The Things You Learn From The Show

[mrdj]

I was listening to a pre Thanksgiving show from 1939 and heard several references to the holiday that had the audience laughing at to what to me seemed to be inside jokes. Rochester talked about Thanksgiving and Jack responded with something to the effect that Rochester didn't even know when it was. Rochester replied that nobody knew, and the audience erupted in laughter.
Well, I googled Thanksgiving 1939 and what do you know, controversy!
The last Thursday in Nov. was the 30th. Retailers thought that put the holiday was too close to Christmas and would reduce shopping time. FDR then proclaimed it to be the 23rd that year and....well .... problems arose.
Check out: http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/thanksg.html

You never know what you learn listening to Jack Benny!

[Moose Hatrack]

Note the animated turkey hopping back and forth on the calendar next time you watch Bing and Fred in Holiday Inn... same slab of history appearing on film!

[helloagain]

Yes, listening to these old radio shows is not only entertaining, but educational as well. Almost every show is a history lesson. What amazes me is that they were never intended to be heard more than once.

[scottp]

I started catching onto this when I got Burns and Allen shows from November 1940 (although my mom had told me something about it years earlier.) And now "When Radio Was" has been playing Captain Midnight shows from November of 1939 (both '39 and '40 had five Thursdays in November.) Only when I looked it up again lately, did I realize FDR wanted to put it on the THIRD Thursday in years there were only four in November. So the controversy continued into 1941.
Hence my conspiracy theory joke-- "In '39 and '40, FDR didn't want Thanksgiving to interfere with the start of Christmas shopping season, and in '41, he wanted to get it out of the way before Pearl Harbor."

[Brad from Georgia]

I understood that FDR actually wanted every Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving. This was known as his "Pilgrim-packing scheme." Didn't work, so he tried to pack the Supreme Court instead.....

[Gerry O.]

Personally, I learned more about World War II from listening to that era's old radio shows than I learned from my school history classes!

[Mister Kitzel]

Sometimes references to then current events go over my head, but as I learn more the jokes become more evident. If anything, the jokes make us go look up our history!