Life before September 12 1938 was dark. My Life from then until March 5 1946 was light. I had a strong Voice for a man of my frame which fact Leon Kern made a remark on this way—“He’s all sticks & bones but with his voice who needs the echo chamber!” After that it was Leon’s job to remind me I should keep back from the microphones even farther back than anybody else did in radio history.
In that studio I came to Life like I never did before I felt like I was just as live as the electric wires that carried my voice out of there & up into the Air & down into living rooms all across America. And when I walked out of the Liberty Building after our first Episode I strolled around very light in my head. I heard a bunch of boys & girls talking about The Green Ray in front of a drug store. A icy wind was slamming across Broadway but I walked right into it with my overcoat wide open. I was invincible. Also anonymous & above rewards but I was walking with a secret inside me my Secret Identity. I knew who I was & what I did plus I knew what a good thing nobody else knew me even if they did not realize how their ignorance was protecting them.
My whole Life changed. It was light all over.
The bright light of my Life faded almost all the way out in 1946 & when I came to again I was sitting in my kitchenette 43 Years later in my apartment on Pecan St. in Mason New Mexico. I had my pot of water boiling waiting for me to drop my onion in it then blooey! A blackout! All the electricity gone to Hell in a flash nor not just my apartment but this whole side of town.
I sat in my dark kitchenette for a few Minutes I waited for the Authorities to turn the juice back on. But the blackout kept going so I left my onion in the pot & went into my bedroom to sit not sleep. I waited 2 Hours & still no Electricity. A blackout it quivers very uncertain. In the middle of the dark it teases you by the promise if you wait eventually your Life will return to Light & Power. With different people the hope of things getting back to Normal takes different times to fade out. My hope faded out after 2 Hours and 10 Minutes which I believe is somewhat longer than the National Average.
One minute your Life is Normal—you have light & air conditioning & the T.V. with a baseball game playing on it maybe & a person has plans—to sit down & be comfortable with a boiled onion for instance & a can of beer he will spend a couple hours rooting for the winner. And next minute it is gone! Silence is everywhere. The game is playing somewhere or maybe it is not. Maybe it has been called on account of a Meteor destroying the field or a Anarchist invasion. All of a sudden anything you can think of is possible. The dark conceals a person from the World and it conceals the World from a person. So a person can stew or a person can change his plans.
I did not stew. I left my apartment I walked around the neighborhood. The dark was Everywhere and even though by my watch it was only 9:00 P.M. it could have been any Time it could have been the Middle Ages.
I believe it was the silhouettes by the fences & the ones running back & forth behind the Elementary School that gave me this particular idea. Ring Around The Rosy I believe was not a innocent child game always but was in the beginning of it a game they played to take away the terrors of the Black Plague. The ashes in the song meant the ashes of burned corpses I believe.
I heard children shouting over there in the playground and I followed the sound of their voices because I could not hear the exact words which they shouted i.e. the Purpose. I could not tell about the words they called out but I felt they were not calling them in Terror. It was playing. You know those kiddies hate like Hell to be in School Monday to Friday but now they were not allowed to be there so they just