Not all things associated with the past or history are about profound events and changes – sometimes you tune into the past and it’s just another day; could be any day – any year. As someone who devotes a lot of time listening to cornerstone moments in history, or those small, subtle moments that prove to be harbingers of greater things to come, listening to a recording of an average day somewhere in the deep-dark past where nothing of any earth-shattering importance or anything other than the typical goings on in the typical life of an average City lends credence to the notion that life has been pretty much the same as it always was. The city in this case is Los Angeles. L.A. is a city of perpetual change by its nature, so listening to this half-hour slice of the average day, somewhere around Christmas in 1958 proves we all weren’t caught up in the paranoia of war or sinister intent – we were just getting on with our lives, just like we always have.
This slice-of-life comes from KNX Radio, one of the most popular stations at the time, one of the last of the era of Radio Drama and Entertainment that only two years later would abandon it’s dramatic side of programs to more genial talk shows and News and later, all news.
For a time, KNX adopted the slogan “Curious Radio”, where issues and events of both a local and international nature plugged into the audiences need to be informed.
So the snippets presented run the gamut from talking about early live Television and the many blunders, goofs and mistakes that only TV without the safety net could provide. The tape then switches over to another program, a call-in show that was becoming a wildly popular phenomenon in the late 1950s. This one, an interview with a near-victim of a shark attack off the Malibu coast.
In retrospect, it makes for fascinating listening – at the time it was sonic wallpaper, broken up by the big, sweeping moments that get carved into the National psyche. It gives you some small idea of what we were about in those deep-distant days. Day-to-Day life is the same as it always has been. Someday we will probably shuffle through recordings of typical, average days in 2025 and marvel at the similarities between people in 2025 and people in some far-off future.
And in that time, if some of us are still around, we may cringe or look wistful at a painfully confusing time and wonder what the big deal was – just maybe.
Or in the words of Talking Heads – “Same as it ever was – Same as it ever was”
Enjoy a day from 1958 where pretty much nothing happened.
