One of Our Boys Shoots the MoonOne of Our Boys Shoots the Moon
By 1943 troops nearly outnumbered civilians in greater Nashville, and the city was frequently overrun with soldiers in training or in transit. They filled the hotels, the bars, the theaters, and the streets. Sometimes, when space simply ran out, they slept in parks or on the steps of the post office on Broadway. Many of them loved the Grand Ole Opry, and olive uniforms became as common in War Memorial Auditorium as dresses and overalls. The only problem was they were punishing the governor’s beautiful theater, and Harry Stone had to answer for it. “By now I had developed a sort of sixth sense and I felt it coming,” he wrote. “I believe it set country music back ten years when I listened to this committee spell out all the reasons why we should not only be put out, but put in jail. But it sure was a nice place.”
His next target—his only target—was the big, Gothic, red-brick tabernacle just off Broadway. “I had a heavy heart that day when I set out to see Mrs. Naff, then manager of the Ryman Auditorium,” Stone said. “I knew if she turned me down, we had no other place to go.”
Lula Naff, then over sixty-five years old, had run the Ryman like the Carnegie Hall of the South for four decades, and approaching her was no small matter. Even in the 1940s, the Ryman was among the most venerated and symbolic public spaces in Nashville, having been an ecumenical church and an eclectic concert hall in the heart of downtown. Its origins make for one of the most repeated stories in the city’s history.
One evening in 1885, riverboat magnate Tom Ryman found salvation in the words of a tent evangelist named Sam Jones. He promised Jones that he’d build him a grand tabernacle, and fourteen years of fund-raising and construction later, he delivered. Jones named the building the Ryman Auditorium while preaching at Ryman’s funeral. In the years that followed, the hall rang like the inside of a grand piano, first with fire and brimstone, then with choirs and hymns. Symphonies and opera companies followed, as did vocal recitals, ballet dancers, theatrical spectacles, political rallies, fiddlers, and banjo pickers. The building seemed to have been mortared with music and designed with performance in mind.
Stone seems to have made his case, and perhaps after years of depression and war, Naff was glad to land a regular Saturday night show with such a large following. The fifty-two-week lease, at $100 per week, was more rent than National Life had ever paid. But with 3,500 seats, the venerable hall let more than a thousand additional patrons see the Opry each Saturday night. And still, lines more than a block long began to form outside the theater for every show. WSM improved the house with a radio control room, rudimentary dressing rooms, a public address system, and new lighting. It hired a crew of off-duty police and firemen for security, plus ticket sellers, stage hands, and electricians. Jim Denny’s concession business expanded. And the Grand Ole Opry had found a comfortable home—a little bit secular, a little bit sacred. Some golden ages really do begin on a date certain. June 5, 1943, launched the Ryman Opry.
That fall, Jack Stapp and Harry Stone pulled off a coup by doubling the number of NBC stations carrying the Prince Albert Opry, from 66 to 129. The price for this success was that the network portion grew more regimented. The Esty advertising agency, which handled the Prince Albert account, sent a man down to sit in on “rehearsals,” which puzzled the Opry artists, since they knew not of rehearsals. “You mean you don’t rehearse a network radio show?” the Esty man asked in the presence of Minnie Pearl. “You should have seen the look on that man’s face,” she related. “He was horrified. He went straight to the WSM officials.” Roy Acuff was assigned to mollify him. “‘I’ll tell you how we handle it,’ he said. ‘We have a fiddle chaser. If we run short, we just let the fiddler play ’til time’s up. If we run long, we don’t use the fiddler.’
“Well, this guy just went to pieces,” Minnie continued. “‘You will have a rehearsal,’ he ordered.’ ” This caused all sorts of problems. The Saturday morning meetings meddled with the touring operations, severely limiting the options for playing the prior Friday night. Then there was the added burden of a playback on Monday afternoon. The regulars would meet at WSM and listen to a transcription of the previous Saturday night show. The Esty people would listen to a duplicate recording in New York, call Nashville, and offer critiques. They offered Minnie help with writing her routines, which had largely been written by her sister, Virginia. Often what they came up with was awkward, she recalled. “We went for chuckles; they went for belly laughs,” she observed. “And sometimes their gags didn’t mean much to country folks.” Minnie did appreciate one Esty agency suggestion—that she crank up her “Howdy” from a demure country girl greeting to the blaring “HowDEEE!” that became her signature walk-on line.
