Tom: ... when I was living ... in North Africa, and I had a cook, and I'd been there for several years, you see. And I was just going to come on leave to England, you see, and obviously it was quite a long leave, you know. I was coming for ... three months, I think it was. So I had to, I had a house and I had to sort of close the house up, obviously, and, erm, this chap who worked for me, who was a sort of ... cook, erm, he was ... obviously going to go off, you know, for three months-there wasn't any point in him staying there-so it was, I was getting everything ready, anyway. And I had a lot of things to fix up, so I'd got rather a lot of cash out of the bank. You know, I had a lot of bills to pay (Yes) and things to do, and, erm, I had about sixty-five pounds, I think it was. And one particular evening, I was just sort of, you know, clearing up the sitting-room and going to go to bed, I put the sixty-five quid under the papers in the top left-hand drawer of my desk and then I went out of the door on to the veranda and locked the door. And the point was, all the rooms of the house sort of opened on to a veranda, on to a courtyard, if you see what I mean. There weren't passages inside the house. And, erm, then I went to bed. So, the next morning I got up, and, erm ... after I'd had my breakfast, I was going out into the town to do various things for which I needed the money, you see (Yes) and, erm, I went to the drawer to get it ... and it wasn't there! I immediately thought, well maybe my cook, Idris, has taken this, because, the thing was, that the rooms were all locked and you couldn't have got in to the, erm, to the room, or any of the rooms of the house, without showing some sort of sign of entry, if you see what I mean. (Yes) And, er, he had access to all the keys in the house, you know. (Oh, I see.) So, erm, I went to his room. And, erm, he'd gone off already. He'd gone shopping, in fact. In fact, his room was locked. Erm, I got the keys, unlocked it, went in, sort of searched the room, ... felt rather sort of ... guilty, you know, at sort of going through his personal possessions in this way. But there was nothing there. So, you know, I thought, 'Well, hell, what do I do next? I'd better go to the police'. And, erm, my mind was still very much on him, that ... it must be him. Erm, so I went down to the police station and, erm, said that the money'd been stolen and would the police please come to the house, and investigate. And would they also ... investigate my cook, whom I suspected. And they said, erm, well, they wouldn't come and search the cook or look round the house unless I made a definite accusation against him. And if I made a definite accusation against him, they'd come along and, er, take him back to the police station and really sort it out. Well, I wasn't very happy about that, because I felt, erm, I didn't really have any evidence, you know, I was just extremely suspicious of him because of the circumstances. So, erm, I said, 'No,' and, but felt pretty desperate about it then. So I went back to the house ... Anyway, later in the day, I said to him, 'You know, I had sixty-five pounds, which I put in the desk, and it's disappeared.' And he sort of said, 'Oh, yeah'. You know, he didn... didn't register anything at all. Er, so I said, 'Yes, sixty-five pounds has disappeared and nobody seems to have come into the house'. And he sort of said, 'Oh yeah, well', (you know). So I said, 'Yes, I'm going to get the police'. And he still didn't sort of register anything, you know. He just sort of shrugged his shoulders. So then I thought, 'Well, the only thing to do is that I'll have to tell him that, erm, that's it, you know, I don't want him to work for me any more'. But, erm, being a coward over these sort of things, I let it drift for about a couple of days, and then, the day I was actually going, erm, I said to him, er, you know, 'Idris, I'm afraid that, er, I don't want you to come back after the holidays. I think it's better if you don't work for me any more.' And, er, he immediately made a tremendous speech, he said what the hell did I think I was doing, etcetera, etcetera, why, what were my reasons, etcetera, etcetera. So I said, probably very stupidly, but I said to him, 'Well, you know about that sixty-five pounds that disappeared, well, I'm not saying you took it, but I just think you might've taken it, and therefore I don't feel I can trust you any more and, er, so I just don't think you can go on working for me.' So, of course, that was it! He absolutely went through