Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood must have been within range of the listeners-in. Amateur establishments also thrust themselves on the air : the Hollywood Breakfast Club broadcasts its orgies of ham and eggs ; Aimee McPherson's temple was so powerful that it had to be reduced legally, for she was continually breaking into serious concerts with devastating interruptions of " Praise the Lord," or " Now I want you all to listen to the Glory Station of Radioland." The cinemas broadcast their first nights. Dinner speeches, political speeches, lectures, book talks saving the listeners from reading the literature reviewed, revival meetings, football and boxing matches . . . the air received them impartially and poured them out from competitive trumpets. The time of the Presidential elections was now drawing near, and for hours dreary voices drawled, fog-horned, or bellowed on, interrupted by tumultuous shouts, catcalls, squeakers, explosions, and other engines of American political enthusiasm. Set poor Robinson Crusoe down on Blank Avenue and he might well have exclaimed : " Oh, solitude, where is thy spell?" The mind was staggered to remember that there were four hundred square miles thus continuing all the while in this piece of reclaimed desert near the Pacific shore, this town that local boosters claimed to be a combination of the delights of paradise, heaven, Eden, and the Riviera. Of the people who provided us with this continual cacophony we saw little. They kept so close that we were almost reduced to inferring their presence by the dissonances and overtones with which they troubled the Californian atmosphere, by the dollops of newspapers or Saturday Evening Posts that the successful pedlars flung at their front doors as they hastily bicycled round the court, by their lit windows at night, and by the daily pilgrimages of dust-bins from [34]