How it was: it is late Sunday afternoon, mother and father in the front of the car, the children crowded into the back like puppies in a box. We are returning from a weekend at the beach, wind-blown and sunburned, sweating, itching, fidgeting, and cantankerous. Twice, father has had to stop the car, turn around in the seat, and fix us all with a baleful glare. But now it is six o’clock. The car radio is turned on, and no one needs to be told to keepquiet. It is The Great Gildersleeve . After that, it will be The Shadow , and by the time we turn into our driveway, we should be halfway through the Jack Benny show. Later yet, it will be Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, One Man’s Family , Fred Allen.…That was more than thirty years ago, but for most of our generation, the voices, the laughter, and the songs are still with us, fast in our memory and on the air forever. Radio gave us our jokes, our music, our adventure, news, politics, dreams, even in large part our view of ourselves—all of this through a witchery of wires and resistors, cathode tubes and condensers. The magic is gone now; the news and the music remain, but most of the rest of radio that excited the mind and tickled the ribs has gone out into the ether, unrecoverable. Even the equipment has lost its magic. A radio that is small enough to be strapped to the wrist simply lacks the mystique of a big Philco cathedral standing on a table in the livingroom, its lighted dial a time machine to anywhere. And will a phrase like “solid state” ever ring with the authority of “superheterodyne”? Of course not. Radio was an experience, one well worth the remembering—an opinion vigorously shared by the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City, which has preserved some of the best minutes and hours of air time loosed on the world since Marconi’s remarkable instrument was put to the uses of commerce. The museum, housed on three floors of a small building on East Fifty-third Street, just off Fifth Avenue, is the child of William S. Paley, chairman of CBS. “I think we often forget,” he has written, “just how major an impact broadcasting has had upon us.…Its growth has been extremely rapid—from 528 radio stations in 1926 to 8,000 radio and 962 television stations today.…Now, after fifty years of network broadcasting, that once fledgling industry has become a mature, responsible and important force in our national life. And therefore it is time that we take stock of our past so that we can know and understand the heritage of the broadcast media in building our future.” One could—one does—quibble with the notion that modern broadcasting is uniformly mature or responsible, but it is impossible to deny its importance or the value of the past in learning something of the future. In any case,