the roof at this! And, erm, you know, gave me a sort of tremendous ... tirade. Anyway, I'd quite made up my mind, although I'd taken so long to tell him ... And I said, 'Well, sorry', you know, 'that's it.' Then, in fact, erm, a friend dropped in, erm, who, who, who was a great friend. He, he, he lived there, he was a local person. And, erm, Osman came in and he sort of ... started getting involved in the conversation, ... anyway, I wasn't going to change my attitude over it. Then Idris got terribly upset and was all sort of sad about it and upset about it and started to cry, said I was ruining his life, etcetera. But, anyway, I was completely sort of hard-hearted about it and didn't do anything about it and that was it. And he went. I, er, I mean I ... paid him, ... you know, quite a bit of money in lieu of notice and everything but, I mean, he still felt extremely upset, and it was one of those, erm, very kind of unpleasant things, which left one ... feeling ... rather ... upset about it and not knowing... I never knew whether I'd done quite the right thing or not. Well, I worked there for a couple of years more and when I was finally leaving after two years I was throwing out lots and lots of things like magazines, books and so on, and this chap, Osman, who'd actually been there the afternoon Idris had finally left amidst all these rows, I gave him some old magazines, including actually, er, an old Encounter and, erm, he came back a few days later and he said, 'You know, I didn't know whether to actually come and tell you or not, but I was looking through that copy of Encounter you gave me and I found sixty-five pounds (laughter) in the back of the magazine.' Terribly difficult because I was leaving the country, never to come back, you know, in about twenty-four hours after that ... feeling that one had done something wrong which one couldn't put right! And I didn't have any idea what had happened to Idris, in fact. Pretty unfortunate!
In the summer of 1933, the world's first drive-in movie theatre opened in Camden, New Jersey. Drive-ins became popular after World War II and in the '50s there were nearly five thousand theatres across the country. But today, less than three thousand remained. Drive-ins are in trouble. Land values near cities are increasing and drive-ins are being torn down to make way for malls. And families are more likely to stay home for an evening of cheap entertainment with their VCRs and cable TV. When one more drive-in closed recently outside Jeffersonville, Indiana, reporter Bob Hanson was there, the last night at the Lakewood Drive-in.
The sun set as the last cars entered the Lakewood Drive-in. At the ticket booth Laura Boyle filled in for her daughter who's away at college. No money changed hands. The show was on the house.
Thirty years ago John Walley opened the Lakewood Drive-in on his father's farmland in southern Indiana. Corn fields still surround the theatre. Since 1956 people have driven for miles to get to the drive-in. They came in Studebakers, and Fords, Ramblars, and Corvats. But the '80s haven't been so kind to the drive-in. And on this night John Walley is closing up.
Before the show started, parents took their children to a playground in the front of the theatre. Framed by an orange sky and in the humid Mid-western air, they played on swings and slides. Inside the snack bar, the menu was timeless.
"Forty cents is your change, thank you."Thelma Wilson stuffed hotdogs in buns and wrapped them in aluminum foil bags. For twenty-three years Thelma has cooked hotdogs, popped popcorn and filled drinks in the Lakewood Drive-in.
In the mid-sixties, five hundred cars would fill the ashfall and dirt theatre. But in the eighties, seventy-five cars was considered a good night. And sometimes the movie's played to just twenty.
Carlo Crown switched on the thirty-five millimeter projector for the last time. About a hundred seventy-five cars pointed at the crumbling while screen. As word got out that the Lakewood Drive-in was closing up, people came from throughout the area. As the black and white images flickered on the screen, some people found themselves back in time. Like Linda King, who spent her wedding night here twenty-two years ago.
"There's a lot of memories here. I've brought all my kids here, my grandkids, and they are not going to be here any more. So they aren't going to bring their children here when they're grown."Johnny Buckman and his wife Merilyn watched the movie from their tinted glass window. The two went out on dates here twenty-seven years ago.
