In my posting yesterday “Penultimate October”, 10/30 was billed simply as Halloween Eve (with two, more eventful, days to follow). In fact it’s two — two! — occasions in one: Grace Slick’s birthday (1939), and the War of the Worlds broadcast anniversary (1938), 86 and 87 years ago (so GS is just a year older than I am). Very brief notes.
Grace Slick. Extensive coverage in the Wikipedia article of GS in Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and the long time afterwards; yes, she’s sill alive.
I will just note the amount of time spent being carried away by her “White Rabbit” (from the Airplane’s 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow) — and then trying to interpret the images and the actual wording (the dormouse did not say “Feed your head!”).
The War of the Worlds on the radio. The Wikipedia summary:
“The War of the Worlds” was a Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air which was broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938 over the CBS Radio Network. The episode was directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds and is infamous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was actually taking place.
An then in my 8/12/17 posting “The war of the weeds”, there’s a section on the novel and its adaptations, especially this broadcast.
October 31, 2025 at 6:15 am |
Something I learned only yesterday: although the “panic” caused by the War of the Worlds broadcast is a well-established tale, according to a host on my local classical radio station (who used the anniversary as the basis for a daily trivia question), in actual fact there was no widespread panic, the reaction in the town in New Jersey where the “invaders” were said to first arrive was overblown by the press, and only a very small percentage of Americans even heard the broadcast.
October 31, 2025 at 8:31 am |
Yes, f course, the panic couldn’t have been truly widespread, since only some Americans were tuned into the broadcast. But it probably wasn’t entirely trivial, either, as reports spread by word of mouth, between neighbors and, especially, by telephone. Rumors and panics spread quickly and widely this way.