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Tracy Smith presents a page from our Sunday Morning Almanac:
January 8, 1933 ... 83 years, eight months and 17 days ago today ... the day Charles Osgood Wood was born in New York City.
Charles Osgood Wood and hissister, Mary Ann.
Courtesy Charles Osgood
He was joined just shy of a year later by his baby sister, Mary Ann, and together they shared a childhood of simple pleasures.
Summers meant happy times at their grandparents home in Massachusetts, where they whiled away the long days fishing and flying kites.
Back in New York, Charlie and Mary Ann shared a room in a small rental apartment ... and Charliebegan hisschool days at Our Lady of Refuge in the Bronx.
That all changed in early 1942, when Charlies father, a textile salesman, was transferred from New York to Baltimore.
In Baltimore Charlie and his sister welcomed a much younger brother, Ken, and they experienced a unique period in our history.
And who better to tell THAT part of Charlies journeythan Charlie himself ... as he did right here on Sunday Morning back in 2005:
You leave the Pennsylvania StationAround a quarter to four,Read a magazineAnd then youre in Baltimore
Baltimore, Maryland, birthplace of the great Babe Ruth and ofthe Star-Spangled Banner. Edgar Allen Poe livedthere, and so did I.
The year was1942. I was nine years old. Like many nine year old boys, Iwas in love with baseball, and radio and the world around me.
And what a world it was, back then -- a world at war. A world of rationing, and air raid drills, and victory gardens, all of which seemed wonderfully romantic to a nine-year-old boy dreaming of the universe beyond Baltimore.
I can still see that boy in my minds eye, blissfully happy in that terrible time, as only a nine-year-old can be.
On January 2, a few daysbefore I turned nine, the Japanese took Manila, and sadly I had to pin a tiny Japanese flag to the big map I had tacked to my bedroom wall.
It would be June 4th, the date of Americas great victory in the Battle of Midway, before I could happily pin up an American flag.
Did I mention thatI loved baseball? The Orioles then were not the Orioles oftoday. In those days, they were a struggling AAA team that often played AA ball. I loved them anyway, especially when my father would take me out to the ball park to see the games.
In Baltimore in 1942, there were white wooden houses with big front porches and grand white stoops many of them still standing, along with the Bromo Seltzer tower. It lookedItalian with a distinctly American twist.
In those days, there was a 40-foot-tall Bromo Seltzer bottle on top of the tower.In Manhattan, a college boy met his date under the Biltmore clock; in Baltimore, theyd meetunder the fizz.
In 1942, milk was delivered in bottles, the mail was delivered twice a day, and that boy named Charlie Wood had a paper route,deliveringthe Baltimore Sun.
Osgood demonstrated this throwing arm: Youd have a stack of them held together with astrap, pull one out as you approach the customer,fold itinto the throwing position -- this is where accuracy in journalism reallycomes in -- try not to get it in the bushes or on the roof.
My best boyhood pal was a girl -- my slightly younger sister, Mary Ann, who followed the Orioles and the war, and loved the radio justas much asI did.
On an April day as misty as my boyhood memories, Mary Ann and I visited our old house on Edgewood Road and relived some of those childhood joys, like the gas street lamps.
I dont think we had one of those dishes on the roofin 1942, Osgood said.
No, we didnt, but we got very goodradio signals, though, Mary Ann replied.
Radio was my window on the world -- and a world unto itself, a world more fantastic, and more real, than the world I saw every day in Baltimore The Lone Ranger and Edgar Bergen, the only ventriloquist every to succeed on radio. I even knew what the Shadow looked like, and he was invisible!
American radio of the 1940s had a profound influence on me -- itsthereason I am doing what I do today, instead of playing the organ at a skating rink. I could imagine no career more delightful, except perhaps to play shortstop for the Orioles. That dream was a littleunrealistic, though --I was afraid of ground b***s!
In those golden days of radio, I never minded the intrusions of sponsors. The commercials were entertaining. Mary Ann and I both loved them.
If you want a peppy pup,Than you better hurry up,Buy Thrivo, for himmmmmmm!
I took piano lessons at the Peabody Institute, an august institution thats still there in Baltimore, newly-refurbished and busier than ever!
Director Robert Sirota even had a surprise for me: We even actually haveyour report card, Charles O. Wood, 3504 Edgewood Road. It says thatyou took four terms of pianosatisfactorily.
I stillremember the song I played at my recital,The Happy Farmer,that I almost didnt get to performwhen they forgot to call my name.
In the evening, our family would gather around the piano at the house on Edgewood Road to sing our favorite songs. That was what families did in 1942, with the shades drawn and the lights dimmed in the midst of a terrible war.
For a few minutes, wed let the rest of the world go by
Well find perfect peace, where joys never ceaseOut there beneath a kindly skyWell build a sweet little nestSomewhere in the westAnd let the rest of the world go by.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charles-osgood-baltimore-boy/