"I have been thinking about, you know, when we were young, and when he put his arms around me and . . . and just a lot of old memories, you know."John Walley stood outside the snack bar and talked to old friends and customers. He talked about how hard it was to compete with air-conditioned theatres and couldn't get first-run movies any more. And most of all he just reminisced.
"This is nice to go out to the country and watch movies on a big screen. The young people just don't know what they are missing because there won't be any drive-ins around in another ten years.
Some people watched the movie from the hood of their car. Others sat on lawn chairs. Many just walked around. John Walley plastered auction off the equipment from the drive-in. But in the dark people tried not to think about that. By the way, tonight's final film-The Last Picture Show. For National Public Radio, I'm Bob Henson in southern Indiana.
Technology and the Future (II)Now I would like to say a word about communications. The revolution in communications that has already taken place is still not fully understood. One way of appreciating it is to do a kind of communications strip tease. I would like you to abolish in your minds TV, then radio, then telephones, then the postal service, then the newspapers. In other words, to revert to the Middle Ages. In such a situation, we should feel deaf and blind, like prisoners in solitary confinement. Well, we'll appear this way to our grandchildren. Don't forget that a generation has already grown up that never knew a world without TV. One communications revolution has taken place in our lifetime. The next revolution, perhaps the final one, will be the result of satellites and microelectronics, which will enable us to do literally anything we want to in the field of communications and information transfer-including, ultimately, not only sound and vision but all sense impressions.
I am particularly interested in TV broadcasting from satellites directly into the home, bypassing today's ground stations-a proposal I first described twenty-two years ago. This will mean the abolition of all present geographical restrictions to TV; via satellites, any country can broadcast to any other. Direct-broadcast TV will be possible within five years and may be most important to undeveloped countries that have no ground stations, and now may never require any. Africa, China, and South America could be opened up by direct TV broadcast, and whole populations brought into the modern world. I believe that communications satellites may bring about the long-overdue end of the Stone Age.
They will certainly lead to a global telephone system and end long-distance calls-for all calls will be 'local'! There will be the same flat rate everywhere.
Newspapers will, I think, receive their final body blow from these new communications techniques. How I look forward to the day when I can press a button and get any type of news, editorials, book and theatre reviews, etc., merely by dialing the right channel. Moreover, not only today's but any newspaper ever published will be available. Some sort of TV-like console connected to a central electronic library, could make available any information ever printed in any form. Electronic 'mail' delivery is another exciting prospect of the very near future. Letters, will be automatically read and flashed from continent to continent and reproduced at receiving stations within a few minutes of transmission.
All these things are associated with information processing, and one-third of the Gross National Product is now spent on this in one form of another-data storage, TV, radio, books, and so forth. This radio is increasing; our society is changing from a goods-producing society to an information-processing one. I have devoted much of one book (Voices from the Sky) to the social consequences of this, and can mention only a few here.
One could be the establishment of English as the world language, through the direct telecast satellites mentioned above. Within the next ten years the future language of mankind will be decided, in a bloodless battle twenty-two thousand miles above the equator.
Another very important consequence will be a change in the patterns of transport, for a man and his work need no longer be in the same place. When these new information-and-communications consoles are available, almost anybody who does any kind of mental work can live wherever he pleases. Beyond this, any kind of manipulative skill can also be transferred from one point to another. I can imagine a time when even a brain surgeon can live in one place and operate on patients all over the world, through remote-controlled artificial hands, like those used in atomic energy plants.
Yet these developments will not necessarily mean an overall reduction of transport. I see a great reduction of transport for work, but increased transport for pleasure.
A result of this will be that vast uninhabited areas of the Earth could be opened up, because people will have far greater freedom to choose where they will live.
These trends will inevitably accelerate the disintegration of the cities, whose historical function is now passing. Cities will go on growing, of course, like dinosaurs-for the same reasons, and with the same results. |