This is a unique post, but it's also a "Part Two" to something I posted nearly two years ago, which was a record containing a Philco commercial that an amateur had added to, and obviously never expected anybody to hear it! If you recall that post, I discovered that the record contained some extra bands recorded at 78 rpm, where a person pretends to be a radio announcer, begins an episode of "Challenge of the Yukon," does lots of time checks, and at one point, barks like a dog.
The person keeps mentioning WENR from Chicago, and at the time I decided that this was most likely an aspiring radio employee who was told to practice, but it could also be that this was simply a radio employee's son who was fooling around at home. Perhaps his dad brought home discs that were normally scheduled to be thrown away, and perhaps he was allowed to screw around on their own transcription machine. We will never know.
This disc came from the same source [read: flea market] as the first one. That first disc was dated November 24, 1948, and this second one is dated September 8 of that year. In the midst of the added material, the speaker says that "Today's the 15th of January, 1949," so make of that what you will!
And now to the disc itself, which may interest some history majors. It's a 4-and-a-half minute news broadcast, read laconically by Edwin C. Hill, who sounds like he could break into an excellent Bing Crosby impression at any time. Southerners throwing produce at President Truman is mentioned. The sponsor is Nash-Kelvinator, and the announcer does a refrigerator ad in the middle. If you want to giggle at old-timey post-war husband/wife dynamics, there's plenty of that, too! (If you want to rant and make something about it, go back to Twitter.)
After that, we flip to the second side of the record, where there is one single band this time, lasting five minutes. I couldn't tell you if it was recorded before or after the last disc we heard, but it's very similar. I've included a transcription again this time, and all I can say is thank goodness for Audacity, which really helped me improve the sound quality (so well, that I went back and re-did the recording on the previous post and improved it, too). We again have "Challenge of the Yukon," Bulova watches, and...barking like a dog. Also, "a little purple hair" on the record, that gets "in the mechanism." Do what, now?! I really can't do it justice; you'll have to hear it for yourself.
After hearing a second recording, I'm more convinced this was an amateur playing around at home (not just every home included the equipment to record their own voice in 1949), and it's the kind of thing I would've done. It's somebody somewhere's father and grandfather, who certainly never dreamed it would end up in a flea market 70+ years later, digitized and transcribed by some wag with a blog. Enjoy!
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