From a self-interested point of view, the war years could scarcely have been better for the Opry and for WSM, for the global effort that was the war forced young populations and international populations together in a way that couldn’t help but spread culture and music. Historian Bill Malone wrote that country music “had taken great strides toward national acceptance during the 1930s but was still basically regional at the end of the decade; it would become a national phenomenon during the war.” Jack Stapp observed it directly. “The war is when the change started,” he said. “Every Saturday night I’d go over to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to produce a country show, and after the show I’d walk around the camp and no matter where I went I’d never leave the Opry. The Opry was on every radio in every barracks and there wasn’t any way these kids from New York and New Jersey could get away from it. It had to rub off on ’em.”
Had it not been for a shortage of shellac, a then-essential ingredient in record making, country music might have grown even faster. But wartime rationing and scarcity affected everyone. WSM withdrew its pending application for 500,000 watts of power, calling it “the patriotic thing to do, considering the amount of vitally needed materials that would have to be used in the station’s construction.” Opry musicians struggled to keep their shows on the road. “We schemed every way imaginable to get gasoline ration stamps,” remembered Minnie. “And our retreads had been retreaded so many times the original rubber began to rot from the rim out. On one 500-mile trip into Nashville we had thirteen flat tires.”
National Life Shield Men had to give up their promotional sewing kits, when needles became precious. Aaron Shelton, inspired in part by Governor Cooper’s weekly addresses over WSM, grew a victory garden. But few sacrifices were as poignant as the downsizing of the annual company picnic. In the 1920s, National Life had rented a paddle wheel steamboat that carried hundreds of employees far up the Cumberland River, where they disembarked in a shady park for a long afternoon of three-legged races, lounging, and feasting. In the 1930s, busses had taken the Home Office family to Dunbar Cave, a cozy resort spot with vast swimming pools and a natural amphitheater under a large outcrop of rock. During the war, the busses and the gas were unaffordable, so the picnic was held inside the Home Office itself. Employees from C. A. Craig to the white clerical staff (African American porters, cooks, and janitors were offered a segregated event) played bingo for war stamps, contested each other in table tennis and darts, and danced until after dark to Francis Craig’s orchestra.
“In 1942,” Owen Bradley remembered, “Beasley Smith whetted our appetites and got us into thinking about writing songs.” Smith, the easygoing WSM veteran conductor/arranger, had proven success was possible when his first widely known composition, a train song called “Tennessee Central Number Nine,” was recorded by Roy Acuff. Inspired, Smith attempted a publishing company in partnership with Owen Bradley and a short, brusque WSM piano player named Marvin Hughes.
“We had a song we had written, called ‘Night Train to Memphis’ that Beasley more or less instigated,” Bradley said. “Marvin had a terrific little song, called ‘Deliver Me to Tennessee.’ It was recorded by Gene Krupa, Woody Herman, and a few others. I made some contribution by writing a couple of themes.” When Hughes and Bradley left for the war, Smith remained at the station and the little company, BMO Music, didn’t last long, failing in its bid to corner the market in “Tennessee” songs. But another publisher born in the WSM studios did thrive.
Fred Rose had arrived at WSM in 1933 as a staff pianist with a solid background as performer and songwriter. He had known the Vagabonds in Chicago, and they’d helped him arrange an audition with Harry Stone at a time when Rose badly needed work. His first show, Freddie Rose’s Song Shop, ran weekday afternoons for fifteen minutes before the evening news, paying about five dollars per spot.
Coming up the hard way as a saloon singer in St. Louis and Chicago, Rose had endured the shady early days of music publishing, where often the only way to make songs pay was to share credit with a vocalist or an orchestra leader, or sell the copyright itself for a paltry one-time payment. But by the late 1920s, he was hobnobbing with the city’s top bandleaders, playing on the radio, and recording for Brunswick. Moreover, he was a prosperous member of the hard-to-crack ASCAP songwriting fraternity. Unfortunately, he also had developed a bad alcohol habit that contributed to the dissolution of his first marriage and to his getting fired from a good radio job. Then the Depression nearly ate him alive. There wasn’t decent work in Chicago or New York, so he chased a tip about WSM in Nashville, driving South with two other radio performers in May 1933.
At WSM Rose found he’d begun to influence country music without ever having cared a bit about it; the Delmore Brothers, he learned, performed one of his songs. In turn, the country music culture at WSM influenced Rose. Biographer John Rumble wrote that “the Vagabonds’ business acumen provided Rose with an excellent example not only of how a pop-to-country transition could be made, but also of how country music could be marketed.” His show, however, was pure pop. Rose’s playing was called, soft, easy, and unusually relaxed. “Rose’s overall approach was informal, and he often ‘conversed’ with the audience as his melodies flowed in the background,” Rumble wrote. “Listeners could telephone requests to the station. Some sources believe that he actually composed songs on the air according to titles suggested by the callers.” Rose suffered from horrible eyesight and even with glasses could see neither sheet music nor the clock on the wall, sometimes forcing engineers to cut away from him in the middle of a song when his time expired.
