heal me up again

Re-posting this because I finally got to scan it in high-res.

Betty Bates is a goddamn hero.

“We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.”

With those words, Orson Welles opened a program and earned a place in the history books. On October 30, 1938, Welles and his Mercury Theatre On the Air presented their adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The story of a Martian invasion of Earth was inventively staged as a series of breaking news bulletins interrupting regular programming to deliver grisly news from the site. The nightmarish scenario reached a crescendo when actor Frank Readick (playing field reporter “Carl Phillips”) vividly describes the Martian heat ray laying waste to a field of troops and civilians before his microphone cuts out to deafening, disturbing silence.

Almost immediately, the news and sensational stories of the broadcast were read and heard by a larger audience than the one that tuned to CBS that night. (Welles’ Mercury Theatre was up against the immensely popular Chase and Sanborn Hour starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.) Newspapers, already wary and suspicious of the increasing power and influence of radio, fanned the flames of a story that claimed millions across the country listened and actually believed Martians had invaded and laid waste to most of New Jersey. Of course, it’s not likely that many - if any - people were truly fooled. It’s certainly possible someone hopping between stations might have been temporarily confused, but the complete absence of invasion reporting on other stations may have been a tip-off that this wasn’t truly breaking news. The affair made a national celebrity of Welles; up until “The War of the Worlds,” he had been an accomplished and acclaimed Broadway producer and star, and he had played The Shadow on radio to acclaim the year before. But post-“War” Welles became legendary. The Mercury Theatre On the Air picked up a sponsor in Campbell’s Soup, and Welles was on newspapers all around the world.