Celebrate Union County Women’s History

Annual Luncheon to Be Held April 10

After two years of physical distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic and cancellation of the Union County Historical Society’s annual luncheon during that time, the Society is pleased to host its annual luncheon on Sunday, April 10 at 2 p.m. at the Garden Restaurant, 943 Magie Avenue in Union.

“We are looking forward to welcoming so many of our members and friends of the Society that we have not seen for two years. It is sure to be a celebratory event,” President Joanne Rajoppi stated.

Well-known historian, academic and scholar Dr. Jonathan Lurie will be the featured speaker at the luncheon. A graduate of Harvard University with a doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Dr. Lurie has a long and distinguished career as a teacher, lecturer and author of several important works.

Dr. Lurie has also served as an instructor at Rutgers Newark since 1962, attaining the status of Professor in 1985. He has also served as visiting fellow in law and history at Harvard Law School and a visiting professor of law at the United States Military Academy, West Point.

His topic for the luncheon is: “What Has Happened to Our Commitment to Honesty? A Few Strictly Non-Partisan Observations.”

The cost of the luncheon is $35 per person and anyone wishing to attend can contact the President at 908-468-1012 for reservations.

Oral History Program

On April 6th at 6 p.m. a talk on Oral History will be presented by Dr. Abigail Perkiss of Kean University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Union County Historical Society, Kean University and Union County Cultural and Heritage Affairs. The event will be held at the Liberty Hall Academic Center and Exhibition Hall, 1003 Morris Avenue, Union.

Parking is available behind Liberty Hall adjacent to the Blue House and Firehouse Museum. We hope you can attend.

Student Excellence Awards

We are also looking forward to our May meeting with the presentation of awards for student excellence in their study and love for history.

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Thoughts About the Last 100 Years

By Bill Frolich (Continued)

We saw movies, too, in the good old days, but they were black-and-white silent pictures like Ben Hur, King of Kings, The Black Pirate, and The Man in the Iron Mask. If you had not yet learned to read, you needed someone with you who could explain the sub-titles to you. By 1929 the “talkies” ended that problem.

Silent Film Era

About this time radio had grown up a bit, and we had four major stations to which to listen: WEAF, WJZ, WOR, and WABC. Most of them broadcast interesting programs of various lengths of fifteen or thirty minutes, and even a full hour. Most of these programs included brief commercials, but nowhere near the amount of time used by present-day programs.

Some sponsors were makers of laundry products, thus originating the term “soap operas.”

Among the popular programs were Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, Amos ’n’ Andy, The Witch’s Tale, The Lone Ranger, First Nighter, and Lux Radio Theater of the Air, which featured hour-long edited versions of popular movies, sometimes with the original cast members.

Lowell Thomas presented The Sea Devil, Count Felix von Luckner, a German sea raider who captained a full-rigged sailing ship named See Adler during the World War, sinking many cargo vessels, yet with no loss of life. Occasionally there was an un-sponsored program known as a “sustaining program”, still looking for a sponsor.

Early Radio & Popular Programming

Radios were rather large items, some of which could be carried around, but the only miniature one was Dick Tracy’s wrist radio, a product of the mind of Chester Gould, a cartoonist in the comic section of a newspaper.

Television was still in the hands of the experimenters, and unavailable to the general public. Science magazines showed pictures of complicated set-ups of wires, vacuum tubes and large scanning discs with a ring of lenses. Video had a long way to go.

Early Broadcast Engineering