After a year or two, Fred Rose left Nashville, first for New York, where he discovered Christian Science, quit drinking, and further developed his publishing relationships. After he returned to Nashville in mid-1936, Jack Shook, the versatile guitarist who led the Opry’s Missouri Mountaineers and played with the Dixie Dons, offered Rose some inroads in Hollywood with cowboy pictures. Artist manager Joe Frank provided his steady mentorship as well. Between 1938 and 1942, Rose traveled back and forth frequently to Hollywood. His main work there was writing songs for Gene Autry and other top singing cowboys like Roy Rogers and Ray Whitley. His classics would include “Be Honest with Me” and “Roly Poly.”
So by the time Roy Acuff approached Fred Rose about starting a publishing company, Rose was already steeped in the complexities of the music business, with ties to New York, Chicago, and Hollywood. The deal was consummated in 1942, after Rose had moved back to Nashville for good with his wife Lorene. Acuff was looking for a long-term financial investment, according to Rumble. “It was partly Acuff’s growing awareness of song property that made him seek out Rose, whom he admired not only as a creative writer, but also as a veteran who would know the worth of songs and how to protect them far better than he.” Moreover Acuff was wealthy and more than able to offer $25,000 for the beginnings of the company. As it turned out, a mere $2,500 would be sufficient, and that came in the form of a loan from BMI. The firm took out an ad in Billboard promising “folk tunes and popular hits” from Nashville, and it quickly delivered with popular songs for Bob Wills and Acuff himself. The partners brought in Fred’s son Wesley Rose as an executive in December 1945, then added a full-time promotion man early in 1946.
And yet Rose’s contributions to Nashville’s burgeoning music scene went deeper than playing, writing, or business. “Rose believed that songwriters were the foundation of the music industry and that one of his primary duties as publisher was to assist them creatively and commercially,” Rumble concluded. “He thrived in the roles of editor, teacher, and mentor, and he pursued them actively and consciously.” It wouldn’t be long before he struck up just such a relationship with a lanky, difficult singer songwriter from Alabama who would change the music’s history.
W47NV operated like a quiet little brother to WSM-AM. Though it is said to have only run one commercial spot in its decade of life, Edwin Craig was very much behind the station as an outlet for classical music. Even if only a handful of Nashville music fans had FM radios at the time, DeWitt said, W47NV “got [Craig] out of the criticism from his Belle Meade friends for the Grand Ole Opry, and it had a big effect on him.” After Tom Stewart left for the war, Marjorie Cooney, who was still doing her Ann Ford news broadcasts on 650 AM WSM, took over as the FM station’s general manager. It was a hands-on job that included spinning and announcing records. Cal Young was one of her few employees, a fresh-from-high-school Nashville native and Air Corps cadet stationed in Smyrna. He was desperate to get into radio and badgered Jack Stapp for months for a job as an announcer. He had no experience whatsoever, so Stapp politely turned him away time after time. But eventually Stapp needed a warm body to staff the FM station and decided to give Young a chance.
“I’d do anything I could. I couldn’t do it very well, but I just stumbled through it,” Young recalled. He spun RCA Red Seal classical albums and big, sixteen-inch transcription discs that came from companies aimed at the musically cultivated market. Cooney mothered him. She advised him that he really should read Time and Newsweek each week to keep up with current events. And when he elicited complaints from a bunch of old ladies for playing hot swing music during a show dedicated to a religious school over in Sewanee, Tennessee, she laughed it off. “I’ve never known a person I think I liked and admired more than Marjorie,” Young said late in life. And many others who knew her, including Minnie Pearl, felt the same way.
The FM control room was a closet-sized annex of the AM master control, and sometimes Louie Buck and Vito Pellettieri and some of the other announcers would turn Young’s lights off without warning. “They were looking over at the Andrew Jackson Hotel because they thought they saw somebody nude over there,” said Young, recalling what was actually a fairly common form of juvenile fifth-floor recreation. “It was about two blocks so they didn’t see much of anything.”
For Young, just being at WSM was something special. He says the place reminded him of New York, in its look, expectations, and professionalism. But this ardor led to an accident. “I wanted my picture made with a WSM microphone,” he said. “So I borrowed one from one of the engineers.” The engineer told him to be careful with it, and he said he would be. He got the coveted picture made at a local studio and put the microphone back. “What I didn’t tell them back then was, I was going down those steps—must have been twenty steps as you went down to the street—I dropped the damn microphone and man, it rolled down about ten of those steps. I didn’t say anything about it. I was scared to death. I don’t know if the mic worked after that or not—I doubt it.”
