Thursday
Five forty-nine, and the only president most listeners could remember
The bulletin ran twenty-five seconds. Then American radio did the thing it had learned on December 7 — cleared the schedule, cancelled the commercials, and stayed up all night with the audience.
Opening the day…
The night of
Before 5:45 pm ET
Roosevelt collapsed at Warm Springs at about 1:15 pm Eastern and died shortly after 3:35. For two hours nothing was said on the air: the White House held the news until Eleanor Roosevelt had reached the Vice President. The serials and the afternoon music ran as printed — Lum and Abner working a crossword puzzle is in the archive from this day, broadcast into a country that did not yet know.
5:49 – 7:00 pm ET
The CBS bulletin survives and runs twenty-five seconds — the whole thing. Fulton Lewis broke it on Mutual; NBC Blue went to continuous coverage; Bill Henry was on air within the hour explaining the order of succession to an audience that had never needed to know it. Twelve years of one voice ended in under half a minute of another.
Evening ET
Commercial programming was suspended across all four networks — for most of them the longest unsponsored stretch in their history to that point. Don Fisher held CBS through the evening. On WNYC, Fiorello La Guardia spoke to New York about the death, one of the few voices that night not reading from copy. Truman had been sworn in at 7:09.
Where this comes from
