BW - EP152—017: D-Day's 80th Anniversary—Ronald Colman Reads an Edna St. Vincent Millay Poem on NBC

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

John Nesbitt was born in Victoria, British Columbia on August 23rd, 1910. The grandson of actor Edwin Booth, the family moved to Alameda, California. Nesbitt was active in stock theater in Vancouver and Spokane and began working for NBC in San Francisco in 1933. By 1935, he was an announcer at KFRC in San Francisco. Nesbitt produced a series called Headlines of the Past which spun off into his signature program, The Passing Parade, in 1937. The inspiration came from a trunk inherited from his father that contained news clippings of odd stories from around the world. He utilized a research staff to verify the details, but wrote the final scripts himself, often within an hour of airtime. This led to a series of one-reel shorts produced by MGM. On the evening of June 6th, 1944, the just-heard Ken Carpenter was announcer for a Passing Parade broadcast on CBS at 7:15PM in which Nesbitt attempted to capture, in real time, the historic significance of D-Day by imagining its story being retold to schoolchildren in the year 2044. At 7:30PM over NBC, Ronald Colman read a special “Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.