In August 1943 seventy-five-year-old C. A. Craig surprised his quarterly board meeting by announcing he was stepping down as chairman of National Life. Runcie Clements took his place, opening up the company’s presidency. Edwin Craig had no serious competitors for the position, making him the first president who wasn’t part of the original founding group. But if one generation of leadership was giving way to the next, nothing in Edwin Craig’s character or style foretold change. Craig lived ensconced in the symbols and comforts of the Old South, working long days but always doting on his wife and three children when he returned at night to their Belle Meade mansion. His benevolent paternalism translated from home to a close-knit National Life culture at work. Nearly every former National Life or WSM employee will eventually use the word “family” to describe the company’s climate, and they agree that it started at the top, with the man many of them referred to as Mr. Edwin. WSM trombonist and National Life house photographer Beverly LeCroy said that Craig “was more like a father with 1,700 kids. He loved us.”
Neil Craig admired his father’s innate sense of diplomacy. “He loved people. People loved him,” the younger Craig said. “And he could get down on their level. Or he could go talk to the president of NBC and get on his level too. He was the best I ever saw. He always, first and last, was a people person.” And more than a mere glad-hander, the elder Craig threw himself into service: vice chair of the city’s Red Cross chapter, member of the Vanderbilt Hospital board of managers, steward of West End Methodist Church, a Mason, and a Shriner. During the war, he volunteered to serve on the local draft board, a dreadful job that nobody wanted. His daughter remembered Craig fielding phone calls from distraught mothers who begged him not to take their boys.
Craig hated to fly. Train rides framed his frequent business travel. He’d go to Los Angeles by way of New Orleans, where he’d stop in the ACME Oyster Bar to drink Sazerac cocktails and sing songs with the old men at the bar. He knew the porters and oyster shuckers by name, and they knew him. After changing trains, he’d ride west in a Pullman car, savoring the rhythm of the rails and reading Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey novels. If he could manage it, he’d steer his travel around a chance to be outdoors with a rod or a gun. He spent many a night in a duck blind with Grand Ole Opry artists and hillbilly pickers. He befriended hunting and fishing guides throughout the South, especially rural Louisiana, whose Cajun people he adored. One guide, “one of the toughest guys you ever saw,” according to Neil, named his son Edwin Craig Hall.
At the same time, Craig was as respected and effective as any of Nashville’s elite. “Ed Craig was the most outgoing business executive I ever saw,” said John Seigenthaler, long-time editor of the Tennessean. “He was dynamic. Bill Weaver [Craig’s successor as president] was close, but he was close because he’d seen the master operate.” Irving Waugh, in a 1978 interview, said Edwin Craig’s stature, combined with his fervent belief in country music, was critical to the Opry in withstanding numerous assaults in the 1930s and 1940s. “I feel that, at the time, he was the only person of substance in the whole United States supporting country music,” said Waugh with trademark extravagance. “When I say a person of substance, I mean a person of wealth, social position, a person whose personal tastes included classical music. He was a man of catholic tastes. He had a great belief and faith in country music and he wanted it on this radio station.”
Craig’s other great musical passion—one that bolstered his close relationship with Jack DeWitt—was the opera. When he was in college, Edwin volunteered to be an extra in performances at the Ryman, including dressing up in Egyptian garb to be in the chorus of Aida. And from his twenties on, he and his wife Elizabeth traveled to New York every year for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s season.
Jud Collins liked to tell a story of a time when he saw into Craig’s character. One afternoon, an engineer who was tied up spinning records (one of their duties before disc jockeys took over the task) asked Collins to call the NBC control room in New York to resolve a problem with an upcoming feed. But long distance calls were big deals then, and the operators in National Life had to know you had authorization. Collins, ever so young and uncertain, felt stumped:
I tried Stone and Stapp. Couldn’t find them on a Sunday afternoon. Finally I just called Mr. Craig. He said, “Well Jud, is this in the best interest of WSM?”
“Yes sir.”
“You tell the operator I’ve authorized this. One more thing. You can have my authority to do anything you want and spend any amount of money at any time if it’s in the best interest of WSM.”
I was sort of flabbergasted. I said, “Well, Mr. Craig, thank you. That’s very nice.”
He said, “Jud, one more thing.”
There was a pause.
“Just be damn sure you’re right.”
