– NBC Radio – This Is Nora Drake – October 28, 1948 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
They always say there’s nothing like feeling better after hearing a story about someone’s life that’s worse than your own.
During those dim-distant days of life before Internet – cell phones – streaming – YouTube or even Television (the kind with only 13 channels and only Black and White) there was radio – and on radio there was drama and it was always during the day. Hour after hour, day after day, stories about people whose lives were, for all intents and purposes, a mess.
Long before the days of Jerry Springer (whom most of you may not know, but some may know as the Crown Prince of the Knock-Down/Drag-out/Trailer Park Kingdom), we had stories of fictional people, smack in the middle of some perilous and dubious series of circumstances – some of them would go for months without seeing an end in sight. It was the stuff that drove audiences en-mass to their radios – hanging on every word – a box of Kleenex never far away.
It was the 1940s – after World War 2 and right at the dawn of The Cold War, The Red Scare, The Atomic Age – any one of those could turn blood to ice water – together they spelled one gigantic nationwide panic-attack.
And what better way to deal with it than to hear stories about other people’s lives that were far worse (and more complicated) than your own?
One such daytime program and a staple in the diets of American sturm und drang was “This Is Nora Drake” – the gist of it goes like this:
“Nora Drake was a nurse at Page Memorial Hospital in a medium-sized town. She was one of several women featured on radio soap operas who “were adept at becoming involved with scoundrels, liars, or, as was most likely, married men.” In Nora’s case, she was a nurse in love with Dr. Ken Martinson, who married nurse Peggy King before he realized that his true love was Nora. Peggy refused to divorce Ken and had a “furious confrontation” with Nora, after which Peggy was crippled in an automobile accident, leaving Ken feeling obligated to remain married. Among other efforts against Nora, Peggy (whose father was a trustee of the hospital) sought her father’s help in getting Nora fired. After five years of making life difficult for Ken, Peggy was killed, which enabled Nora to pursue her romance.”
“Nora’s life gained another complication when her long-lost father returned. He proved to be unstable and impulsive, and he went to prison for shooting a gambler.”
The program went for a little over 10 years – putting audiences in a state of suspended animation five days a week. This episode ran on October 28, 1948 and centers around a displaced person, brought to America after the war – the rest, as they say, is the stuff of pure hysteria.
If you aren’t familiar with any of this – it will sound like Mars to you. But, at least it’s an education in what Pop Culture was all about during a time which most of you weren’t even being considered, because most likely even your parents weren’t born yet.
But it was part of our daily lives – it was what America was all about, at least partly – one of those pieces of the puzzle that, when all put together, would make everything clear.
It’s only fifteen minutes worth – and the singing commercials are worth price of admission alone – Kleenex is extra.
Enjoy – and it’s not my fault.
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