Episode 232: Oh, Herbert Morrison

"This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMoeau. It wasn't live. It was never going to be. It could have been live theoretically. It was 1937. Bigger stations at that point could manage the technical and logistical hurdles to broadcast from places other than radio stations. They could do remote broadcasts from an important event. A presidential speech. But this wasn't that." "How do you do everyone? We're greeting you now from the Naval Air Base at Lake Coast of New Jersey. From which point we're going to bring you to the ship and of the landing of the mammoth air ship, Hindenburg." You can hear it in the recording. Here Herbert Morrison attempting to puff up the significance of the event he was sent in New Jersey to cover. "But just one year ago today, May 6th, that the Hindenburg made its first regular passing to flight to America. The flight to the inauguration of the first air service across the Atlantic. So this occasion is doubly significant. It is the first anniversary of the inauguration of the service and marks the first flight of this year." And so Herbert Morrison, a 31-year-old Chicago radio host, will in roughly 20 minutes time from that moment become not just an eyewitness to history, but the interpreter of that history. Because the Hindenburg is coming back to America, as it will in a regular schedule throughout the warm weather months of the rest of 1937, which is not worthy, though I'm not sure all that newsworthy. Definitely not worth all the hassle of doing a live broadcast. In fact, this whole thing is kind of a corporate boondoggle. And so when he says, "There is nothing incidental about it. It isn't ad. It is SponCon. He and his engineer Charlie Nielsen get a free trip to New York on a fancy plane, and in turn he gushes about American airlines. He also gets a chance to try out some new technology. He gets a company to gift him a new gadget for the occasion that would record live sound directly onto an acetate disc. It would cut a record right there in the field. And then they would take it back to the studio and play a clip. Basically just drop the needle in the record and then drop some audio into the middle of a live news broadcast. It was a good deal. He and Charlie would be flown to a landing field in New Jersey. Try out the new recorder, U and A at the Hindenburg and the wonders of American Airlines. Grab some dinner in the city, maybe a show. Then they get flown back to Chicago. And the station could drop a little bit of sound from the Hindenburg's first seasonal arrival in New York into its Sunday night newscast. And so we have this recording now in the National Archives. Most of it is herb Morrison just vamping, coming up with stuff to talk about as he waits for the Hindenburg to land. Oh, he's read up on it so he can be ready with facts and figures. And it goes on and on. Herb is professional. He can just go on riffing all night. So he does seem to have come with a few pre-planned lines locked and loaded. Maybe not. Maybe he is just kind of poetic on the fly. And then it all goes wrong. That's enough to keep it from him. It's rising, it's rising. It's rising, it's rising, terrible. Oh my, get out of the way, please. It's burning, bursting and it flames and it's falling on the morning. That's all the folks between us. That's terrible. This is the one of the worst catastrophes in the world. It always seems as though the place is 20, old, four, five hundred feet into the sky. It's a terrific place. Ladies and gentlemen, smoking it's flames now and it's very much striking to the ground. Not quite to the morning mass of a humanity at all. The planet is screaming at it. I don't do it. I can't even talk to people. It's miserable out there. It's a, I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honestly, it's just like their mouth is smoking wreckage. And everybody can hardly breathe and I can hardly breathe. I'm going to step inside while I cannot see it. It's not even terrible. I can, I listen folks. I'm going to have to stop for a minute because they have lots of voices. It's like we're together, we're with this. And so this is a recording of both the Hindenburg disaster. One of the most spectacular and I mean that in the literal way, the one free of judgment. It is a spectacle. You can see it, I bet. The Hindenburg in flames. You probably know the picture by a freelance journalist named Sam Cher, who came not knowing what was coming like her Morrison, narrating one of the most famous disasters in American history, making a recording of that, while making a recording of the worst thing he had ever witnessed. Leaving behind a 42 minute document of one of the most harrowing and strange nights of his life. It is not the whole night. He takes breaks. He pauses to go off to report. At one point he signs off and then a second later he's back. And he fills in the gaps. He tells the story of this thing that had just happened to him, this thing that he had just done, which in his telling, harried and urgent seem almost disbelieving of this thing that he himself had just experienced. This moment when he realized that he could help this man, who was burnt, who had jumped out of the Hindenburg, realized that there was this man in need in front of him and he could help him even though that is not what journalists do. And he does, get some off