In radio's golden age, LI station aimed for Mars

Nine months after Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of a Martian invasion set off panic, Long Island radio station WOR-AM was joined by representatives from Manhattan’s Hayden Planetarium to contact Mars in a live program on July 27, 1939.

“The plan was to transmit a signal which, WOR hoped, would go straight to the planet and bounce off its surface right back into our laps,” The New Yorker wrote the next month. “If any alert Martians could hear it and reply, so much the better.”

The transmission was organized, alongside events worldwide, for Mars’ nearest distance from Earth since 1924. Twenty-two miles from Baldwin at the World’s Fair in Queens, plans had been made for a blackout and mock combat in an imaginary Martian invasion, according to news reports at the time. But vendors refused to turn off lights, preferring sales over searches.

At 11:23 p.m., the Morse code broadcast went from the Baldwin studio to the Hicksville transmission towers owned by Press Wireless, formed in 1929 by news organizations to facilitate radio and cable communications. The signal was supposed to take 6½ minutes to travel to Mars and back to Press Wireless’ receiving towers in Baldwin, where planetarium head Clyde Fisher was interviewed by WOR’s director of special events, Dave Driscoll.

There was radio silence from the red planet.

Now, a librarian-turned-radio-detective sees this Mars mission as the right stuff for an academic paper.

“I like mystery and digging into the past,” said Chris Kretz, 54, a librarian who’s head of academic engagement at Stony Brook University. “The more obscure the better.”

Kretz, who last year became president of the Long Island Radio & Television Historical Society, has been contacting historical societies and Hayden officials for the past year and even found a rare recording of the publicity “stunt” at the Library of Congress. He wants to flesh out an episode that has been mostly forgotten — despite coverage by Time magazine, the Daily News, Associated Press and more. For example, whose idea was it? Did it have an impact? Does the planetarium have any internal documents on this?

He’ll submit findings to an academic publication, perhaps the Journal of Radio & Audio Media, to be vetted for publication.

“It contributes to a deeper understanding of the connections between radio and popular and scientific interest in Mars that had been going on since the late 1880s,” Kretz noted. “How did radio technology get applied to the hunt for life on Mars? How did broadcast radio treat it — seriously or strictly for entertainment purposes?”

‘Cradle of radio’

One might dismiss his passion project as a 21st century indulgence, but Kretz points out that the Mars effort illustrates a pivotal time in radio and Long Island history.

The Island was what he and others call the “cradle of radio.” Communications behemoths and big-name inventors — RCA, Telefunken, Press Wireless, Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi — were here experimenting with radio stations and radio waves for government, business and entertainment. The Island is relatively close to Europe, making communications abroad easier, and major swaths of undeveloped land were available as sites for radio towers. It was also the “golden age of radio,” when people huddled around the radio for news and entertainment, such as “The Dick Tracy Show” and “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.”

The Sayville resident is also host of the Long Island History Project, a twice-monthly podcast he co-founded, as well as the voice of Radio Tower, the monthly podcast from the radio and TV historical society. In those roles, he’s interviewed witnesses and experts on a range of topics: a prolific, independent record label that was based in Huntington Station; researchers on the German spies who used Telefunken towers in West Sayville to transmit secrets to Europe; the family that pioneered square dancing in the metropolitan region; ham radio operators and more.

His favorite podcast, he said, was an interview with Jack Beebe, who called himself “Mr. Backstage” and was a teen disc jockey for WALK-FM in East Patchogue before he broadcast from Korea with the Armed Forces Radio Service, traveled with a circus where he owned a hippopotamus and became a radio and TV executive. Beebe died months after the interview last year.

Once in a while, Kretz speaks at historical associations and libraries, donating his fees to the Long Island History Project.

“Chris is a house on fire,” said Connie Currie, 86, of Sayville, co-founder of the radio and TV historical society. “He has electrified the Long Island Radio & Television Historical Society.” She said he has worked on projects — and inspired others to do the same — to highlight radio’s past, such as by putting markers at historical sites.

Kretz started his career as a researcher at a stock photo company, where he filled requests for images for “Saturday Night Live” backdrops, textbooks, pharmaceutical ads and more. After his wife got a degree to be a school librarian, he was inspired to study to become an academic librarian. “I liked the intellectual curiosity of it — all the interesting questions that you had to deal with and research,” he said.

Preservation mindset

For 13 years, Kretz was the digital resources librarian at Dowling College before moving on to Stony Brook. His research and articles, from “What a User Wants” to “Invited on the Air: Public Libraries at the Beginning of Broadcast Radio,” have appeared in academic and library publications.

“It crept up on me slowly,” the librarian says of his love of the past. “Working at Dowling from 2002 turned me on to L.I. history, finding out about the Vanderbilt mansion it was housed in. I was also a lover of garage and estate sales — always looking for the old stuff.”

