Escapes: The Gramophone Concerts of ‘37

by Professor Walden

Whether it’s been Celebration Day celebrations at the Philbert’s house, or the more recent chartered spring break vacations to Mexico, letting our hair down is not something Jeffersonians have a problem doing. But here’s one trend of amusement you may not have heard about.

In the summer of 1937, the university had just acquired a license to broadcast it’s own radio channel. Soon those who could pinpoint the spot on the dial were treated to lectures, concerts, radio plays, and variety hours. It was an immediate success. Finally, we had radio we could call our own. The signal from Chicago came in intermittently, and if you could pick up anything out of the Rockies, it was too garbled to understand. The university broadcasted, and the public was enthralled.

But then, disaster struck. During a particularly vicious June storm, the year old radio tower  was struck by lightening and blown over. The silence was deafening. The university didn’t have the budget to fix it, which was the last thing the taxpayers of this town wanted to hear. But what the university did have was an audience, and they capitalized on it.

Along with the radio tower, the university had built a state of the art recording studio. During the day, budding sound engineers would take turns putting the performances previously heard on the radio onto lacquer discs. Then, in the evening, the university threw open the doors of the main auditorium, and played the best of what was recorded that day. By the second night, the auditorium was full, and the doors were left open so the sounds could drift out into the hot summer night.

For the rest of the summer, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday evening, people would gather and listen to the gramophone concerts. It got so hot inside the auditorium, the concerts were moved to Washington Square. Families would gather around the streetlamp-lit marble lion, still hot with the heat of a Midwestern summer, and listen to two hours of entertainment. By September, the engineering school had constructed a temporary tower, and the concerts ended.

Why people didn’t patronize the one local movie theater during this time is a bit of a mystery. No primary sources exist on this topic, but I’d guess that first night everyone showed up and experienced such a large, peaceful, relaxed gathering that it awed everyone in the auditorium. The live listening, with nothing but their mind’s eye to watch, must have been such a unique cultural and communal experience, that they had didn’t compare but enjoyed it. And there hasn’t been anything, to my knowledge, like it since.