Happy New Year! Enjoy this New Year’s mix of swing and jazz from 1930s-50s New Year Radio. And marvel at how Wynn the Astrologer on his live-to-air 1936 radio predictions got 1937 so wrong.

The Phantom Dancer is your weekly non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV every week.

LISTEN to this week’s Phantom Dancer mix (online after 2pm AEST, Tuesday 26 December) and weeks of Phantom Dancer mixes online at, at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

OOGIE BOOGIE

This week’s featured ‘artist’ is Wynn the Astrologer…

SEER

This famous 1930s astrologer gives his prognostications for 1937 on this week’s Phantom Dancer. In fact, get ready for disappointment at the end of Set 1, where I play Wynn’s ‘wise words’ (and some musical excerpts) from the 1936 New Year’s Eve Rudy Vallee show.

You’ll hear most of what Wynn had to say about the year ahead. I cut it short for time. Think of the audience for the 1936 radio broadcast, they never got that time Wynn wasted back.

Wynn, born Sidney Kimball Bennett, wrote the stars for the New York Daily News. It seems he didn’t do it for a laugh. He was pompously serious about himself, as you’ll hear.

SPOOKY

His claim to fame was a prediction he made in the NY Daily News in 1932. He ‘foresaw’ financial turmoil for early March of 1933. That’s when President Roosevelt closed the banks for a week as the US struggled with the Great Depression.

UNCANNY

Wynn’s predictions for 1937 are typically vague, and, well, predictable. More interesting is just a short list of what actually happened in 1937 out of the trillions of things Wynn’s charts failed to predict…

• Safety glass in vehicle windscreens becomes mandatory in Great Britain
• Bradman scores 270 Aust v England at the MCG, incl 110 singles
• 2nd of Stalin’s purge trials; Pyatakov & 16 others sentenced to death
• DuPont Corp patents nylon, developed by employee Wallace H Carothers
• Initial flight of the first successful flying car, Waldo Waterman’s Arrowbile
• Bradman scores 169 in 5th Test Cricket v England in 223 minutes
• Mexico nationalizes oil
• Pope Pius XI publishes anti-nazi-encyclical Mit brennender Sorge
• Astronomer Fritz Zwicky publishes his research on stellar explosion in which he coins the term “supernova” and hypothesizes that they were the origin of cosmic rays
• Spinach growers of Crystal City, Texas, erect statue of Popeye
• Debut of cartoon characters Daffy Duck, Elmer J Fudd & Petunia Pig
• German Luftwaffe destroys Basque town of Guernica in Spain
• 1st commercial flight across Pacific operated by Pan Am
• The Philippines holds a plebiscite for Filipino women on whether they should be extended the right to suffrage; over 90% voted yes
• San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opens
• Spam, the luncheon meat, is first introduced into the market by the Hormel Foods Corporation
• Japanese & Chinese troops clash at the Marco Polo Bridge, beginning the Second Sino-Japanese War
• Buchenwald Concentration Camp opens
• Isolation of pituitary hormone announced (Yale University)
• 1st FM radio construction permit issued (W1X0J (WGTR) in Boston MA)
• Date celebrated as the first International Hobbit Day and the birthdays of Bibo and Frodo Baggins
• 1st Santa Claus Training School opens (Albion NY)
• Balinese Tiger declared extinct
• Dmitri Shostakovitch’s 5th Symphony premieres
• Clifford Odets’ “Golden Boy” premieres in NYC
• Japanese troops conquer and plunder Nanjing (Nanjing Massacre)
• Bill O’Reilly takes 9-41 for NSW against South Australia
• Constitution of Ireland (Irish: Bunreacht na hÉireann) is enacted and Irish free state is named Eire
• Pan Am starts service between San Francisco and Auckland, New Zealand

Here’s some footage of the first successful flying car, Waldo Waterman’s Arrowbile. How did Wynn miss this one? Probably the same way he missed foretelling his own 1926 car accident…(gosh, on today’s Phantom Dancer he warns Rudy Vallee to be ‘careful of cars’, spooky!)

31 DECEMBER PLAY LIST