The headlines and the photo on the front page of the Boston Post for May 7, 1937 have stayed fixed in my memory ever since I saw them. I was then a few months short of my ninth birthday and even then an avid reader of the newspaper that employed my father.

Had I been listening to the radio the evening before, I could presumably have heard a man named Herb Morrison announce the arrival of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Standing next to his network’s sound truck in the drizzle, he started to describe the mooring of this great German dirigible, just arrived from a flight across the Atlantic.

Clearly he found the sight awesome but his voice is controlled as he tells how the famous airship was hovering “like some great feather.” This it did as some two hundred handlers prepared to attach the Hindenburg to its mooring post.

Then, all of a sudden, he cries out: “It’s terrible, oh my get out of the way, it’s one of the worst catastrophes in the world.” Without warning the giant ship had burst into flames that were engulfing its entire structure, shooting four or five hundred feet in the air and endangering all the bystanders assembled for its arrival.

Listening to Herb Morrison on the recording, I find it difficult to discern all of his words, so caught up with emotion was he. As he realized what was happening to people around him, he actually began to weep. The broadcast’s original listeners would have had trouble developing a coherent notion of what was happening.

I have been listening to this dramatic spoken history on one of three phonograph records in the Columbia Masterworks album entitled “I Can Hear It Now.” This album was purchased by a member of my family decades ago. I play it on a venerable turntable that still gives good service and vinyl records that have preserved remarkable sound fidelity over so many years.

The segment on the Hindenburg disaster is only one among dozens of events and personalities, with words spoken by the central figures or by  eyewitnesses. Inside the album are comments written by Edward R. Murrow, Fred W. Friendly, and J. G. Gude. These producers say of the era from which I have culled a single incident “The thirteen years from the beginning of 1933 to the end of 1945 was an era for ear. The first and perhaps the last.”

With no little exuberance, they also call those thirteen years “perhaps the most fateful and exciting years in all the recorded story of civilization.” For people of my certain age, the events recorded here stir a rich collection of memories that have played a part in the development of our psyches.

Another of the bands on the record is entitled “Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returns from Munich and tells of his meeting with Hitler.” And a New York Philharmonic broadcast is interrupted for an announcement of the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This latter announcement I myself heard by reason of having been banished to my room by my parents for bad behavior.

Harry Truman’s first speech to Congress in April of 1945 is included, a speech that produced a rash judgment from me. Not without regional prejudice, I remember feeling that this man from Missouri sounded like someone too unpolished for the job of president.

Another entry, this for August 6, 1945, still provokes in me disturbing thoughts about religion, warfare, and the dropping of the atomic bomb. “Chaplain William Downey, U. S. Army Air Forces, says a prayer at Tinian before takeoff of the Enola Gay, which carried the first atomic bomb used in warfare.”

Sprinkled among these events, some of them literally earth-shaking, are others that simply give the flavor of the times. The Yankee Stadium heavyweight bout between Max Schmeling and Joe Louis suggests the part that championship boxing then played in national life. And Mayor Fiorello La Guardia reading the comic strips to children during the New York City newspaper delivery strike of 1945 provides comic relief.

For fear this all seem mere nostalgia, it bears repeating that the events and personalities recalled here form part of who we are as a people.

To a greater or lesser extent, these happenings were shared by all of us alive then. And for those who have come long after, the material transcribed into “I Can Hear It Now” has some place in their heritage also. Our society was shaped by what you can hear on these records and it was affected by the people, good and bad, who figured in the events.

Listening to the story of the Hindenburg disaster also brings me back to my boyhood with its still unknown potential. Soon, the events of World War II would fill my imagination and made me feel part of a cause much larger than myself.

Richard Griffin