Good morning, Whitewater.
Thursday in town will be cloudy with a high of fifty-four, and just a one-in-five chance of rain.
On this day in 1938, Orson Welles captivates and scares America with a radio play:
“The War of the Worlds” is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898). It became famous for causing mass panic, although the extent of this panic is debated.[3]
The first two thirds of the 62-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to some listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a sustaining show (it ran without commercial breaks), adding to the program’s realism, and that others were primarily listening to Edgar Bergen and only tuned in to the show during a musical interlude, thereby missing the introduction that proved the show was a drama.[3] In the days following the adaptation, there was widespread outrage in the media.[4] The program’s news-bulletin format was described as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers (which had lost advertising revenue to radio) and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission.[3] Despite these complaints—or perhaps in part because of them—the episode secured Welles’s fame as a dramatist.
On this day in 1914, Wisconsin gets her first 4-H Club:
1914 – First 4-H Club in Wisconsin Organized
On this date the Linn Junior Farmers Club in Walworth County was organized. This club was started five months after Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act which created the Cooperative Extension Service whereby federal, state, and county governments participate in the county agent system. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers]
Google-a-Day asks a question about a band:
The main character in the Broadway production of “Jersey Boys” was the lead singer for a band that celebrated their first commercial release in what year?
For today, from the Saline Project‘s animators, let’s go with a Loch Ness Monster for Halloween:
