Tag: 1940s

Big News from Cladrite Radio!

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Big news!We’ve got big news! Cladrite Radio has taken the Patreon plunge, and we wanted you to be the first to know.

Patreon is a website that allows creative types to receive monthly support from their fans, followers and, in our case, listeners. We’ve set up several contribution levels, starting as low as $1 a month, and with a thank-you gift (or gifts) at each level.

Cladrite Radio is a labor of love, but it costs us a good deal of money, time and energy. A little support from our listeners, readers and followers will go a long way toward making things a bit easier for us.

If you listen to our toe-tapping tunes, enjoy our posts here on our blog and on our various social media platforms, or both, we’d very much appreciate if you’d at least pay a visit to our Patreon page and consider chipping in what you can—you’ll receive some swell stuff in return, in addition to our deep gratitude. We love exploring the pop culture of the first half of the 20th century with you, and your support can help us dig even deeper.

Cladrite Radio’s New Home Sweet Home

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You may have noticed that things look a bit different around these parts, and there’s a good reason for that: We’ve been hard at work for weeks, revamping our website.

Cladrite Radio is now a fully secure, mobile-friendly website and we have a brand new streaming player for you to enjoy our toe-tapping tunes of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. We hope you’ll put the new site through its paces and let us know if you experience any technical issues.

Moving the site to a new server and springing for increased security wasn’t cheap, so if you’d like to show your support by chipping in a few clams, you’ll see a link to the right of this post that allows you to do just that. And thanks!

An attractive woman sits listening to a vintage radio

Dame Vera Lynn’s Still Got It

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Dame Vera LynnWe were tickled pink recently to learn that the recent greatest-hits release from Dame Vera Lynn has sold more copies than any other album released by a female artist in the U.K. this year.

Not bad for a 100-year-old songbird!

Lynn, known during World War II as “the Forces’ Sweetheart” for the inspiring wartime songs she sang and her dedicated efforts to entertain the troops, celebrated her centenary birthday in March of this year, and though she’s no longer recording, her reissues and greatest-hits packages have always done very well.

But the top-selling female artist in the U.K. more than 65 years after her heyday? That speaks to the deep affection and high esteem in which Dame Vera is held.

Longtime Cladrite Radio listeners and readers know very well how we feel about Dame Vera; her music has been a big part of our playlist since we went “on the air” years ago. So you can imagine how excited we were to receive in the mail last week this lovely autographed picture, direct from Dame Vera herself.

In the brief note that accompanied the picture, Dame Vera wrote, “My P.A. [personal assistant] Susan has told me about your radio station, and I commend you for keeping alive the memory of that bygone era.”

It’s our great pleasure, Dame Vera, and we’re grateful you’re still here with us. You’re an inspiration to us all.

If you’d like to show your appreciation to Dame Vera for the joy she’s brought us all over the years, consider supporting Dame Vera Lynn Children’s Charity, which is dedicated to supporting families with children under 5 years old with cerebral palsy and motor-learning difficulties. Dame Vera thanks you, and so do we.

The Latest from the Streaming Wars

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We’ve been talking to you of late about the technical troubles our streaming provider, Radionomy, has been experiencing, and here’s the latest: Our stream is currently available via all the popular browsers via this website, our page on the Radionomy.com website, the Internet Radio feature in iTunes (look for us under Jazz), and via the free Radionomy app that’s available for Android and iOS.

However, it’s still not available through many third-party apps (like Reciva and Nobex—though Android users of the latter may be able to access the stream), and that has impacted our listener hours rather drastically. This matters because Radionomy has a daily minimum number for listener hours and any stations that fall below that mark get 86’d.

We’re not that close to the danger point just yet, but we’re closer than we’d like to be. So we humbly ask you to make it a point to give us a nice, long listen or two (or twelve) over the next few days to get our average back up a bit. Choose whichever method mentioned above that works for you; it’s all the same to us (and to Radionomy).

We may look into switching to another streaming provider one of these days—Radionomy is not only buggy, but their communication with their broadcasters is almost non-existent. But the service is free, which matters to us a great deal—a money-maker Cladrite Radio is not. We’re lucky when we break even.

So unless and until we switch, please keep us streaming in the background whenever you’re able (heck, stream us on your computer or phone and mute the sound, if you’re not in the mood for our toe-tapping tunes at just that moment, though honestly, when are you not in the mood for great music from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s?). And thanks!
Listening to Cladrite Radio on the beach

Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill, Then and Now

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The Bunker Hill neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles was once a fashionable area where the many of the city’s elite resided. By the late 1940s, the Victorian homes those well-to-do families had occupied had been transformed into boarding houses and apartment buildings, and the people who called them home were decidedly not high society.

Today, the neighborhood would be all but unrecognizable to those who lived there in either the good old days and the bad old days, as is demonstrated in this film by Keven McAlester, which juxtaposes 1940s footage (shot, we’re guessing, as background for some of the many films noir of the day that featured scenes shot in the neighborhood) with contemporary footage of the same streets that are captured in the earlier footage.

It may come as no surprise to you that, given the choice, we’d opt for the Bunker Hill on the left in a heartbeat.