The Listening Life
( <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/84568447@N00/" target="fredseibert">fredseibert</a>/flickr
)
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
The music you're hearing is a three-person collaboration. First, Jimmy Giuffre, a pioneering clarinetist and bandleader, who died in April at the age of 86. The second, Reenah Schwartz. It's her high heels you hear echoing in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan office building 50 years ago. And the third is her husband, Tony Schwartz, who made the recording.
This is just one of over 30,000 Schwartz recordings. That he recorded so much is all the more remarkable for the constraints under which he did it. Tony Schwartz.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I'm not able to travel far. I have agoraphobia. And in walking, I could just go around my postal zone in the midst of Manhattan. And the postal zone was New York 19 at that time. That was the area I could travel in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What he lacked in range, he made up in depth, using a new recording device he built himself in 1945.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I made the first portable tape recorder. I brought the VU meter from inside the case to the top so I could look down at it and see how loud things were. I put a strap on it, so I could have it over my shoulder. I could go record children in the park doing jump rope rhymes. And I made 14 records for Folkways Records.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
When his recorder was mass produced, he struck a deal with those who bought it: send me your sounds and I'll send you mine. And they did. And when he wasn't dealing strictly in sound, he used his ear to inform his other vocation, TV advertising, much of it political.
He's best known for the so-called Daisy Ad he made for Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 race against Barry Goldwater, that of a young girl pulling off and counting daisy petals, a sound that dissolved into a man counting down to an atomic blast. And that was all just still a small part of Schwartz's extraordinary legacy as a media theorist, author, record producer, Broadway sound designer, advertising exec and folklorist.
Schwartz died on June 15th. In this piece, the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, reflect back on Schwartz and a life spent listening.
CHILDREN SINGING:
I won't go to Macy's anymore, more, more. There's a big fat policeman at the door, door, door.
[SINGING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I was interested in the sound around us.
[CHILDREN SINGING/STREET SOUNDS]
[WHISTLING]
CABDRIVER:
Two things that you're not allowed to carry in a taxicab: one is fish, the other is bedding –
[SOUND UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I had a wrist mic. I had a brush lapel mic and I would put it on a wristwatch band and I'd pull it out my sleeve. So I would just walk around and record that way, like when I went into the pawnshop. And I did cabdrivers that way. I recorded about 7-800 cabdrivers.
CABDRIVER:
Do away with your parkin’ lots in midtown from 14th Street to 59th Street, no parking allowed during in the daytime, only after 6 o’clock. There's your - you'll solve your whole plan –
[CABDRIVER’S VOICE/MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I had recorded the songs on jukeboxes in the restaurants or bars that catered to the various groups around my postal zone. What I would do is get people in the restaurant who spoke English to come over and translate it for me.
[SINGING, MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
MAN:
The country in which I was born is suffering many, many bad economic things. Even though I'll feel terrible there, in my country there are always flowers. That is my paradise. I won't change Puerto Rico by 60 New Yorks. I won’t [LAUGHS] change Puerto Rican chickens by frozen chickens in the iceboxes here.
MAX NICHOLS:
This is Max Nichols of Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa, calling Tony Schwartz of New York, USA.
[MUSIC, WHISTLING UP AND UNDER]
WOMAN:
Hello Tony Schwartz, I'm bringing you greetings from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
MAN:
This is a Greek folksong from Island of Crete.
THOMAS KNOTT:
Hello, Tony. My name is Thomas Knott and I come from Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland.
[WHISTLING, MUSIC – UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
When I got my first wire recorder, I asked the company if they would give me the guarantee slips from people from all over the world and all over this country who bought the recorders who said they were buying them because of their interest in music. And I would exchange wires with people in other countries who were interested in folk music, and they would send me material from their countries.
[GUITAR PLAYING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
My name is Tony Schwartz. The music you'll hear is a Peruvian Indian playing his guitar on a quiet summer evening. This is one of 15,000 recordings I've collected, recordings of folk music and folklore, recordings I've exchanged with people all over the world.