As WSM staff peeled away to join the war effort, jobs opened up. One to take advantage was a thirty-two-year-old Texan with flinty eyes softened by a baby face. The Opry had not been part of Jesse Granderson Turner’s boyhood. He was a pop music fan who became aware of the Opry’s mystique after an early job in Sherman, Texas, where he began spinning country 78s as an early disc jockey. Eventually, he found himself working in Knoxville as “Tex” Turner, where he was involved with the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, a popular East Tennessee radio barn dance. A fellow announcer there named Ernie Keller moved to WSM and then helped Turner get a job interview with Ott Devine reading commercials and news. He was hired on the spot, though Devine suggested he adopt the more dignified “Grant,” and urged him to stay for that night’s Grand Ole Opry.
Grant Turner remembered being introduced to “Judge” George Hay that night but not by whom. The Judge was delighted to meet him and asked if he would please sit on a bench beside the stage, watch the show, and form some comments for afterward. They hit it off. Grant Turner’s first day of work was June 6, 1944, a day of indescribable anticipation and concern. The station was on war footing, everyone riveted by the NBC and BBC feeds about the Allied invasion of Normandy. Long before they ever saw pictures in Life magazine or on the newsreels, and even before the newspapers could catch up, Nashville, like the rest of America, experienced the emotional whipsaw that was D-Day on the radio.
Hay mentored Turner into a major-league announcer, teaching him how to enunciate, leading by example. “He never did a broadcast without a glass of water at his side,” Turner recalled about Hay. “He then had a number of vocal limbering-up exercises he did, as an opera singer, going the full range of the scale . . . mi mi mi, la la la and so on.” Turner watched Hay audition people, studying the care with which he listened, his enthusiasm for something fine, and his polite demurrals when he told lesser artists the roster was full and he wanted to have them keep practicing. Hay took Turner on the three-block walk to Frank Varallo’s on Church Street for three-way chili, an essential Nashville plate dinner of spaghetti topped with tamales and beef and bean chili. Hay also introduced Turner to golf, driving him (terribly) out West End Avenue, miles into the Belle Meade hunt club countryside, to the course at Percy Warner Park. Hay teed up a ball and whanged it with gusto and an edge of un-Judge-like aggression. “You know before I take that swing, I think of a certain person I despise,” Hay said. Turner could tell Hay had someone very clearly in mind. “I think of him, and then I hit this ball like I would like to hit him.” Turner also remembered coming off the golf course at the end of a day with the Solemn Old Judge when another golfer told them the radio was reporting sad news: President Roosevelt was dead.
In mid-1945, NBC discontinued its long-running Farm and Home Hour, a feed and seed program aimed at farmers and farm wives. For WSM, pledged to serve rural audiences, that left a vast hole in its schedule. The station had broadcast daily farm market reports since 1929 and built on that in the 1930s with weekly farm and homemaker shows produced from the Knoxville campus of the University of Tennessee. On the strength of such potent segments as “Home Grown Fruits for Amateurs” and “Bug Bombing with DDT,” WSM’s agricultural programming earned Variety magazine’s “Farm Service Station of the Year” award in 1938. The station added Homemaker’s Chat on Saturday mornings, and by the 1940s, University of Tennessee president James Haskins figured WSM’s farm shows were reaching a million listeners. Moreover, the Knoxville-based shows evolved into a more elaborate educational program called Campus of the Air, with lectures and poetry readings alongside the farm news. It reached a statewide network of eight other radio stations.
WSM knew the NBC feature was coming to a close and tried to come up with a replacement. Several months of looking for the right farm director proved fruitless. Then all of a sudden, they found their man thanks to a wrong number. Rotund and jovial John McDonald, a dairy farmer with a University of Tennessee agriculture degree, had just quit a vocational agricultural job in Ashland City, a few miles down the Cumberland River. He was in Nashville at the Hermitage Hotel, where a state agricultural official he knew gave him some job tips. “I dialed WSM by mistake,” McDonald told the Tennessean in 1980. “I had their number in my pocket. I had been thinking about calling them. I asked Harry Stone if the station needed someone who knew something about agriculture. He said he had been looking for someone like that for six months.”
As part of his audition, Stone took McDonald to visit with a National Life employee named Charlie Luker, a former farmer, who gave the young man a nod for authenticity. McDonald also spoke with Edwin Craig that day, before officially being offered the job. On his first day of work, he came in with a big hunk of hair cut out where, the day before, he’d needed stitches after an accident with a fishing lure. In McDonald’s first on-air interview, the president of the American Farm Bureau said American agriculture was “going to hell in a damn hand basket,” then yammered on well past the show’s cut-off time. “I knew I was fired,” the host said. But it didn’t work out that way. Instead, the show born that day—Noontime Neighbors—ran for twenty-seven years.
