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Untitled, by Norman Corwin · Lawrence University: Theatre of the Air

• 0:07
  Host: Welcome to the Lawrence University Theatre of the Air. Tonight, taped before a live audience in f Theodore Cloak Studio Theatre, the campus the Lawrence University Theatre of the Air presents Norman Corwin. Now our Norman Corwin Festival continues with Untitled. Mr. Corwin wrote and directed this play for broadcast on 04/18/1944 on CBS as part of the series called Columbia Presents Corwin.
• 1:01
  Actor 1: With reference to Hank Peters, he is dead. That much is certain. The fact of his death is common knowledge to himself and to the files of the War Department in Washington DC and has been duly reported in his hometown newspaper and has been taken into consideration by his relatives and friends. Perhaps you knew Hank Peters. Perhaps if you didn't know him, you saw him somewhere and didn't know it was he, quite possible.
• 1:32
  Because at one time or another, he rode on the coaches of the Santa Fe, the Union Pacific, the New York Central, and the Nickel Plate. He mingled with crowds and depots across the land and at various times was among the audiences at widespread Orpheum and Low Theatres. He strolled on leave down Broadway and Wilshire Boulevard, Wabash Avenue, and the main streets of Killeen, Texas, Gulfport, Mississippi, and Des Moines, Iowa. He frequently ate blue plates at scattered child's restaurants, was known to have purchased sodas, razor blades, and magazines at Liggett drugstores. And before he was apprenticed to the war, he drove many a mile over many a state highway, also over secondary and dirt roads not represented on the Saucony maps.
• 2:24
  So it is quite possible that at some time or other you may have passed him, seen him, talked to him. Well, anyway, he's dead now. They sorted out his belongings and put them in a canvas bag and sent them home. There wasn't much to send.
• 2:43
  Actor 2: Wristwatch. Check. Shaving kit.
• 2:44
  Actor3: Check.
• 2:45
  Actor 2: Wallet.
• 2:45
  Host: Check.
• 2:45
  Actor 2: 14 American dollars.
• 2:47
  Actor 4: $14.
• 2:47
  Actor 2: 52 lira.
• 2:48
  Actor 4: What does family do with the lira?
• 2:49
  Actor 2: Never mind. Put it down there. Portable radio.
• 2:52
  Actor 4: Check.
• 2:52
  Actor 2: Deck of cards.
• 2:53
  Actor 4: Check.
• 2:53
  Actor 2: Pack of letters. Check. Four snapshots.
• 2:55
  Actor 4: Let me see.
• 2:55
  Actor 2: Come on. Come on. Marksman's medal.
• 2:57
  Actor 4: Right. That's all. Next.
• 2:59
  Actor 1: These things were sent home in a neat package. But what could not be sent home were items unassorted and unrelated that died within his head when he was hit. Telephone numbers, the taste of good hot grub on a cold rainy day, the image of the evening plane caught in the skein of searchlights over the town pulling the whole web with it across the sky, the paralyzed newsboy on Maple and Elm who could barely hold his coins in his hand while he counted change, The shimmer and float of summer and the bright bare legs of a woman. The posture of his dog faking exhaustion, lying with his head down on the floor but watching his every move. Oh, a great many corny things and a few others including the antique smell of books in the public library.
• 3:48
  And the moon going down over the shoulder of his girl Marian as they sat on the porch into the hours of the forming dew. These items, of course, cannot be reconstructed as he felt them, and neither can Hank Peters be reconstructed, at least in the form by which you may possibly have known him. As for his life, there is no straightforward account available, but there are several people who could piece it together, although they cannot always be relied on to give you a true interpretation of the facts. Let us start then with two folks who saw him last and first, neither friends nor relatives, but professionals and thus unprejudiced this way or that.
• 4:42
  Actor 2: I'm a medical officer attached to
• 4:44
  Actor 5: the sixth Company, twenty second regiment, tenth division. In this coffin, we
• 4:48
  Actor 2: have reason to believe, is the body of Hank Peters, private first class. I shall I shall read you the contents of his of his death certificate. Henry Charles Peters, 26. Identification number, 8406912. Killed in action of the following injuries, abdominal lacerations, lower left quadrant, fracture of the sternum, ruptured spleen, internal hemorrhages, severed right arm.