MAN:
Hello Tony, I received your letter here the other day. Well, I was going to send you a wire and all of this stuff that I generally do, you know, singin’ the cowboy stuff. I don't know if you fellas in New York City appreciate this kind of music, but we folks around here do - this hillbilly stuff.
[VOICE UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
That's how it started. Recordings came in from all parts of the United States, from all parts of the world - recordings on wire, recordings on tape. One of my exchanges was with a man who wanted sounds he no longer heard.
MAN:
Tony, I wonder if you'd do me a favor. I live out in the country and originally I came from the city, and I kind of miss it. And I was wondering if you would record some sounds of the city and send them out to me. I'd really like to hear it. How about it?
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Part of my answer was recorded in Times Square
[TIMES SQUARE AMBIANT SOUNDS/MAN ANNOUNCING TOURIST SITES]
A week later, I found this in my mailbox.
[CITY SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
MAN:
[LAUGHS] Tony, I received your sounds of the city this morning, and [LAUGHING] I've been playing them ever since. I noticed that you said that you recorded them about 8:30 at night. To sort of reciprocate, here's the sounds of my country, 8:30 at night.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
The voices and music of the world came into my apartment in New York City, and I traveled no further than my mailbox.
[AUCTIONEER SPEAKING FAST]
[VARIOUS SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
In people talking there's an innate musicality in the way certain people speak, and also in the barkers at nightclubs or various places. The sound of selling used to be the people - vendors going by on the street or people singing in the backyard or shouting in the backyard. Now, it's over the radio or television.
[SELLING SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
I did a whole record on the sound of selling.
[SOUND OF STREET VENDOR]
A vegetable men shouting, "Apples, apples" on the street, or that horse and wagon selling vegetables.
WOMAN SINGING:
My mule is white. My charcoal is black. I sells my charcoal to be –
[SINGING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
There were men who would go around buying old clothes, and they'd yell, “I cash clothes! I cash clothes!”
WOMAN SINGING:
Charcoal, charcoal.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I did a radio program on sound once a week, on WNYC for over 35 years.
[CHILD’S VOICE UP AND UNDER]
I would do it on any subject that came up to me during the week.
[COLLAGE OF VARIOUS SOUNDS/SINGING, TALKING]
How did I come to these ideas? Just from [LAUGHS] being human and working with sound and knowing how sound affected me and affected other people.
[SOUND OF TOY TRUMPET]
CHILD:
Here lies Tony Cherny, once a pet turtle of Thal Cherny, died February 24, 1964.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Who died?
CHILD:
My turtle, Tony. He got a soft shell, and we tried to save him by giving him hamburger, but he died. And we're gonna - bury him.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
How do you feel about it?
CHILD:
Not too well. It's sort of a tragedy for me. I'm gonna play Taps, and the flag is because I like him, just like the President of United States when he died, except but he is like in my family.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Okay.
CHILD:
Give me the turtle. [PAUSE] Bye.
WOMAN SINGING:
Come to me, my melancholy baby. Cuddle up and don't be blue.
[BOTH AT ONCE]
CHILD:
Can – can a baby feel blue?
WOMAN:
Anybody can feel blue. [SINGING] All your fears are foolish fancy, maybe.
[CHILD SINGING ALONG WITH WOMAN]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Well, I was born at the beginning of Time.
HARRY BELAFONTE SINGING:
Day-o! Day-o!
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Time Magazine started the year I was born.
HARRY BELAFONTE SINGING:
Daylight come and me wan' go home. Day – is a day -
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Harry Belafonte was a bop singer when I met him. I got him into the Jamaican songs.
[HARRY BELAFONTE SINGING UP AND UNDER]
WOMAN:
This is another working song. It is The Banana Loading Song. [SINGS] Day-o, day-o.
GROUP OF WOMEN SINGING:
Daylight come, me wan' go home.