McDonald knew his audience as well as any of the WSM announcers. “Farm people are hard to reach at best. They’re hard-headed,” he told a group of radio people in 1950. “I can say that because I am one. I grew up a farmer and my Dad was a farmer.” He rewrote wire copy of farm reports because he could tell the people who’d written them “haven’t ploughed.” He used simple language but was careful not to get “too corny.” At a station whose other announcers took diction seriously, he said “Missippi” and “y’all” and never acted as anything other than a good ol’ boy who’d had a few strokes of luck. He knew the minutiae of cattle breeds, fertilizers, hybrids, and veterinary medicine. He knew that one confused the 4-H club and the Future Farmers of America (FFA) only at one’s own peril. He knew that women made 85 percent of the purchasing decisions in the farm home, that they love recipes (if they’re “home tested”), and that it was important to have plenty of mimeographed copies ready to mail out if you mentioned one on the air. He even knew how to draw out the often hidden wit of agricultural extension workers or Farmers Home Administration bureaucrats in on-air interviews.
Noontime Neighbors mingled country and pop more aggressively than perhaps any WSM show so far. Owen Bradley led a twenty-six-piece orchestra, often in support of the station’s best pop singers. A rock-solid country band called the Musical Millers was arranged by a long-time WSM musician and producer named Milton Estes. Once the show had been kicked off by announcer Louie Buck, Estes essentially anchored the broadcast, introducing McDonald, who sat at a desk with an enormous dinner bell.
Set up in Studio C every day at 12:30, Noontime Neighbors drew a live audience of office workers with bag lunches who came from National Life and the state buildings next door. McDonald also frequently took the show on the road, capturing interviews with farmers in their fields on a wire recorder and reporting from Mule Day or the Crimson Clover Festival. Remarkably, though Neighbors could have milked a major sponsorship from agribusiness, it remained a sustaining (ad-free) show for many years. In its early years, it cost WSM $750 per week in talent, production, and travel. But it was one of the first things WSM officials would mention when called on to defend their community service and their clear channel status in Washington hearings.
Irving Waugh felt left out of the war. With his sailing background, he was gung ho to fight on PT boats, but the Navy turned him down based on his academic record. He was now a full-timer at WSM, sharing news and sports duties in the wake of Jack Harris’s departure. Married and with a young child, he considered avoiding service altogether. “But as the war moved deep into ’42 I became more and more restless, thinking this is the biggest story of my life and I’m not playing any part in it,” Waugh remembered. He investigated enlisting in the Marines, but there was no assurance that after boot camp he could get assigned to the combat correspondent division he wanted. Harry Stone countered with a better idea. The War Department wanted several clear channel radio stations to contribute correspondents to the civilian press corps. Waugh loved the idea, but his draft board in Salem, Virginia, wouldn’t clear it, saving him, it seemed, to be called up to fight. After more than a year of limbo, Waugh traveled to Salem and confronted them: draft me or let me go overseas with a microphone. They relented, and at last, in late 1944, Waugh began a long journey to and around the Pacific theater.
His first stop was Manila, where he found Jack Harris, by now the chief radio press liaison for General Douglas MacArthur. Harris got Waugh oriented and helped him get an on-the-fly network promotion. NBC paid him $50 for two-minute stories. He was made a stringer under Merle “Red” Muller, a famous Time magazine writer who’d been recruited by the network.
“If there was something important going on, he took the broadcast,” Waugh said. “If it was a damn dull day, he’d say, ‘Irving, you’ve got the broadcast.’ And then I’d say to myself, ‘What am I going to do? What’s happening? Nothing is happening.’ And I’d have to luck into something.” He reported from New Guinea about four Nashville soldiers who’d been in combat almost continuously since 1942. He attended press conferences where MacArthur held forth and spouted off the most remarkable strategic information, only to have Army censors keep it out of the reports. He visited the USS Iowa because it was a near duplicate of the Missouri, the ship that was to play host to the Japanese surrender.
In March 1945 Waugh broadcast a dispatch about the Japanese surrender of Manila, a city badly damaged after the battle for U.S. occupation. He visited the hastily refurbished apartment building where the Emperor’s delegation had just stayed the night during its humiliating mission. With his buttoned-up accent ringing through the long-distance, shortwave signal, Waugh reported: “The building formerly had been a four-story apartment, but the fourth floor had been burned out, and the roof was wholly gone—the concrete flooring of the upper story serving as a roof for the three floors below.” Not only did he speak in elegant, compound sentences, he found many telling details. He described the woven mats hung in the blasted-out windows and the urban war-torn wasteland outside. The young GIs taking care of the housing had just waxed the entrance hall floor, he said. “Two of the Japanese slipped on the polished surface, and one went down on his knees.”