• 5:09
  That is all.
• 5:20
  Actor 1: Ah, but you have left out the important things. He died also of a broken Jew and the multiple abrasions of the skin of a Chinese. And where in the report have you mentioned what happened in a little Spanish town in 1938?
• 5:42
  Actor3: I am the doctor who, twenty six years ago, delivered Henry Charles Peters. My file says, primipara, normal labor of about six hours. No complications. Anesthesia, ether. Weight, six pounds, four ounces.
• 5:59
  It was a simple birth.
• 6:10
  Actor 1: But it was not a simple birth. His mother's womb having inward connections with Scandinavia and the springs and winters of that region, the seed of his father being out of the cross fertilizations of restless migratory peoples and the silt and backwash of a thousand continental waters. And at his birth, his pulse was 130 and his states were 48. His respiration normal and his rights equal. And there were 56 teeth implicit in his gums and 21 amendments in his constitution.
• 6:46
  And although he was blind at birth and without a mind of his own, he was nevertheless automatically a citizen of his country. Certain privileges having been obtained in his name and underwritten by many men. Among them, some too famous to be mentioned and others less famous who died in battles too familiar to be here recounted. Do you call that a simple birth?
• 7:16
  Actor 6: I am his mother. His hair was light when he was born, but it turned dark later. He was a bottle baby after three weeks. When he was still in knee pants, he got into a fight with some other boys at the corner of our street and got cut with a piece of metal. That's how he got the scar on his chin.
• 7:33
  He was a dreamer, Henry was, with all kinds of ideas. Seems like he was never one for the girls hardly until he met Marion, whom he got engaged to the day he got the good job at McAndrew's department store. I remember how I was hoping he wouldn't be drafted, but he went and enlisted. And when he went away to war, he said he knew exactly why he was going and said he'd be back when the war was over and not to worry, but I worried. Why did he have to get killed?
• 8:00
  Why did it have to happen to my boy? He kissed me goodbye on a Thursday morning. It was 08/20/1942. He had to get up very early that morning, and I cried. And the last I saw of him was when he went out of the front door, and I hurried into the front room and watched him through the front window going down the street.
• 8:23
  Actor 1: Down the street a piece there was fighting mother and your boy got hit with a piece of metal. Who will come to the door and tell her why? It was a long street he started down mother, all the way down Maple and continuing on Piccadilly and the Nevsky Prospects, winding down around the main drag of Canberra and connecting with footpaths in the Solomons. Many mothers and many windows on that street mother, and many are turning in a sudden intersection. Where it leads to is, of course, the question of our time.
• 8:57
  Actor 7: I was his teacher. He was a fair student, nothing out of the ordinary. His average grade was b minus overall, rating a c in English, a in history, d in geography, and b in chemistry. Best mark was in history. He was in the lower third of his graduating class.
• 9:17
  That is all we have in the record.
• 9:28
  Actor 1: There is more to the record. Sir, he went beyond you and geography, learning that an ocean is a straight, a continent, an isthmus, learning that the sky is the limit in the letting of blood, learning the lie of the darkest land. Sir, he has been graduated with honors, and he shall have a good mark in history forever.
• 10:02
  Actor 8: When he was about 15, he got a sudden passion to be a drummer, and so he gave up the violin. I advised against his doing it, but he was all caught up with traps and snares and paraphernalia, and I suppose he had to have his fling. There's no accounting for the taste of adolescence. When he was 19 or so, he got to appreciate good music. And in fact, the last time I talked with him was at a concert at the Memorial Building in town.
• 10:29
  He was there with his girl, and we met at intermission and made a date to meet afterward. And mister Draper and I and Henry and Marion went to an ice cream parlor, and we had a fine time talking about things in general, and I got to like him very much. I saw him a couple of times after that at the movies, but I never again got to speak to him. I was really sorry to hear about him.
• 10:58
  Actor 1: Who was it fiddled while Rome was burning the native huts of Abyssinia? Very respectable gentlemen indeed, including old King Carol and his fiddlers three. Paganini Baldwin, Joaquin Bloom, sir Johnny One Note, and choirs of fiddlers, whole companies of fiddlers, nations of fiddlers, senatorial and parliamentarian, all of whom may now sound a's for a dead soldier and then go into a Pavan. Call it none but the Purple Heart. Among the heavy drums, he sat and played the bazooka, played the sweet bazooka, played it sweet and low and ducked his head from time to time as chords crashed all about him.
