Cubs Fans without Radios

This is an outlier post, I know, but something in a Wall Street Journal story about the Chicago Cubs caught my eye. Writer Jason Gay described the scene outside Wrigley Field in Chicago as the seventh game of the World Series was being played in Cleveland, Ohio. A huge crowd had gathered, waiting to celebrate if the Cubs actually won their first World Series since 1908. The crowd was so big that their cellphones won't work, and the fans couldn't get updates. The problem: no one had an AM/FM radio, a piece of 20th century technology:

Phones didn’t work; the crowd was so thick that local cell capacity was choked. “There is no service,” said 20-year-old Brady Friedkin. A radio might have done the trick, but nobody seemed to have a radio. A thoroughly modern crowd was suddenly reliant on the most primal communication tool: word-of-mouth. It could have been 5,000 years ago. It could have been…1908.

I like web-based and satellite access too, but I think some of us become too dependent on it. For lack of a simple transistor radio, these Cubs fan were forced to search out a television set, some watching a big screen tv in a private residence from the street! (You might remember old movies with scenes of people standing outside stores with television sets in the display window!)

When I was growing up, our family wouldn't think of going to sporting event without a transistor radio; that way we could listen to the play-by-play. Perhaps today we have become too dependent on cellphones and tablets. Yes, the "thoroughly modern crowd" relied upon person-to-person communication, and that's a good thing, but it's amazing to me that "nobody seemed to have a radio"!

In 1999/2000 PBS produced a program about the development of the transistor and the introduction of the transistor radio, battery-powered, portable, and relatively inexpensive. 

Guess what? There's no DVD, only a VHS video of the program, and it's rare. As rare as a transistor radio in the satellite generation.

Oh, and if you're looking for something on the Fifth of November and the Gunpowder Plot, here you go!

Our Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride Radio

Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride is also known as Bakelite*. My husband bought me this radio, an Airline, which was the store brand for Montgomery Ward, their model 04WG-611 AM tube radio from 1940's. When it arrived, I thought we should turn it on and hear Glenn Miller and His Orchestra or The Fred Allen Show! We did find a local station, KSGL, that plays "The Music You Remember". The radio has that warm tube sound and the bakelite cabinet does get warm. It looks like a radio my parents had.

The radio has been restored and polished up by a gentlemen named Eric in Lake in the Hills, Illinois; it has tubes and push button tuning that has the call letters set by the owners decades ago: WOR (New York), WBZ (Boston), WTIC (Connecticut), WSPR, WDRC (Connecticut), and WMAS (Springfield, CT). All but WSPR are broadcasting today!

Here's more information about the radio from the Radio Museum; it was made in America, in that city of big shoulders, Chicago.

*Bakelite is a synthetic resin chemically formulated and named after its Belgian inventor, Chemist L.H.Baekeland c.1909. It is pronounced "Bay Ka Lite". Originally it was used for molding items that were previously done of celluloid or hard rubber. One of the original uses was for pool balls. It is collectible in all its forms including jewelry, buttons, radio cases, lamps, dresser sets and many more items. It was used commercially for parts especially in electrical wiring. After bakelite and the introduction of so many other plastics and composition materials it was easy to confuse them all. People began to lump all plastics into one generic term "Bakelite".

Just a little bit of history on our dining room buffet.

The English Reformation Today, Episode One

Today on my radio program on Radio Maria (from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time) I am going to discuss the relevance of the English Reformation today--and this article I wrote for the Catholic Exchange would be useful background:

Commentators have been noticing the parallels between the HHS Contraceptive Mandate handed down on January 20, 2012, and the Tudor religious mandates of the sixteenth century. In 1534, Henry VIII had himself declared the Supreme Head and Governor of the Ecclesiae Anglicanae (the Church of England) and separated Catholics in England from the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope, taking that power to himself by an Act of Parliament, the Act of Supremacy. In 1588, his younger daughter Elizabeth I’s first Parliament passed laws requiring her subjects to acknowledge both her Supremacy, modeled on her father’s, and the Uniformity of the Church of England, based upon the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-nine Articles developed by Thomas Cranmer. Thomas Cranmer was the Archbishop of Canterbury for both Henry VIII and Edward VI, burned at the stake as a heretic during the reign of Mary I.

Henry VIII’s actions gave him control over the Catholic Church in England, as he regarded himself as a good Catholic (perhaps a little more Catholic than the Pope) who continued to believe for instance in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist and who left a will providing for prayers and Masses said for his soul after death. He required his subjects to accept this change, demanding loyalty through the Oath of Succession and the Oath of Supremacy, both of which denied the Pope’s authority over the Catholic Church in England. St. Thomas More, as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews recalled, was found guilty of treason and beheaded because he refused to accept this Tudor mandate that violated his Catholic conscience:

“I guess I grew up watching movies like Becket and A Man for All Seasons and seeing the church and state go to war with each other and being told stories from the Old Testament about the Maccabees, about people, families being told you got to eat pork,” he said. Matthews added that it is “frightening” to him “when the state tells the church what to do.”

Elizabeth I’s actions meant that Catholicism, even as her father had defined it after 1534 (sans monasteries, for example), was outlawed in England. When Catholics resisted, refusing to attend Church of England services, mounting a rebellion in the North of England—and when Pope St. Pius V issued a Papal Bull excommunicating Elizabeth and proclaiming her Catholic subjects free to disobey her—Parliament passed a series of recusancy laws. In an editorial in the Catholic World Report, “Twenty-first century Recusants” Matthew Cullinan Hoffman saw some parallels between those laws and the Obama administration’s HHS Mandate against Catholic consciences:

“Intentionally or not, the administration’s policy smacks of the methods established by England’s Queen Elizabeth against Catholic “recusants,” who refused to participate in the worship services of the Anglican Church during the late 16th century. Although Elizabeth’s regime, and those that followed for the next two hundred years, did not provide a penalty for Catholic belief as such, they found a simple and devastating way to coerce Catholics to violate their consciences: the recusancy fine, which was levied against those who absented themselves from Sunday Anglican worship or failed to receive communion once a year.”

Chris Matthews and Matthew Cullinan Hoffman are making reasonable connections. Even an anonymous poster to my local newspaper’s “Opinion Line” saw the point. The Wichita Eagle allows readers to post brief statements which appear both in print and in an on-line extra. This astute student of history commented, “Like Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, the Obama administration’s HHS mandate is an attempt to seize control of all Catholic institutions. But Catholics are only the beginning. If this decision stands, freedom of religion is dead in this country.” . . .

This link to the USSCB Fortnight for Freedom might also be helpful (especially as we'll begin with the prayer from that event as illustrated above), as would this one about the Anglican Ordinariate as Pope Benedict XVI describes it in Anglicanorum Coetibus.

I welcome all listeners of Radio Maria US to my blog, whether you're listening on one of their radio stations or on line or through one of their apps. Next week on The English Reformation Today we'll discuss some aspects of how the history of the English Reformation has been written and look at the state of the Catholic Church in England before the Reformation. I invite you to call in with questions and comments toll-free at 866-333-MARY(6279).