Throaty chucklings, indignant hoots & snuffles

Rosamond Lehmann, The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968, p. 31—

The trains are much loved by me; their language is companionable, familiar, pregnant with interest and surprises: triumphant masculine crescendos, gently lamenting diminendos, hoarse throaty chucklings, indignant hoots, unbridled snorts and explosions, exhausted sighs and snuffles. Even the shunting goods trains are dear to me, especially in the dead of night, when their screech and cackle speak to me not of dementia but of hope and comfort…

Above Rosamond Lehmann, her brother John Lehmann, and British writer Lytton Strachey (c1920s). Cropped. Photographer unknown. Public domain.

Let's Pretend | A Radio Series from the 1950s

Poster by Roy R. Behrens (2018)

Among the most vivid memories of my early childhood is that of listening to a fantastic children's radio program called Let's Pretend. I no longer recall any specific stories. All I remember is how powerfully engaging the performances were—as if they were visual, when in fact they consisted entirely of voices and sound effects.

Recently, I've been reading the autobiography of Terry Gilliam, the only American member of the Monty Python troupe, titled Gilliamesque (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). On page 9, he recalls his own American childhood, and the experience of reading books, in which a child may often engage in "translating that mental picture from two dimensional into three." How clearly I remember that in my early years of reading books. But then he goes on—

It's the same with the radio, which was all-powerful in America at that time [the early 1950s]. There was a children's radio show called Let's Pretend, which was one of my very first gateways to the fantastical. 

Mine too, for which I will always be grateful.

On Air Romance

Former PBS news anchor Robert MacNeil, recalling his early days on radio, in Wordstruck: A Memoir (NY: Viking, 1989), p. 153—

In one [an adult radio drama in 1950] I had to play a series of love scenes with a pretty actress called Miriam Newman, who was enough older, say twenty-nine to my nineteen, to make me feel a very raw youth. The sound of kissing was achieved by kissing one's own hand. We stood, man and woman, facing each other, a few inches apart, with a large microphone between us, each holding the script to one side of the mike, in order to get our mouths very close for the intimate, breathy parts. Miriam was extremely realistic, sighing and kissing the soft part of her right hand above the thumb until it was smeared with lipstick and, I thought, as a mere thumb, getting far too much attention.