Hello, America. Hello, America. I’m going to let one boy speak for twenty thousand of them. Here he is, a fine boy–or he was this morning–and glad and proud he had the chance to do it. Speak up, son, you’re talking to half a billion people.
“Hello. Hello. Mother—goodbye, Mother. Mother-goodbye, Mother.“
Thanks, son. Oh-oh! That was too much for him. Take it away, Poke.
Folks, we’re having a little champagne dinner back here outside the dugout—and do we need it! But it seems to be getting suddenly misty in this neighborhood, very misty. And it’s beginning to smell funny. I don’t like it-it’s GAS, folks-GAS! And I can’t find my mask! Hey, my job is giving it out, not taking it…
…The time is eight o’clock. All you truckers on your toes! Prince Paul Obaloney of Dance Hall Society will give us a lesson in the Slinky-winky Blues.
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Editorial: This sketch was written in 1935. To our knowledge it has never before been published or broadcast.
The highlight is mine and the editorial comment is from
a Russian website that translated into Russian
and then re-translated back into English virtually every word ever written by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Two years before this sketch was written,
New Yorker Magazine rejected an FSF short story
that it ultimately published three months ago.
Thank You For The Light is about banning cigaret smoking in public. The idea was unheard of in 1936 but that changed seventy years later.
The actual title of Fitzgerald's sketch is
The Broadcast We Almost Heard Last September.
The second half of it is posted above but the opening line introduces Poke McFiddle
"bringing you the big battle in Central Europe."
World War II had yet to begin.
The idea of twenty thousand American troops engaged in European warfare
was unheard of in 1935...
Poke McFiddle and
Paul Obaloney and
Slinky Winky Blues???
Sometimes silliness can be sagacious.
Blogger's Note
Regarding this and the previous post:
There is one degree of separation between Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov.
That would be
Edmund Wilson, who had one of the greatest American minds
of the 20th Century.
His lifelong friendship and correspondence with FSF began
when they were Princeton classmates.
Wilson's extensive correspondence with Nabokov began in 1940,
the year Scott Fitzgerald died.
