Volume 79, Issue 9 Web Edition SERVING BREVARD COLLEGE SINCE 1935
Nov. 1, 2013
75 years ago, panic at BC makes national news
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By John B. Padgett
Contributing Writer
T hat Sunday night—Oct. 30,1938—^was
like pretty much any other at Brevard
College. Students had just completed seven
weeks of the fall semester. They lived in one
of three dormitories on campus: women in
West Hall, men in either Francis Ross or
Taylor Hall. Because they were enrolled at
an overtly Christian college, each student
was “required to identify himself with one
of the local Sunday schools and attend it
regularly,” according to the college bulletin,
and Sunday evenings had vesper services on
campus for students who longed for further
religious activity.
Then at 8 p.m., BC smdents, like millions of
other Americans across the country, listened
to the radio ... and became part of the national
spotlight.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of
Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio
broadcast, a dramatic adaptation of H. G.
Wells’ science fiction classic about invaders
from Mars, performed as if it were “breaking
news” about an invading army of Martians
landing in New Jersey. Then, like now, folks
often “channel surfed” across the various
radio networks in search of satisfying
entertainment—and consequently, listeners
who tuned in late to Welles’ Mercury
Theatre on the Air on CBS radio missed the
announcement at the beginning that what they
were about to hear was a dramatic production,
not an acmal newscast.
The result: mass hysteria nationwide, many
listeners preparing for the end in their belief
that the United States was being invaded by
hordes of Martians hell-bent on death and
mayhem. Newspapers the next day—which
just happened to be Halloween—reported
some of the ways Americans had reacted to
the fear of alien invasion ... including how
students at a relatively new two-year college
in a small North Carolina mountain town
responded:
“College Boys Faint: Brevard, N.C. - Five
Brevard College students fainted and panic
gripped the campus for a half hour with many
students fighting for telephones to inform
their parents to come and get them.”
That single
sentence, part of
a compilation of
reporting from
around the nation
by the Associated
Press, appeared in
many newspapers
across the
country, though
with slightly
different wording.
It was front-page
material in the
Spartanburg
(S.C.) Herald, it
appeared in the
New York Daily
News (who added
the “College Boys
Faint” subhead) and it
was part of a 4,000-word
article in the New York
Times that started on
page 1 and continued
inside, filling most of
page 4.
So who were the five
Brevard College students
whose nerve failed them
at the threat of alien
invasion? Or the unnamed
(and unnumbered) others
clamoring for telephones that night to call
home? And perhaps the most puzzling
question: of all the colleges and universities
in the United States, why was tiny Brevard
College— then in its fifth year of existence,
with just over 400 students—singled out for
such attention in the wake of the nationwide
panic?
The record is tantalizingly devoid of
answers to these questions. In fact, other than
the numerous published newspaper articles
which ran the wire service report, there is
almost no record at all that anything out of
the ordinary happened on the BC campus
that night before Halloween in 1938. In that
year’s BC college yearbook, “Pertelote,” for
instance, students’ reaction to the broadcast
is never alluded to, the college’s bulletin for
the following academic year does not mention
SSi
r
O rson Welles, then 23
years old, directs the
live “War of the Worlds”
radio drama with 10
actors and a 27-piece
orchestra from a studio
in New York City on the
evening of Oct. 30,1938.
The production was
broadcast on the CBS
radio network, and it
aired on 92 locai stations
around the country.
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P BS’s history series “American Experience”
premiered a new documentary this week
about the “War of the Worlds” radio drama
that wreaked such havoc with iisteners’
fears 75 years ago. In this screen grab from
the series web page video piayer, viewers
can see how Brevard Coliege made it into
newspapers the day after the broadcast.
it, and—conspiracy theorists, take note!—no
issues of The Clarion for the 1938-1939
school year were archived in the college’s
library.
The incident does merit one paragraph
in an unpublished history written in the
1950s, which can be found in the Jones
Library’s archives. In “The History of
Brevard College and Its Forerunners,”
Marjorie Craig documents in several hundred
typed pages the history, from 1853 to 1953, of
Brevard College and the three other colleges
See 'War of the Worlds,' page 6