[WOMEN SINGING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I met a woman who was a cashier at Macy's, and her name was Louise Bennett. And she knew all the Jamaican folklore. And I played those songs to Harry Belafonte.
[BANANA BOAT SONG PLAYING UP AND UNDER]
I got from a nightclub in Africa songs like Wimoweh. Remember that?
[WIMOWEH SUNG UP AND UNDER]
And Everybody Loves Saturday Night. Wimoweh I gave to the Weavers. And Everybody Loves Saturday Night I gave to - what's his name? He owns a casino in Atlantic City. He used to be a singer. He also - I watch Jeopardy on television. You ever watch that? And who is the guy that is the funder of it? Merv Griffin. I gave him Everybody Loves Saturday Night.
[WIMOWEH SUNG]
[PAUL ROBESON SINGING “SLEEP MY CHILD”
IN GERMAN]
TONY SCHWARTZ [ON AIR]:
Good morning. Today I'd like to play two beautiful songs, sung by Paul Robeson.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I think he was one of the great singers of our time. And in the McCarthy era, Robeson couldn't travel because they called him a Communist, which is ridiculous. He wasn't a Communist. He just believed in [LAUGHS] internationalism.
He wanted to send tapes to various places around the world. One I did to send to England for a speech for him.
[PAUL ROBESON SINGING UP AND UNDER]
It was about peace so I had his song behind it. Then I had his narration over that.
PAUL ROBESON:
Peace and friendship with our great wartime ally and enduring peace growing out of united United Nations out of friendship with the Soviet people and the governing democracies –
[PAUL ROBESON’S VOICE UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I did it for many people who couldn't travel. For W.E.B. DuBois I would record speeches that he wanted to give in South Africa.
TONY SCHWARTZ [ON AIR]:
Dr. W.E.B. DuBois of New York, writer and president of the Pan-African Congress, to the peoples of Africa, greeting.
[VOICE UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Then when the Hollywood Ten were supposed to go to jail for being un-American, and many of them had made movies that I loved.
[CLIP]
MAN:
The alleged infiltration of Communism in the moving picture industry –
[MAN’S VOICE UP AND UNDER]
I recorded all of them the night before they went to jail, Dalton Trumbo telling what he was accused of.
[CLIP]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
How did they treat you in front of this committee? I mean –
DALTON TRUMBO:
The committee was anti-Semitic, anti-labor, anti-Negro, pro-war and had been denounced by everyone from Roosevelt down over a period of 12 years.
[DALTON TRUMBO’S VOICE UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
The ridiculousness of this McCarthy era - you know, he started the whole thing of loyalty oaths, and most people think of evil as the sounds of gunfire or thunder or lightning, or something.
[CLIP]
MAN:
And did you, as a witness, did you conduct yourself like -
[COMMITTEE TESTIMONY UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I found and believe that the most evil sounds in the world are the sounds out of mouths of people.
[COMMITTEE TESTIMONY UP AND UNDER]
[WOMAN SINGING THE BLUES/UP AND UNDER]
I've used media to shame people into proper behavior.
In primitive cultures, if someone did something shameful, word of mouth got around the village in an hour or so. In our culture, the same thing exists. But if you divide the distance of our country into the speed of sound, you'd find that it would take 1/64th of a second to reach across the country by telephone, radio, television or anything like that.
[WOMAN CONTINUES SINGING THE BLUES]
I did a commercial with the Pope against nuclear weapons. I've been against nuclear weapons since 1939.
[CLIP]
[BIRDS SINGING]
LITTLE GIRL COUNTING DAISIES:
One, two, three, four, five…
[COUNTING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
One thing I've done was the daisy spot for President Johnson. I was working on sound for six or seven commercials in the campaign against Barry Goldwater. One of them was a little girl counting down and picking the petals off a daisy. Then there's the countdown –
MAN:
Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one –
[SOUND UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
And then the bomb goes off.
MAN DOING COUNTDOWN:
Zero.
