Pryor Collection

Roy Pryor was a hobbyist who, from the mid-1930s until the late 1940s, recorded radio broadcasts onto aluminum and acetate transcription discs in his home. During the early part of World War II he and his family made a special point of trying to capture programs related to the conflict in Europe and the Pacific. As a teacher and dean of the Menlo School and Junior College, he used some of these recordings in class and made them available to other educational institutions.

The Archive of Recorded Sound now houses over 1000 of these discs; the collection contains a wide range of subject material taken directly from local and network radio, providing a kind of aural snapshot of day-to-day life at the time. The majority of the recordings cover the period 1940 to 1942, and depict war-time attitudes toward local and world politics, the economy, and social issues. There are entertainment shows and commercials as well.

Eleanor Roosevelt had a regularly scheduled radio program, "Over Our Coffee Cups", on Sunday nights (broadcast by KGO at 9:15pm in San Francisco). In #676 Roy Pryor captured the words of the First Lady on the night of Pearl Harbor, departing from her prepared comments (which are about morale in the military) to talk about the war which now was starting for the United States. Click on the microphone icon to download a 910k sound excerpt in au format.

The next entry in the log is for her husband's famous "day of infamy" speech before a Joint Session of Congress the following day.