, we think you should have it to give to your Uncle Paul."

"He's dead now."

"Well, then it should be with you. Can you come over?"

I visited my boyhood home again for the first time in decades. I came home with this thing I'll show you in the next form.

And so I close this posting, it was no review.
But, instead, another incredible confluence of dates, chance, history, kindness and rememberance
of the dead, of those (Pearson, our country's men, women, the people of the world who died in the struggle, the Allied nation's sacrifices;

for me, it all boils down to kinship with a symbolic knife that somehow has come to my possession,
I know not why, I am not at all spiritual.
I accept wonderful confluences of chance for what they are: rare mediums reinforcing a message.

The knife Fern Wolfe Welch would not have in her home:

http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/9244/screenshot214lk3.jpg