[SOUND OF BOMB EXPLODING]
PRESIDENT JOHNSON:
These are the stakes, to make a world in which all of God's children can live or to go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die.
[END CLIP]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
What would you say to young people who smoke?
WOMAN:
I would say that they're very foolish even to consider it. I had to have my voice box removed. I have had all of my throat, that’s what I –
[WOMAN TALKING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I teach a course for NYU. I also teach Media and Public Health at Harvard. Both places come here. I have agoraphobia. I don't travel. I'm not able to travel. I have used the telephone to teach all over the world, in Sweden –
[GUITAR MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
- in Japan, South America, Australia.
My brother built a one-tube radio which never worked, and I used to go up in the attic and play a spaceship like Jack Armstrong. I was also interested in physics, and the physics teacher was interested in amateur radio. And I first built my own receivers and huge 20-meter antennas, and I built my own little shack where I had a 16 by 16. And I had my radio station in the front, my bed in the back, and I ran a telephone line up to the house, so my mother could call me in for [LAUGHS] supper.
I made up short-wave listener cards. I'd
speak to them on the radio, and I would tell them how they're coming in. I think the most important thing we can work on in communication is to make the world safer for the people who live in it. People, that's what I was most interested in, people and their life and what they do.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
MAN:
Believe you me, as long as you live, and may you live as long as you wish, and don't forget all the money that that you spend with me goes to a good cause, because my wife wants money, the butcher, the baker. Everybody wants money.
[MAN’S VOICE TRAILS OFF]
[SOUND COLLAGE UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This reflection on Tony Schwartz was produced by Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, the Kitchen Sisters.
[SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Jamie York, Mike Vuolo, Mark Phillips, Nazanin Rafsanjani and edited by me. We had technical direction from Jennifer Munson and more engineering help from Zach Marsh and editorial assistance from Gina Gasper. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to our program and find free transcripts at Onthemedia.org. You can also post comments there, or email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC.
Bob Garfield will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
[MUSIC TAG]
This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
The music you're hearing is a three-person collaboration. First, Jimmy Giuffre, a pioneering clarinetist and bandleader, who died in April at the age of 86. The second, Reenah Schwartz. It's her high heels you hear echoing in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan office building 50 years ago. And the third is her husband, Tony Schwartz, who made the recording.
This is just one of over 30,000 Schwartz recordings. That he recorded so much is all the more remarkable for the constraints under which he did it. Tony Schwartz.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I'm not able to travel far. I have agoraphobia. And in walking, I could just go around my postal zone in the midst of Manhattan. And the postal zone was New York 19 at that time. That was the area I could travel in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What he lacked in range, he made up in depth, using a new recording device he built himself in 1945.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I made the first portable tape recorder. I brought the VU meter from inside the case to the top so I could look down at it and see how loud things were. I put a strap on it, so I could have it over my shoulder. I could go record children in the park doing jump rope rhymes. And I made 14 records for Folkways Records.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
When his recorder was mass produced, he struck a deal with those who bought it: send me your sounds and I'll send you mine. And they did. And when he wasn't dealing strictly in sound, he used his ear to inform his other vocation, TV advertising, much of it political.
He's best known for the so-called Daisy Ad he made for Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 race against Barry Goldwater, that of a young girl pulling off and counting daisy petals, a sound that dissolved into a man counting down to an atomic blast. And that was all just still a small part of Schwartz's extraordinary legacy as a media theorist, author, record producer, Broadway sound designer, advertising exec and folklorist.
Schwartz died on June 15th. In this piece, the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, reflect back on Schwartz and a life spent listening.
CHILDREN SINGING:
I won't go to Macy's anymore, more, more. There's a big fat policeman at the door, door, door.
[SINGING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I was interested in the sound around us.