The most remarkable of Waugh’s reports came from Japanese soil, just hours after the first U.S. forces landed there following the nation’s post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki surrender. The long-planned and long-feared invasion of Japan, expected at one point to cost 100,000 Allied lives, transpired bloodlessly, and radio reporters were lined up to report the news that the Yanks were landing by the thousands at Atsugi, south of Tokyo. Waugh was among the reporters who followed them in, only to learn that the airplane carrying the radio pool’s shortwave transmitter had crashed, leaving them no simple way to get their stories to the United States. They were told they could write hundred-word summaries that would be flown out and transmitted by wire to San Francisco. But for a story this big, that seemed unacceptable.
Improbably, Jack Harris came to the rescue. The former WSM newsman was responsible for helping reporters, like Waugh and others, gather and report news from the front, subject to military censorship. That day on the busy, noisy Atsugi airfield, Harris ran and shouted at Waugh to tell his boss, Red Muller, that there was a B-17 bomber on the field with a shortwave radio, which the media could use to reach the United States, by way of Guam.
“To hell with Muller,” Waugh thought. He retrieved the story he’d already submitted to the military censor for the newswire and ran down the airfield to find the bomber himself. Once inside the plane, he found two reporters, including CBS’s senior reporter Bill Dunn, waiting for the Guam connection to come through on the radio. Suddenly, a colonel appeared, telling the reporters to “get your asses out of the plane” and back to the wire office. Dunn and the other correspondent were furious and lit out to find Jack Harris and his boss, General Diller, to complain.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there,” said Waugh. And before five minutes had gone by, the radio crackled to life: “Go ahead CBS,” the voice on the other end said.
“Not available,” Waugh replied tersely.
“Go ahead Mutual.”
“Not available.”
“Go ahead NBC.”
And so he did, breaking in over the NBC network at about 9:20 p.m. New York time. He interrupted a program called Kay Kaiser’s College of Musical Knowledge to report that the Americans were on the ground and facing no resistance.
“So I’m reading my copy,” recalled Waugh of the moment he became the first American correspondent to report from occupied Japan. “And as I’m doing the broadcast, I became aware that [CBS’s] Bill Dunn had become so angry that he charged off and left his copy. So I pulled Dunn’s copy over, and he was a better writer than I was. So now I’m integrating Dunn’s copy into my copy. I’d been at it long enough I knew I could do that. That was my big moment. I had to think later that was only possible because I wasn’t important enough to go tell General Diller off.”
Days later, on September 2, 1945, Waugh found himself on board the Missouri, docked in Tokyo Bay, a civilian among thousands of sailors and officers who covered every horizontal surface of the giant ship like snow. Waugh stood on the higher of two massive gun turrets, looking down at the deck where delegates were being assembled in rows behind the dark desk where the papers were to be signed. In the midst of it all—again—was Jack Harris, stage-managing the surrender ceremony on the flight deck.
“Harris lined up Lord Louis Mountbatten, for example, the head of the British Empire column,” Waugh recalled. “He was lining them all up: the French, the British, the Dutch, Canadians, the Australians. If [generals] were two-stars, Harris waved them out. Only the fives, fours, threes. And he was a lieutenant colonel! So I’m watching that with a big grin.”
Besides bemusement, Waugh and all aboard knew a kind of exalted joy that would soon be shared by the entire Western World. They witnessed the foreign minister of Japan, in his top hat and tails, surrender after a fight that would long ago have broken any other nation. The Japanese had endured the firebombing of all their key cities and seen two metropolises erupt in nuclear infernos. The terror had been complete and unprecedented, and now it was over. Back in Nashville, jubilant throngs filled the streets. Military parades coursed up Union Street, and National Life clerks hung out the windows, waving and crying and cheering without any reason to stop.
Jack DeWitt was as pleased as anyone about the war’s end, but he was stuck at the Evans Signal Laboratory, living in a rented house with several other officers, and in a funk. Elise wouldn’t leave Washington. She said it was because she didn’t want to take Jack Jr. out of school, but in fact their marriage was on the rocks. DeWitt’s life on the coast of New Jersey was dull. There was little to do at night and one decent restaurant. Jack had no hope of accumulating enough points for discharge until the spring of 1946.
