A Summer Almost Gone, 1948 | Music from a Late Summer Radio

Tonight’s hour comes to you from somewhere in America, near the end of August 1948. It is the time of year when summer begins to leave quietly. The afternoons are still hot. Dust hangs over the county roads after a car has passed, and the white boards of the houses hold the sun until evening. Screen doors are left open. Porch swings creak in the warm air. Somewhere down the street, a radio is playing through an open window. By supper time, the shadows have grown longer. A Ford rolls slowly past the filling station. A boy pedals home with a paper bag tied to the handlebars of his bicycle. Someone is washing dishes behind a kitchen window. On another porch, a glass bottle of Coca-Cola sweats beside an empty chair. The fields are beginning to turn. Corn stands high along the road. Hay lies sweet and dry in the barns. Birds gather on the telephone wires in numbers no one noticed a week before. After dark, moths circle the yellow porch lamps. Fireflies move through the grass behind the houses. A train whistle carries across the fields, so far away that for a moment it is hard to tell whether it is coming closer or going farther away. From one house comes the sound of a baseball game on the radio. From another, a dance band. Someone laughs. Someone calls a child home. A screen door closes. Then the street is quiet again. There are still peaches in the kitchen bowl. Still warm evenings for sitting on the steps. Still one or two Sundays left before school begins. Still time for a drive to the river, for bare feet on the dashboard, for a nickel bottle of soda at the roadside stand. Summer has not gone. Not yet. But the mornings are cooler now. The metal door handle feels cold before sunrise. Dew lies in the grass beside the road. The first truck toward town can be heard long before it appears. And there is something in the air that was not there in July. September. No one speaks much about it. Perhaps there is no need. Everyone knows that soon the windows will be closed at night. The children will return to school. The fields will be cut. Suitcases will be packed. Some people will leave town. And some evenings, without anyone realizing it at the time, will never happen again. So tonight we will keep the radio on a little longer. We will leave the porch light burning. We will listen to the insects in the grass and the last cars passing on the highway. For another hour, it is still late summer in small-town America. It is still August. It is still 1948. And somewhere, the best part of the evening has not ended yet. A Summer Almost Gone, 1948 A quiet late summer evening in 1940s America, with old radio memories, small-town streets, distant trains, warm porch lights and the gentle nostalgia of an August slowly coming to an end. 1948 America • Late Summer • Small-Town America • 1940s Radio • Vintage Ambience • American Nostalgia • Old America • August Evening