[CHILDREN SINGING/STREET SOUNDS]
[WHISTLING]
CABDRIVER:
Two things that you're not allowed to carry in a taxicab: one is fish, the other is bedding –
[SOUND UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I had a wrist mic. I had a brush lapel mic and I would put it on a wristwatch band and I'd pull it out my sleeve. So I would just walk around and record that way, like when I went into the pawnshop. And I did cabdrivers that way. I recorded about 7-800 cabdrivers.
CABDRIVER:
Do away with your parkin’ lots in midtown from 14th Street to 59th Street, no parking allowed during in the daytime, only after 6 o’clock. There's your - you'll solve your whole plan –
[CABDRIVER’S VOICE/MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I had recorded the songs on jukeboxes in the restaurants or bars that catered to the various groups around my postal zone. What I would do is get people in the restaurant who spoke English to come over and translate it for me.
[SINGING, MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
MAN:
The country in which I was born is suffering many, many bad economic things. Even though I'll feel terrible there, in my country there are always flowers. That is my paradise. I won't change Puerto Rico by 60 New Yorks. I won’t [LAUGHS] change Puerto Rican chickens by frozen chickens in the iceboxes here.
MAX NICHOLS:
This is Max Nichols of Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa, calling Tony Schwartz of New York, USA.
[MUSIC, WHISTLING UP AND UNDER]
WOMAN:
Hello Tony Schwartz, I'm bringing you greetings from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
MAN:
This is a Greek folksong from Island of Crete.
THOMAS KNOTT:
Hello, Tony. My name is Thomas Knott and I come from Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland.
[WHISTLING, MUSIC – UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
When I got my first wire recorder, I asked the company if they would give me the guarantee slips from people from all over the world and all over this country who bought the recorders who said they were buying them because of their interest in music. And I would exchange wires with people in other countries who were interested in folk music, and they would send me material from their countries.
[GUITAR PLAYING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
My name is Tony Schwartz. The music you'll hear is a Peruvian Indian playing his guitar on a quiet summer evening. This is one of 15,000 recordings I've collected, recordings of folk music and folklore, recordings I've exchanged with people all over the world.
MAN:
Hello Tony, I received your letter here the other day. Well, I was going to send you a wire and all of this stuff that I generally do, you know, singin’ the cowboy stuff. I don't know if you fellas in New York City appreciate this kind of music, but we folks around here do - this hillbilly stuff.
[VOICE UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
That's how it started. Recordings came in from all parts of the United States, from all parts of the world - recordings on wire, recordings on tape. One of my exchanges was with a man who wanted sounds he no longer heard.
MAN:
Tony, I wonder if you'd do me a favor. I live out in the country and originally I came from the city, and I kind of miss it. And I was wondering if you would record some sounds of the city and send them out to me. I'd really like to hear it. How about it?
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Part of my answer was recorded in Times Square
[TIMES SQUARE AMBIANT SOUNDS/MAN ANNOUNCING TOURIST SITES]
A week later, I found this in my mailbox.
[CITY SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
MAN:
[LAUGHS] Tony, I received your sounds of the city this morning, and [LAUGHING] I've been playing them ever since. I noticed that you said that you recorded them about 8:30 at night. To sort of reciprocate, here's the sounds of my country, 8:30 at night.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
The voices and music of the world came into my apartment in New York City, and I traveled no further than my mailbox.
[AUCTIONEER SPEAKING FAST]
[VARIOUS SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
In people talking there's an innate musicality in the way certain people speak, and also in the barkers at nightclubs or various places. The sound of selling used to be the people - vendors going by on the street or people singing in the backyard or shouting in the backyard. Now, it's over the radio or television.
[SELLING SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
I did a whole record on the sound of selling.
[SOUND OF STREET VENDOR]
A vegetable men shouting, "Apples, apples" on the street, or that horse and wagon selling vegetables.
WOMAN SINGING:
My mule is white. My charcoal is black. I sells my charcoal to be –
[SINGING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
There were men who would go around buying old clothes, and they'd yell, “I cash clothes! I cash clothes!”
WOMAN SINGING:
Charcoal, charcoal.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I did a radio program on sound once a week, on WNYC for over 35 years.
