Writers Guild Office Boy 1970 (xi)

After my visit to the Newsreel office reminded me how morally bankrupt the U.S. corporate media television network scene was compared to the U.S. anti-war media scene, I began to do more research on the Screenwriters Guild’s hidden history. And I examined how the liberal anti-communist faction of the movie, radio and television writers’ union had, initially, collaborated with the Hollywood movie studio heads, the radio and TV network executives and the U.S. government when they drove most of the screenwriters, radio writers and television writers who had been the ones that originally formed the Screen Writers Guild and the Writers Guild East talent unions out of the U.S. film, radio and television corporate entertainment industry, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Since part of my Writers Guild office boy job duties included delivering and picking-up union documents for the various television and radio network unit shop stewards to sign at their workplace, by December 1970 I had personally visited the office of Writers Guild East members at the CBS studios on West 57th Street, at the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building, at the newsroom of ABC radio on West 66th Street, at CBS’ all-news radio station in the CBS Building at 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue and at the WNEW-FM radio station newsroom.

Charles Osgood at CBS was some kind of official of the Writers Guild East in the Fall of 1970, and I brought and picked-up documents to and from his office at CBS on West 57th Street a number of times. Osgood was friendlier than most of the other Writers Guild East members I met at this time, but was more just heard on radio than seen on television in the Fall of 1970. Yet in the Fall of 1970, the not yet elderly Osgood still seemed to lack an anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist consciousness, still dressed in a straight, plastic-looking, suit and tie, had short hair and was beardless, and seemed to be unhip philosophically and politically.