As the funeral procession crept along East Ft. Lowell Road toward Evergreen Cemetery, Tucson Police waved the priest by. He had presided over the Requiem Mass and ignored speed limits as he hurried to beat the procession to the cemetery. The priest had officiated many funerals and didn’t care for all of them. “Some of the Mexicans get carried away,” he told me, “hysterical and screaming. I even saw one of them jump onto the coffin.” I was an altar boy at the time and remember the conversation after more than half a century. I respected the priest, but his comments troubled me, and not because of my Mexican-American background. I thought it inappropriate, even for a man of the cloth, to criticize the expression of grief. There is no handbook; not everybody does it well. I once was asked to represent an elderly couple in a minor dispute with their neighbor, who turned out to be an acquaintance from my broadcasting days. When I called him, he told me his 90-year-old Mother had just passed away. That caught me by surprise and I paused, thinking about what to say. After a few seconds, he said, “Well, I guess it’s not important.” If he could have seen my expression of shock and sorrow, he would have understood why I groped for words. Over the phone, I was just a silent jerk.
I thought about that interaction and the priest’s comments after President Trump’s clumsy attempt to place a condolence call to the widow of Sgt. LaDavid Johnson, who had been killed in Niger.
The War of the Worlds
Despite his bravado, Mr. Manulis panicked and bolted out of the car. He was so frightened by the reports of interplanetary invasion that he ran off, leaving Aunt Bea to contend with the green monsters he expected to drop from the sky at any moment. She walked home. Six miles. When Mr. Manulis called for a date the next week, she told my mother to say she couldn’t see him. She had married a Martian.
– Woody Allen, “Radio Days” (1987)
Four score years ago less one, a radio drama by 23-year-old Orson Welles “created almost unbelievable scenes of terror in New York, New Jersey, the South and as far west as San Francisco,” as listeners drank in a Halloween tale of an invasion from Mars. As Welles advised his audience at the beginning of the broadcast, the presentation was an adaption of H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” Most of the audience understood they were listening to a gripping radio drama, but not all. Welles’ program, the Mercury Theater, was far from the most popular show in the timeslot. That honor, curiously, belonged to Edgard Bergen, a ventriloquist who starred, with chief dummy Charlie McCarthy, in the Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety program. Bergen’s prominence was strange enough in its own right. As Joshua Mostel exclaimed in the movie, Radio Days, “He’s a ventriloquist on the radio – how do you know he’s not moving his lips?” But I digress.
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