[CHILD’S VOICE UP AND UNDER]
I would do it on any subject that came up to me during the week.
[COLLAGE OF VARIOUS SOUNDS/SINGING, TALKING]
How did I come to these ideas? Just from [LAUGHS] being human and working with sound and knowing how sound affected me and affected other people.
[SOUND OF TOY TRUMPET]
CHILD:
Here lies Tony Cherny, once a pet turtle of Thal Cherny, died February 24, 1964.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Who died?
CHILD:
My turtle, Tony. He got a soft shell, and we tried to save him by giving him hamburger, but he died. And we're gonna - bury him.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
How do you feel about it?
CHILD:
Not too well. It's sort of a tragedy for me. I'm gonna play Taps, and the flag is because I like him, just like the President of United States when he died, except but he is like in my family.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Okay.
CHILD:
Give me the turtle. [PAUSE] Bye.
WOMAN SINGING:
Come to me, my melancholy baby. Cuddle up and don't be blue.
[BOTH AT ONCE]
CHILD:
Can – can a baby feel blue?
WOMAN:
Anybody can feel blue. [SINGING] All your fears are foolish fancy, maybe.
[CHILD SINGING ALONG WITH WOMAN]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Well, I was born at the beginning of Time.
HARRY BELAFONTE SINGING:
Day-o! Day-o!
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Time Magazine started the year I was born.
HARRY BELAFONTE SINGING:
Daylight come and me wan' go home. Day – is a day -
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Harry Belafonte was a bop singer when I met him. I got him into the Jamaican songs.
[HARRY BELAFONTE SINGING UP AND UNDER]
WOMAN:
This is another working song. It is The Banana Loading Song. [SINGS] Day-o, day-o.
GROUP OF WOMEN SINGING:
Daylight come, me wan' go home.
[WOMEN SINGING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I met a woman who was a cashier at Macy's, and her name was Louise Bennett. And she knew all the Jamaican folklore. And I played those songs to Harry Belafonte.
[BANANA BOAT SONG PLAYING UP AND UNDER]
I got from a nightclub in Africa songs like Wimoweh. Remember that?
[WIMOWEH SUNG UP AND UNDER]
And Everybody Loves Saturday Night. Wimoweh I gave to the Weavers. And Everybody Loves Saturday Night I gave to - what's his name? He owns a casino in Atlantic City. He used to be a singer. He also - I watch Jeopardy on television. You ever watch that? And who is the guy that is the funder of it? Merv Griffin. I gave him Everybody Loves Saturday Night.
[WIMOWEH SUNG]
[PAUL ROBESON SINGING “SLEEP MY CHILD”
IN GERMAN]
TONY SCHWARTZ [ON AIR]:
Good morning. Today I'd like to play two beautiful songs, sung by Paul Robeson.
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I think he was one of the great singers of our time. And in the McCarthy era, Robeson couldn't travel because they called him a Communist, which is ridiculous. He wasn't a Communist. He just believed in [LAUGHS] internationalism.
He wanted to send tapes to various places around the world. One I did to send to England for a speech for him.
[PAUL ROBESON SINGING UP AND UNDER]
It was about peace so I had his song behind it. Then I had his narration over that.
PAUL ROBESON:
Peace and friendship with our great wartime ally and enduring peace growing out of united United Nations out of friendship with the Soviet people and the governing democracies –
[PAUL ROBESON’S VOICE UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I did it for many people who couldn't travel. For W.E.B. DuBois I would record speeches that he wanted to give in South Africa.
TONY SCHWARTZ [ON AIR]:
Dr. W.E.B. DuBois of New York, writer and president of the Pan-African Congress, to the peoples of Africa, greeting.
[VOICE UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
Then when the Hollywood Ten were supposed to go to jail for being un-American, and many of them had made movies that I loved.
