Sunpapers Christmas Show

[lxskllr]

For 70 years, two reddish-colored 16-inch vinyl records rested undisturbed in a large cardboard box in the publisher's vault in the basement of The Baltimore Sun building.

The box was shipped by Railway Express from the Newark Phonograph Record Co. in New Jersey to "WFBR, Radio Centre, Baltimore" and was covered with several labels: PLEASE RUSH. BROADCAST RECORDS. KEEP AWAY FROM HEAT. STAND ON EDGE.

Further information on the box explained what they were. The two records, each 30 minutes long, were copies of a Dec. 25, 1943, Christmas broadcast that was sponsored by The Sunpapers.

It featured soldiers from the 29th Infantry Division and Army Air Forces as well as women from the Red Cross sending messages to loved ones at home. It was broadcast from two bases "somewhere in England," through arrangements with the Army Special Services and the British Broadcasting Corp.

Pretty cool broadcast from WWII, Story here...

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/mar...,3121559.story

Show here...

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/xmas-wwii/

[Andy105]

That's great. So glad that they saved it.

[lxskllr]

I ripped the show, and transcoded it to 64kbps opus(sufficient for this quality). If anyone wants it, I zipped it up here(35.5mb)...

http://ubuntuone.com/5H673FjCoAwKrfyfO8KAvA

opus is a very new codec, but VLC player will play it. You can get that here...

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Edit:
Changed my download link. I included Dan Rodericks' show. The sound quality is pretty bad, but good enough for speech. The stream was very low, and I transcoded it after editing. It's 64kbps vorbis.

[whalen]

Listening now....nice.

[lxskllr]

Here's a nice follow up to the show...

Margaret Ann Wolf Harris with her mother and father, who was home on furlough. He died in World War II a short time later.

At 71, Margaret Ann Wolf Harris heard her father's voice for the first time in her adult life.

Her dad, Sgt. Cody Wolf, died in World War II when his plane was shot down over Germany on Jan. 11, 1944. But a couple of weeks before his death, he contributed to a Christmas broadcast, produced by war correspondents of the Maryland newspaper The Baltimore Sun.

Wolf recorded a message in which he mentioned his baby girl, Margaret Ann. Harris, who was 17 months old when her father was killed, heard the recording for the first time 70 years later on NPR member station WYPR.
Margaret Ann Wolf Harris, 71, lives in Catonsvile, Md.

Margaret Ann Wolf Harris, 71, lives in Catonsvile, Md.
Courtesy of Margaret Ann Wolf Harris

Wolf told the interviewer he'd been thinking a lot about Catonsville, home to his parents, wife and "my 16-month-old daughter, Margaret Ann."

"It was so wonderful," Harris tells NPR's Arun Rath. "And it was not a sad thing at all. It was just a wonderful experience to know that I could hear that voice and that my father said my name. That was the most poignant part."

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/05/259680...-decades-later