Monday
Six and a half minutes to Congress
The morning schedule went out as printed — a breakfast show, a serial, dance music. Then the networks joined the Capitol, and the shortest declaration speech in American history went out live to the largest daytime audience radio had ever had.
Opening the day…
The night of
After midnight ET
Nine minutes past midnight in New York, Bert Silen reported from Manila that the Philippines were being bombed — the same correspondent who would be taken prisoner weeks later and who returned to the same microphone in 1945. Through the night the networks ran news and music, the two things they could produce without notice.
9:00 – 11:45 am ET
Don McNeill's Breakfast Club. Familiar Melodies. The Story of Mary Marlin. The daytime schedule went out largely intact — the serials had been recorded or were live and unstoppable, and the audience for them was the audience about to be told their country was at war.
11:50 am – 1:30 pm ET
CBS opened the microphones at the Capitol before the President arrived and stayed with the chamber through the vote. Roosevelt spoke for a little over six minutes. The Senate voted 82–0, the House 388–1. The surviving recording of the proceedings runs over an hour: it is the applause, the gavel, the roll call and the walking about, which is most of what a listener actually heard that day.
Afternoon and evening ET
Analysis, then dance music again — Irving Miller, Vincent Lopez and his orchestra — then back to the Far East for the late bulletins. By nightfall the shape of wartime American radio was set: news on the hour, correspondents by shortwave, and everything else carrying on around it.
Where this comes from