• 11:41
  And when the raid was over, he would rise and pick up his pack and go on against the kettle drums, against the snares and booby traps and paraphernalia of a well rigged enemy. And by such tactics, he and others of his band storming the Appian Hill up as far as the third position. The comfort of a box seat at the Met was being made secure, and the undivided concentration of the music lover in his home was being convoyed safely through the program on the radio.
• 12:25
  Actor3: We've been keeping company for three years before the war broke out. And I wanted to get married right after Pearl Harbor, but he enlisted immediately and said he'd rather wait until after the war because he didn't want me tied down to him in case he might get crippled or blinded or something and be a burden to me. We used to go to the movies once a week depending on who was playing or to a concert, and occasionally, we went dancing at the Palladium on Saturday night. We were both crazy about photography. We used to keep a picture album together in which we pasted pictures of all the places we had been and all the people who were important to us, like our families, and the boy who first introduced us at a party.
• 13:04
  Hank became very serious toward the end though, and he used to talk a great deal about the world and its problems. When Hank went away, I felt sure he'd come back, and I still can't get used to the idea that he won't.
• 13:26
  Actor 1: While you were going to the movies once a week, the Weimar Republic failed you. While you were fumbling on a sofa, a paper hanger laid waste your plans. In your picture album, have you not left out the gallery of senators who voted down the League of Nations and a group shot of the Chinese of Mukden dead since 1931 and a close-up of the Greece proud face of Franco? These people were important to you also. Tonight, your arms lie empty of your lover because it was assumed in local legislative circles after one such war as this, the world was none of our concern.
• 14:07
  The empty pillow beside your own is stained with the oil we sold the enemy. Our foreign policy was set against the occasional Saturday night at the Palladium or so it turned out when the scrap reserve got high enough in Yokohama.
• 14:29
  Actor 4: I got a letter from him once, practically telling me how to run my newspaper. He demanded to know why we took the stand we did in our editorials about certain fundamental and constitutional things. He accused us of being anti war and against the United Nations simply because we hammered away a bureaucracy in Washington and kept pointing out the dangers of trusting our allies too far. He indulged in the fruitless and misguided pastime of calling names and took occasion in his letter to label us fascists, simply because we took a strong position against the excesses of labor and warned the public not to encourage racial equality among population groups for whom equal rights would obviously create problems that would upset the entire social structure. It was typical of letters we received from numerous victims of propaganda, and so, naturally, we did not print it.
• 15:22
  Actor 1: Yes. He was the type to trust an ally in all seasons of travail. For in the summer of the year, when the star close by us shone on the Midlands and the grasses grew exuberantly on the moors, the varicolored currents sparkling and curling in the channel, he trusted the young men of an ally up as far as 30,000 feet against the finest squadrons of the obviously unvanquishable Luftwaffe. And in the spring of yet another year, when the dandelions and cool disdain of the communicates appeared among the corpses and spice carrying breezes from neutral orchards to the south blew softly over the ammunition dumps, he trusted the men of another ally as far as the border of Romania and still farther. He was also the type to enjoy the excesses of labor as they appeared in the shape of the gun in his hands, as they flew by the hundreds over his head, as they rolled on tracks and treads down the paths of most resistance.
• 16:30
  He was the type who insisted upon the open candors of labeling, his nose contending fascists by any other name smelled just as bad. He was an easy victim to the propaganda that all men are equally created. This being not especially a doctrine short waved from abroad, but rather early American. On the day he died, reconnaissance had told them that the foe lay straight ahead, but Pete knew very well some of the enemy was back at home, publishing daily and Sunday.
• 17:16
  Actor 9: I killed him. It was early in the morning when the shells occurred. I did not see him, of course, because I was miles away. I merely pulled the drawstrings and fired the 88 millimeter shell. As far as I'm concerned, it was merely a puff of smoke on the side of a hill.