to safety, reunites him with his terrified family. And then there is everything that takes place after they ran out of space in the record. And when there is no more they can do, and they start to realize, or they think they do, I'm not sure they could be sure in the chaos, that the Hindenburg people, the representatives of the Reich, want their recording. Maybe they are purely intentioned, maybe it's the closest they can come to a black box recorder on an airplane, or maybe it is something darker, and cover up. They want to limit the embarrassment for Hitler's Germany, and herb and Charlie start running. They slip out as fast as they can. Later they find themselves at a diner in Newark. They are ragged. They are starving. Herb eats with the acetate recordings of the Hindenburg disaster hidden inside his coat. When they land back in Chicago, when they rush to the station, they do not know if there is anything even on the recording. They don't know if it worked. Maybe they screwed something up, or maybe it malfunctioned. They find a hole in it. Because when the Hindenburg exploded, the blast, the force of it, shook the recorder, and this stylist cut straight through the acetate disk. But then they are listening, along with much of America, as the Hindenburg disaster. That so many in the audience had just read about in the morning paper, but heard Morrison and Charlie Nielsen saw it happen, as it filled the air and their living room. And that recording will go on to be played again and again for decades. Someone will pair it with newsreel footage, put in in history documentaries. It will get used in montages that will serve as shorthand for whole eras of American life. And herb Morrison will hear it over and over for the rest of his life. He died in a nursing home in West Virginia in 1989, after a celebrated career in radio and TV in academia. A career built in no small part on the fame he'd earned on that night. He talked about his experience in that field in New Jersey in 1937, a lot in the years that followed. He was interviewed many times, rolled out on round-numbered anniversaries. He would be asked about it by students. He would weave it into speeches he'd give when he received various honors. Spoke about it so much in 1975 after he was hired as a technical consultant for a movie about that night. Universal pictures sent he and George C. Scott, a movie star out on a promotional tour. As far as I've been able to figure, I never talked about that. About what it was like to talk about it. Or to have a document of himself witnessing the worst thing he had ever witnessed. At least as far as we know, anyway. I sure hope it was. Here was that one night again, and again, decade after decade. And here was Herbert Morrison, the man who was there. There is this thread of inquiry that pops up now and again, where some academic ponders the phrase, "Oh, the humanity that is so famous still has been quoted in parodyed and has never slipped all that far from the cultural consciousness for nearly a century now." Was that a thing that people said? Was it a stock phrase that could have popped into anyone's head? Has that head reeled and swirled and tried to reign in the chaos of living through language? Or did it just come out? A moment of invention. This thing that heard Morrison said once. It seems like it did. There are countless citations for the phrase in the past decades, but they all start there on that night, with that recording. Someone found one other instance, one single documented time that someone said, "Oh, the humanity before her Morrison did?" It was in a letter, a poetic report of sorts, from a union soldier to his sweetheart in the Civil War, trying to get across to her the sadness that he had witnessed. Her Morrison never saw that letter. There's no way. He just saw the flames. And he knew the names of so many people on that aircraft, and read all about them, knew how many people worked in the engine room, how many waiters and bartenders, bell hops, and was sure that they were all dead, didn't know then, that some had survived. And the words just came. Some guys, some days after the disaster, while the whole country obsessed with the ongoing coverage, were still talking about her Morrison's on the ground reporting. Someone wrote a takedown of that report. In a paper in Baltimore, pegged herbs emotion as "undignified" blathering. Beneath a broadcaster, and worse beneath any man. In an interview in the late 60s, maybe early 70s, Herb Morrison would dismiss that take as their product of the times, that for some reason, in the late 1930s, and those backwards days, boys weren't supposed to cry. But I don't know how long it took him to come to that comfort. Don't know how it felt to be called out for a feeling. And I don't know what it felt like to keep hearing himself feel, though it didn't sound like himself to him. But not in that way that no one's voice in a recording sounds the way that it does in one's head. The actual recording was too fast, so his voice was too high. That odd quality to his speech that I always assumed was a strange 1930s affectation, was just an artifact of a falsely calibrated belt that spun the acetate disc at the wrong speed. Some years ago, a researcher named Michael Beale at Morehead State University in Kentucky slowed it down, tinkered with a pitch, to do his best to recover what