Orders came just after Japan’s surrender to develop methods for detecting and tracking long-range missiles, one of the most fearsome new weapons developed in the war. One of DeWitt’s projects in the latter half of the war had involved field radar that could track incoming mortar fire and deduce its point of origin, so he was qualified for the assignment. With no flying rockets to detect off the shore of New Jersey, DeWitt thought he could adapt his orders to an experiment that had tantalized him for years. In 1939, he and George Reynolds had tried to shoot a radar signal at the moon from a specially built antenna on the WSM tower grounds, but they found they had far too little power to produce a detectable echo. Now, Jack asked himself, what if we used the moon as a stand-in for a missile? It was a fast-moving body in the sky. And such an exercise could address some critical questions, chiefly: would radio waves cross the reflective ionosphere, travel through space, and return to the earth? The effort, dubbed the Diana Project, after the goddess of the moon, got the green light.
Over five months, DeWitt and a team of four men, all between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-six (Jack was thirty-nine), retrofitted a radar that had done service at Pearl Harbor, doubling its sending antennas. Their base was a twenty-foot by fifty-foot shack on a promontory out in the Atlantic ocean, with marshes of pine and scrub oak behind them. Towering over them was a one-hundred-foot tall antenna that resembled a giant, upended barbecue grill.
DeWitt wasn’t in the lab when the detector finally worked. At almost exactly noon on January 10, 1946, when the moon was suspended over the ocean like a scoop of ice cream in the blue sky, an oscilloscope began to wiggle exactly 2.4 seconds after the regular sending pulses. At 186,000 miles per second, that’s just how long they’d calculated the signal would take to travel there and back. Civilian scientist Herbert Kauffman proclaimed, “That’s it!” And the team went to fetch DeWitt.
The Signal Corps’ commander, General Van Deusen, after seeing a separate demonstration, made plans to personally announce the news at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers meeting in New York on January 24. DeWitt sat at the back of the room, waiting for the general to follow the “exceedingly dull” president of Bell Labs. At the same moment Van Deusen took the podium, a newsboy came in the room with an evening paper, whose banner headline read “Army Contacts the Moon.” The next day, DeWitt was a celebrity, his picture and news splashed across front pages around the country, including the top of the Washington Post. Most stories noted DeWitt’s peacetime career in Nashville at radio station WSM. Editorial cartoonists depicted moon men and moon creatures being disturbed by lightning bolts. Broadcasting magazine boasted fraternally: “One of Our Boys Shoots the Moon.” The New Yorker’s lead “Talk of the Town” item riffed on the accomplishment as “man’s first tiny venture into the cold, appalling hole of interstellar space.”
Observers could only speculate on the ultimate scientific value of the effort. DeWitt told reporters that it proved we could track and communicate with spacecraft, when and if such craft were launched out of Earth’s atmosphere. But what really resonated about the story was its optimism and its universally shared sense of wonder, the mingling of a very new science and a very old symbol. The world was anticipating peace, prosperity, and new frontiers of scientific discovery, including space and its mysteries. If they could see that bright future in a full moon, so much the better.
DeWitt’s own sense of the future was equally unbounded, and it did not appear that he’d be heading back to Nashville. In February, when reporters were still seeking him out for more detailed feature stories on the moon-radar experiments, he was given the Legion of Merit Medal and a citation “for the conception and development of a radar set which accurately located hostile mortars by their fire and directed counter mortar fire.” (He called this his greatest achievement, as it saved lives.) He was being courted by a major engineering consulting firm in Washington, and the radio industry was preparing for a massive set of hearings on the merits of high-powered, clear channel broadcasting. DeWitt even bought a house in Falls Church, Virginia.
Then Edwin Craig called and asked him to lunch in New York. He had two important pieces of news. First, National Life was going to carve out WSM as a subsidiary called WSM, Inc., encompassing the radio station, the Grand Ole Opry, and the Artist Service Bureau. Craig’s other news was that he wanted DeWitt to again return from New Jersey to run things—to be president of WSM, Inc. It was a hell of a thing to ask. DeWitt weighed his prospects in Washington against whatever might be blossoming in Nashville. WSM, alive with network productions and national talent, was recognized as one of the best radio stations in the nation, and there was talk of starting a television station, which would be a huge engineering challenge. Not incidentally, it was also now quite clear that his marriage was heading toward divorce. Perhaps it was big-fish-small-pond time again. He looked homeward, to a web of friends and family, to a broadcaster on the make, to a strange brew of Southern bluebloods and hillbillies, to the warm support of Mr. Craig, and he accepted the job.