When my mother died in 1998, one of the photos amongst her papers was of my father standing at a microphone onstage at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, about to receive two cocker-spaniel puppies that the host was handing to him. My dad had a surprised smile on his face, and Navy men sitting in a row at the back of the stage were all laughing. On the curtain behind and above them was a huge sign identifying the event: "Bromo-Seltzer presents Vox Pop," and below that, "CBS-Coast to Coast." The photo had a caption showing the date: May 24, 1943.
My father was commissioning a new submarine, the USS Cisco, at the time. Four months later, he'd disappear with all hands in the enemy-infested waters of the Sulu Sea off the Philippines, and the cocker puppies, Skip and Jack - named for one of my father's former subs: the Skipjack - would grow up with our family through several moves down the east coast.
About eight years ago, when I started trying to learn about my father, I wrote to CBS Archives to see if they had a recording of the radio broadcast. They never wrote back, so I figured there wasn't such a thing. And then about five years ago, I happened to read a detective novel about WWII. After finishing the book, I read on the book jacket that John Dunning, the author, was an avid collector of oldtime radio broadcasts. Since he knew a lot about WWII, I thought there was a chance he might collect WWII-vintage broadcasts, so I kept the book bedside to remind me to look up his website and query him about the broadcast.
It wasn't till this past November that I finally got around to writing him. And again, no answer, so I thought no more about it. And then, just last week, I got an e-mail from the author's wife saying her husband was very sick, but had asked her to send me contact info. for someone who kept a list of oldtime radio collectors and what broadcasts they owned. I e-mailed him.
And boom! The next day I got an e-mail from a collector saying he had that very broadcast, and would copy it for me onto a cassette tape and send it to me. We talked on the phone, and he warned me not to expect anything, that the sound quality was very bad.
The tape arrived last week, on my 63rd birthday. I sat down at the kitchen table, wondering if I'd be able to hear my father's voice for the first time, and if so, what he'd sound like. My brother? My sister? My aunt, his only sibling, now long dead?
But fifteen minutes into the old, scratchy tape, when he finally was introduced by the show's host, he didn't sound like anything I'd expected. His voice was deeper than my brother's, and his hesitant, almost reluctant delivery was totally unlike the humorous raconteur I'd come to know through my research. Here, he was anything but lively, fun. He sounded bone-weary, almost shell-shocked, hardly the smiling man at the mike in the photograph.
I finished the tape and went to meet my husband and daughter for my birthday dinner, and by the time I told them about the tape, I'd pieced together an explanation. My father was in a slowly tightening vice at the time, sandwiched between a Navy bureaucracy who wanted to break records with his new boat for the fastest sub ever built, and his cautious charge as skipper to bring his men home safe - which had him retesting and pulling the boat back to drydock again and again for further repairs against a mysteriously recurring oil leak. He was also worn out, having just come off two years of continuous duty in the Pacific without a break, with six war patrols as skipper.
Add to this the media's need to sanitize the war to the public (the Clint Eastwood movie Flags of Our Fathers shows this most powerfully) and you can hear the conflict in the voices: the host's full of false cheer as he steers his submariner interviewees to subjects he thinks are heroic, glorious. "What's it like to be depth-charged by the Japs?" he asks, with a heartiness befitting something like, "Hey Kids! Tell us about that merry-go-round you rode the other day!" My dad seems stunned, buying time with a long "Welllll...." and then with an "um," seems to decide something and sidesteps the unspeakable, with, "The worst thing is feeling all eyes on you." He explains how the crew, particularly new sailors, look to the skipper to judge whether they can show the fear they feel. "No matter how you feel, you gotta keep your eyebrows as high or low as the next guy's."
By the time I ran the tape again, straining for my father's words through the background hiss, he was indeed the dad my research had revealed, the methodical, careful guy who's thinking his way through every sentence. "What do you like best about submarines?" said the jaunty host. "Wellllll...." my dad paused again, and I'm sure he's sick to death of submarines, wants nothing more than to stay home and watch his kids and new pups grow up. "The men all know their jobs," he said. "They don't have to ask an officer what to do. That's why I like submarines."
(Note: does anyone know of technology to clean background noise off old tapes?)
Mary Lee-
Your best bet is to take the recording and digitize it into a computer. There are a few different ways you can do this, but the simplest is probably to run a cable into the line-in port on your computer's sound card, and then use a program to record it as a .WAV file. Then there are a few programs you can use to try and clean up the sound. One that is relatively easy to use and easy to get is Roxio's CD Creator v. 9 which I believe has a sound editing/cleaning utility. This is a PC program, the Mac equivalent would be Roxio Toast.
If you need more specific advice, please drop me an e-mail with what kind of equipment (PC and audio) that you've got currently.
Also, if you'd like, I can see if my sister can get you a cleaner version of it. She works for the local CBS affiliate.
Dan
Posted by: AdriftAtSea | April 10, 2007 at 07:42 AM
Oh, Mary Lee, what an incredible gift you were given this year for your birthday!
I got chills as I read about you hearing your dad's voice for the first time. Talk about amazing!
Your dad certainly sounded like one special man. My husband is ex-Navy, so I can really appreciate your father's thoughts and the way he conducted himself in that interview.
Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful, uplifting, slice of your life with us.
Posted by: Terri | April 10, 2007 at 08:07 AM
There's free software for sound recording and editing, Audacity, at audacity.sf.net. It should let you record the tape (if you run a cable from the earphone jack on the tape player to the mic jack on your computer, a $5 purchase at Radio Shack if you don't have one) and it has a number of utilities which will try to clean up the sound a bit. I hope they help!
Posted by: pjm | April 10, 2007 at 10:07 AM
Chills, indeed, ML! What an amazing birthday present, and what a demonstration of the kindness in some human hearts, to join forces and let you hear your father's voice, with its message that is still way too relevant.
I hope your technologically gifted friends can help you with the recording.
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
Posted by: Annie in Austin | April 10, 2007 at 11:10 AM
I can picture you sitting and intently listening for the first note of your father's voice. I can't put myself in your shoes to understand the depth of feeling and emotion you must have been going through.
Is is possible for you to share the recording with us? This story alone is a very wonderful thing to share.
Wow.
Posted by: Cowtown Pattie | April 11, 2007 at 08:48 PM
What a great and rare gift!
Posted by: Wally Blue | April 13, 2007 at 08:25 PM
A belated Happy Birthday greeting to you! How wonderful to hear your father's voice on that tape. Can only imagine how I would feel after all these years if I was to have a similar experience. Hope some of these techniques being suggested serve to clear up the tapes, as I'm sure there are ways to do so.
Your story reminded me that I have an audio tape of my mothers's voice, which I'm thinking I must try to preserve somehow, since tape quality does disintegrate over time.
Posted by: Joared | April 14, 2007 at 01:31 AM
My dad spent 3 years in the Pacific during WW II, and he didn't ever talk about it. He was a jovial, story-telling guy, but the only things he told me were how seasick he got on the ship over, how badly he missed having orange juice, and how a girl without teeth flirted with all the soldiers. "You knew you'd been there too long when Naomi started looking good." Your touching story has inspired me to find out more about his experiences. He died in 1999 and his stories went with him.
Posted by: Travelinoma | April 24, 2007 at 10:46 AM
Oh I hope someone can clean the tape for you. What a marvelous thing to have a recording of your father as he was when you were so young.
Posted by: wayne | April 28, 2007 at 09:06 PM