• 17:31
  I had nothing against this man personally. I was merely doing my duty for the furor on the fatherland in the struggle to save the world from the Bolshevik Democrats. It was entirely an impersonal matter. Heil Hitler.
• 17:52
  Actor 1: When the last bomb has crumped and the tank is garaged and the cruiser wheels about the ports, when the tape is scraped off the windows in London and the delicatessens of Copenhagen once again break out in green neon, when the wives and children go down to the station in Council Bluffs knowing that victory comes in on the five forty five, Missus Peters will be sitting alone in the front room window listening to the bells and the whistles. What will you be doing then, Blitz Boy? Where will you be going then, war maker extraordinary? What impersonal matter will absorb you on that day, master of Europe? The mother of the smoke puff on the hillside will finger a worn gold star, remembering the son you killed merely in the name of the mystic of Munich.
• 18:53
  Actor 2: I'm Charlie Ferreter. Me and Hank was crawling on our bellies up a slope one morning, and there's a big stinking red flash. And when I looked around again, Hank was just a mess of rags and a couple of bones sticking through. Me and Hank used to get into arguments about the war. He used to say he used to talk about freedom.
• 19:13
  Said that's what we was fighting for. Well, for Christ's sake, I knew that. He didn't have to tell me that. Anybody except a fascist bastard would agree it's the best thing in the world you could fight for. But what I'd like to know is, why do you have to fight for it every twenty five years?
• 19:27
  Can't somebody figure a way around that? What bothers me is whether I'm being a sucker. Because if this war don't add up to something big, bigger than any came out of any other war, then I don't know what the hell I'm doing in this outfit. I used to say to Hank, the people who still who are still alive when this one's over, if those people don't do something sensible about it, then what the hell is the use? What's the good of guys like Hank Peters getting knocked off if nobody knows what to do over their dead bodies?
• 19:54
  What are you gonna do about it?
• 20:02
  Actor 1: I was Hank Peters. I assure you I hated to go. It is not easy to leave a woman crying at a train gate. It is not easy to leave a mother standing at a window, to walk away and not look back. You can get lonesome no matter what when you are far from home, especially if you don't know when, if ever, you are coming back.
• 20:25
  I am dead of the mistakes of old men, and I lie fermenting in the wisdom of the earth. I am very dead, but no deader than the British who struck at Alamein, the Reds who crossed the Dnieper going west. I am silenced, but no more silent than the partisans of Yugoslavia who fought tanks with their bare hands and bottles of benzene. I am missing, but not farther than a famined Greek. I am buried, but no deeper than the children of Chungking.
• 21:00
  I know I know how there will be jubilation at the end and how the proclamations will be sent out on the waiting air. They will gather in committee, pose for pictures, sign the papers. Territories will be wrangled and big punishments performed. It will be seen to that the ruins are most carefully policed. Ah, there will be a stirring and a busyness about the capitals, and Charlie Ferriter will wonder if perhaps he's being answered.
• 21:32
  The charters will be sealed in wax above the bodies of the dead, and all the words will make a noise of truth and sensibility. But let me tell you, from my acre of now undisputed ground, I will be listening. I will be tuned into clauses in the contract where the word democracy appears and how the freedoms are inflected to the ear of a Negro. I shall listen for a phrase obliging little peoples of the earth, for partisans and Jews and Puerto Ricans, Chinese farmers, miners of tin ore beneath Bolivia. I shall listen how the words go easy into Russian and the idioms translated to the tongue of Spain.
• 22:20
  I shall wait and I shall wait in a long and long suspense for the password that the peace is setting solidly. On that day, please let my mother know why it happened to her boy.
• 22:45
  Host: This has been Norman Corwin Untitled presented by the Lawrence University Theatre of the Air, starring Timothy Troy as Hank Peters, Emma Sweet as sergeant, Tom Gilmore as corporal and editor, Dan Whiteley as medical officer, Joe Yeager as the obstetrician, Kathy Prevett as the mother, Devin Schrafe as the teacher, Elizabeth Stoner as the music teacher, Merrill McNally as the girl, Devin Cass as the Nazi soldier, and Nick Endres as Ferreiter. This is Albert Riser, your director, thanking you for joining us this evening. We hope you enjoyed Norman Corwin as much as we have.