Fitzpatrick Also Ran

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 409, 24 April 1947, Page 10

Fitzpatrick Also Ran

N_ his’ introduction to Our Town Thornton Wilder says, "So — the people a thousand years from now will know .... this is the way we were, in our growing up, in our marrying, in our living and in our dying." The NZBS Hawera Scrapbook also concerns itself with giving the people (present, not future) a picture of. a town, but is naturally more concerned with what distinguishes our town rather than with what it has of universality. "Scrapbodk" is an unpretentious title, but apposite. The hour’s programme is bitsy, but surprisingly comprehensive, and at the end we find that a bit of the Ladies’. Choir here and a bit of the High School Band there have added up to something more than a musical programme, that the sum of a and b and -c is somehow greater than atb+c. I particularly enjoyed the snippets of Hawera history, told us by those who remembered, or those whose parents had remembered. And the programme was all the brighter for not being muffled in the customary NZBS cloak of anonymity. Credit was given where credit was due. The 5,000 citizens of Hawera, under whose feet no grass grows, should feel proud to have their achievements placed so accurately on record, and the rest of the listening public should stand to applaud both the gallant 5,000 and the staff of the Mo‘bile Recording Unit.