[CLIP]
MAN:
The alleged infiltration of Communism in the moving picture industry –
[MAN’S VOICE UP AND UNDER]
I recorded all of them the night before they went to jail, Dalton Trumbo telling what he was accused of.
[CLIP]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
How did they treat you in front of this committee? I mean –
DALTON TRUMBO:
The committee was anti-Semitic, anti-labor, anti-Negro, pro-war and had been denounced by everyone from Roosevelt down over a period of 12 years.
[DALTON TRUMBO’S VOICE UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
The ridiculousness of this McCarthy era - you know, he started the whole thing of loyalty oaths, and most people think of evil as the sounds of gunfire or thunder or lightning, or something.
[CLIP]
MAN:
And did you, as a witness, did you conduct yourself like -
[COMMITTEE TESTIMONY UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I found and believe that the most evil sounds in the world are the sounds out of mouths of people.
[COMMITTEE TESTIMONY UP AND UNDER]
[WOMAN SINGING THE BLUES/UP AND UNDER]
I've used media to shame people into proper behavior.
In primitive cultures, if someone did something shameful, word of mouth got around the village in an hour or so. In our culture, the same thing exists. But if you divide the distance of our country into the speed of sound, you'd find that it would take 1/64th of a second to reach across the country by telephone, radio, television or anything like that.
[WOMAN CONTINUES SINGING THE BLUES]
I did a commercial with the Pope against nuclear weapons. I've been against nuclear weapons since 1939.
[CLIP]
[BIRDS SINGING]
LITTLE GIRL COUNTING DAISIES:
One, two, three, four, five…
[COUNTING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
One thing I've done was the daisy spot for President Johnson. I was working on sound for six or seven commercials in the campaign against Barry Goldwater. One of them was a little girl counting down and picking the petals off a daisy. Then there's the countdown –
MAN:
Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one –
[SOUND UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
And then the bomb goes off.
MAN DOING COUNTDOWN:
Zero.
[SOUND OF BOMB EXPLODING]
PRESIDENT JOHNSON:
These are the stakes, to make a world in which all of God's children can live or to go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die.
[END CLIP]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
What would you say to young people who smoke?
WOMAN:
I would say that they're very foolish even to consider it. I had to have my voice box removed. I have had all of my throat, that’s what I –
[WOMAN TALKING UP AND UNDER]
TONY SCHWARTZ:
I teach a course for NYU. I also teach Media and Public Health at Harvard. Both places come here. I have agoraphobia. I don't travel. I'm not able to travel. I have used the telephone to teach all over the world, in Sweden –
[GUITAR MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
- in Japan, South America, Australia.
My brother built a one-tube radio which never worked, and I used to go up in the attic and play a spaceship like Jack Armstrong. I was also interested in physics, and the physics teacher was interested in amateur radio. And I first built my own receivers and huge 20-meter antennas, and I built my own little shack where I had a 16 by 16. And I had my radio station in the front, my bed in the back, and I ran a telephone line up to the house, so my mother could call me in for [LAUGHS] supper.
I made up short-wave listener cards. I'd
speak to them on the radio, and I would tell them how they're coming in. I think the most important thing we can work on in communication is to make the world safer for the people who live in it. People, that's what I was most interested in, people and their life and what they do.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
MAN:
Believe you me, as long as you live, and may you live as long as you wish, and don't forget all the money that that you spend with me goes to a good cause, because my wife wants money, the butcher, the baker. Everybody wants money.
[MAN’S VOICE TRAILS OFF]
[SOUND COLLAGE UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This reflection on Tony Schwartz was produced by Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, the Kitchen Sisters.
[SOUNDS UP AND UNDER]
That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Jamie York, Mike Vuolo, Mark Phillips, Nazanin Rafsanjani and edited by me. We had technical direction from Jennifer Munson and more engineering help from Zach Marsh and editorial assistance from Gina Gasper. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to our program and find free transcripts at Onthemedia.org. You can also post comments there, or email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC.
Bob Garfield will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
[MUSIC TAG]
Produced by WNYC Studios