Ping pong ping. Drops of water in a tin cup. Pong pong ping. A church organ from hell shatters the calm. Da da da da da-daa da da! It’s late at night; your radio knob’s tuned to the left side of the dial. A baby cries. A chicken clucks. A cat meows. And then the voice rumbles through your speakers like an approaching thunderstorm.
“. . . old as now it was
Philosophical meditations. References to Aquinas and angels dancing on the head of a pin. Images of chicken-brain operations, of waking up inside an alarm clock. Cut-and-paste poetry culled from Eliot, Joyce, and Dylan Thomas.
“This has all the creative input of a parrot,” he says, waving a copy of the script. He tosses it aside.
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Nordine grew up in Chicago. His father was an architect who helped design some of the buildings at the 1933 Century of Progress world’s fair. He says his mother was quite religious. She made him ad-lib sermons for her.
In the heyday of radio, when Norman Corwin and Orson Welles and Arch Oboler were heard in households across the country, Ken Nordine was a student at the University of Chicago. He started a radio club there and got a job at WBEZ working the mimeo machine. (Back then, WBEZ’s programming was strictly for the public schools.) After graduation, he worked as an announcer at small stations in Bay City, Michigan, and West Palm Beach, Florida, before returning to Chicago.
