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This story was published in Radio Recall, the journal of the Metropolitan Washington Old-Time Radio Club, published six times per year.
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OTR REBUTTAL FROM WISCONSIN
By Ron Sayles, President of the Milwaukee Area Radio Enthusiasts
(From Radio Recall, June 2006)
When I received the latest issue of "Radio Recall," Volume 23, April 2006, Number 2, I read with interest the two negative reviews on the book, "I Hid It Under the Sheets," by Gerald Eskenazi. I have to disagree with what those reviewers had to say.
The author and I both graduated from high school in 1954, so I assume that we are about the same age. I find it fascinating reading about him growing up in Brooklyn, New York while at the same time I was growing up in Pewaukee, Wisconsin during the same decades. Two vastly different milieu, but we both listened to the same radio programs.
One reviewer wrote, "it was written with surprising little research." I don't think this book was meant to be the definitive work on Olde Tyme Radio; it is someone's recollection of growing up in Brooklyn, New York in the 1940s and the 1950s, nothing more, nothing less, and the role radio played in that growing up.
The two reviewers notwithstanding, I found the book to be delightful and I recommend it to anyone who is sixty or seventy something.
Note: The original item in our April issue reads as follows:
The New York Times recently reviewed a book entitled I Hid It Under the Sheets: Growing Up with Radio by Gerald Eskenazi (Univ of MO Press, $29.95). The author tells of growing up in the '40s in Brooklyn, listening to Superman, Lone Ranger and Captain Midnight. Reviewer Tara McKelvey termed the book's writing flat, its structure disjointed, and wirtten with "surprisingly little research, relying instead on a static-y memory." Mel Simons, of the Radio Collectors of America (in Boston) concurs, saying the book's actual connection to OTR is tenuous, moreover it is dull, pointless, and fails to hold one's interest.
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