He credits his “odd habit” of reading old newspapers with leading him to the WOR-
Hayden tidbit last year.

Kretz has been captivated by the starring characters in the Mars radio story. Fisher, originally a botanist, helped launch a balloon that carried dirt from the World’s Fair site to “spread in space,” the librarian said. The Hayden Planetarium, 4 years old in 1939, may have been using the Mars program to attract more visitors and grow its role as a science educator, he said. Like other radio hosts, WOR’s Driscoll was hoping to create a buzz for the station — his previous stunt was trying to cook an egg on the sidewalk during a heat wave, Kretz found out. Driscoll, who had set up WOR’s news department, became a World War II correspondent.

In the 15-minute Baldwin-to-Mars recording, now owned by Aerojet Rocketdyne, experts at Hayden discuss Mars, then Fisher answers Driscoll’s questions about the planet, Kretz said.

Silence accompanies the last 10 seconds or so of the wait for Martian waves to bounce back. Then Driscoll announces Mars’ failure to respond and the station’s return to regular programming.

“It was anti-climactic,” Kretz said, joking that there was no “swelling orchestration” of music.

In search of remnants of the Mars stunt, Kretz trekked last month to what is now Baldwin Park, where WOR and Hayden officials were on the air in the building that a reporter at the time called Press Wireless’ “rural headquarters.’’

Kretz looked at the grass, but there was no sign of concrete stanchions that would have supported receiving towers. Press Wireless was long gone from the waterfront park. In fact, the exact location of its building may also be lost to history. Was it near the reeds or the parking stripes he had just stepped on?

There were just people enjoying the park and an electrical workers union holding its annual softball tournament and picnic.

“Do you know what used to be on the site?” Kretz said to one man at a table selling union T-shirts. “It used to be a radio transmission site.”

“Way before my time,” the man answered.

Kretz wants to campaign for a historical marker at the park to note Press Wireless’ history there, along with the Mars episode. “I don’t begrudge them a park, but their not knowing — where do you learn about this?” Kretz said. “How do you tell the story? It comes down to us.”

He sees an ongoing thread in the attempt to contact Mars — how society is still fascinated by the planet, from seeing a face in its topography to studying whether life existed there. Mars’ orbit brings it close to Earth every 15 years — 36 million miles — and 1939 was one of those years.

Already, Kretz has concluded through his research, 1939 appears to have been the last of the 15-year cycle peppered by Mars-related media gimmicks. After that, he said, science took over.

As he documents the “ghosts of radio past,” Kretz acknowledges the Earthbound orbit of his academic research.

“It’s not going to win any prizes for an undiscovered thing,” he said, “but for Long Island it’s a nice little unknown story about how we were connected to all these institutions back then. It kind of highlights how special events were developed and how science was popularized.”

Preserving radio history 

Art Deco radios, warplane consoles, a salesman’s suitcase of radio parts, vintage postcards — the artifacts amassed by the Long Island Radio & Television Historical Society live on in members’ homes and public libraries awaiting funding to create a museum.

The group also hosts a monthly podcast, Radio Tower, that features a wide range of interviews and topics, including radio DJs, the success of an independent record label once based in Huntington Station and the evolution of local college radio stations.

“We have been one of the biggest secrets kept on Long Island,” Connie Currie, the society’s vice president, lamented with a chuckle.

The group was formed in 1997 by Currie, a past president of Sayville Historical Society, and Ralph Williams, a radio historian and Suffolk County Historical Society member, after a series of thwarted attempts to save radio towers and other evidence of Long Island’s past as the “cradle of radio.”

Among the insults to preservation, says Currie: the 1998 destruction by fire of a derelict communications station in West Sayville as former radio industry employees and preservationists pressed state and federal leaders to give the site historic status. The station was where Telefunken, a German communications company, had allegedly sent out coded messages during World War I instructing U-boats on the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania. The liner’s sinking killed almost 1,200 people off the coast of Ireland in 1915.

About the loss of the West Sayville station, the radio enthusiasts “were brokenhearted,” said Currie, 86, a former children’s librarian.

The society’s books and magazines are in Sayville Public Library’s Long Island History Room, where readers can peruse books and photos of valuable radios, and learn about television icons such as Walter Cronkite and the giant communications companies, such as RCA. Society co-founder Williams died in 2002, but his historic Orient Point home, the Terry-Mulford House, showcases antique radios that can be seen by appointment.

You can also learn more online about LI’s radio and TV history:

•Long Island Radio and Television Historical Society, lirtvhs.org

•Long Island History Project podcast, longislandhistory project.org

•Press Wireless history, bit.ly/tmchistory-presswireless

•RCA history, radiomarine.org /point-to-point/rocky-point; dec.ny.gov/press/123797.html; rockypoint historicalsociety.org