Herb Morrison really sounded like. And so you can hear him now, sounding a bit more like he must have, as he worked his way through the chaos, the ununderstanding, the fear and sadness that happened sometimes in life, though there's usually not anyone there recording us when it does, and you can hear him. And something close to real time, catching his breath, catching himself, calming himself down, and processing the whole thing, turning into a story, finding some way to make sense of this life even when it doesn't. [Music] This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate Dimaio, in May of 2025. This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw, as a proud member of Radio Topia, and network of listeners supported independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. I just got back from a book tour of the Midwest, which included, besides terrific events in four-leveled communities, a tense but ultimately safe experience at the St. Louis Airport as the weather went insane, and tornadoes touched down nearby, and, you know, baseball-sized hail rained down. And for what it's worth, I just wanted to say that I'm thinking about all of those folks who weren't lucky enough to be in a safe, fortified building, where they didn't have to be terrified. Because as a non-midwesterner, I had never seen anything like that, and I am thinking about those places and those people right now. Yeah, on a brighter note, The Midwest is a special place. And it is filled with special bookstores, it turns out. And here, as Father's Day approaches, it is the perfect time to go to your local independent bookstore and pick up or order a copy of my book of stories, New and Beloved, The Memory Palace, two short stories at the past. By Nate Dimeo, it is filled with those stories and with memoir and found photographs and beautiful illustrations. For what it's worth, as I read this while I am wearing my incredibly soft and stylish sweatshirt from Golden Hour Books in Indianapolis, about the green one, although the blue one was lovely too, I just want to say that one thing I've learned doing these events and interacting with folks who work at or own these bookstores, I want to say that independent bookstores are magic. I have always understood that one should support one's local bookstore, but I always figured that that wasn't for the same reasons that you should support any local business. Like you support your local donut guy because otherwise it will just be some Dunkin' donuts there. So like you like going to your local bookstore and you want it to stay there and so you shop there because otherwise it gets turned into a Starbucks or a city man or whatever. But I did not realize that to be an indie bookstore is to be indie in the same way that an indie filmmaker or an indie musician or indeed an indie podcaster is. Like these people are out there and they are not just running their own business but they are making choices based on their passions, like the things they love and the books they are putting on their shelves are based in knowing their neighborhoods and their customers. With no publishers paying them to put a giant stack of some new big book by some weird TV pundit as happens at a lot of the big chain stores, they are calling all the shots on everything and they are applying their expertise and their aesthetic and like their moral compass to figure out which books they are going to stock and which books they are going to recommend. And for what it's worth every time I walk into an indie bookstore and they see my book on the shelf I feel legitimately grateful. Because I know that there is someone, a person, not some algorithm who found room for it there on the shelf or who saw the cover and thought it was worth taking a chance on it or who had never heard of it and then a customer walked in and said oh you should get this, you should stock this, this guy is great. In every single place that I have been to in the last couple of months, big and small, in a bright blue city, deep red town, these bookstores have been the beating hearts of the best of their communities, I have loved getting to new places through their bookstores, it's been wonderful. And so all of this like long thing to say thank you to these bookstores that have hosted me or even kindly replied that they wish they could but their schedule is tight and to encourage you all like legit to think about your own indie bookstore in your own town next time you were looking for a book. They are magic, I tell you. Not a bookstore event but an audiobook event, I'm going to be doing a special live show on June 13th, 2025 in New York City to close out the Tribeca Audio Festival. I'm going to be reading stories to music and animation and slides as is my usual live deal but I'm going to be joined on this night and this night only by two of my audiobook readers by Carrie Coon and Lily Taylor, I'm super excited to do this. You can find a link to tickets at thememorypalace.us/event. You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook which are our polar opposites of indie bookstores at the Memory Palace or on Instagram and Threads in Substack at the Memory Palace podcast and on Blue Sky where I am myself at Nate Dimaio, the IMEO. You can send me an email at [email protected] and you can hear another new story here in a couple of weeks. Talk to you again.