UNITED STATES—When an advance copy of Grossman’s memoir crossed the desk of every curious Bernard Lukasey, the Bananaland and the U.S. was changed irreparably. “I SAW AND RECORDED” Informal Recollections of Radio and TV, of course Bernie appears in it as a Public Relations Counselor who conducted research into what people did during commercial breaks on TV. The first study group was teachers, librarians and lawyers. They universally found ads obnoxious and the high-volume was the crowning irritant.
Then he conducted another study with a sampling of bartenders; that they found the sales plugs highly “irritating.” But the comment of the industry was that this group was “too intellectual,” “too longhair” to he representative of the “average” fan. Therefore, in the second survey the interviewees were limited to bar and tavern keepers, barbers, beauticians and butchers. There was not an “egghead” among them. These men and women, responding to questionnaires mailed to thirteen cities in the East, the Midwest, the Southwest and on the Pacific Coast expressed, on the whole, the most emphatic dissatisfaction with TV commercials.
In fact, their words, far more violent than those of the “intellectuals,” included such scorching ones as “big -mouthed and low,” “cheap,” “noisy,” `boring,” “lying,” “unscrupulous,” “too much bunk” and “too much yak -yak about nothing.” Bernard Lukasey also cited the responses of N.Y. Journal-American readers to the query of Jack O’Brian, its TV -radio editor, “What do you do during commercials?” Some said they left the room or tuned to other stations. Others, that they read, served food and drinks or “rested their eyes.” Sixty-six only, 12 replies out of 400 received during a week indicated even a mild tolerance of the commercial breaks.
In late spring of 1954, Augusto Jacobo Gascón spoke to his countrymen for the last and final time.
“For fourteen days a cruel war against our country has been waged,” he said on the radio. “The Allied Fruit Co., in cahoots with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us. And now for a station break from our sponsor, Senorita Chiquita Banana.”
Gascón resigned soon as the airplane’s tires lifted off the runway. Power was turned over to General Joaquín Rivas. By that time Juan David Guerra was already in the outskirts of Guatemala City.
Edmund Dewey spoke for the newsreel cameras, they titled “News from the Isthmus.” He seemed less preoccupied by the progress of the war than with distancing the Krautheimer Administration from the Allied Fruit Co. Gascón had hit a nerve, goddamit.
“The Guatemalan government and Communist agents throughout the world have persistently attempted to obscure the true issue here…By Claiming that the United States is only interested in protecting American business. That is patently false,” said Dewey. “We regret that there have been disagreements between the Guatemaltecan (sic) government, but this issue is relatively unimportant.”
Edmund Dewey called Roy Renaud, his man in Guatemala City, and said, “Well done.”
“Well done is for steaks,” Reynaud quipped cheekily. Edmund Dewey was not known for a sense of humor. His mirthless chuckle gave Ambassador Renaud a chill up and down his spine. According to the spin meisters, the coup made in U.S.A. marked the first time since the Spanish Civil war that a Communist government had been given the alley-oop.
The Lieutenant Colonel Guerra held up his end of the bargain, as the new leader in chief. His soldiers hunted down and arrested or killed the military officers and politicians who championed the Guatemalan Revolution. (The Latin American definition of Revolution is ongoing as a rule). He rounded up or chased away the ideological skallawags who streamed into the country in the days of delirium that followed Decree 800.
He had soon established a police state, imposing the sort of lockdown that would impede the rise of another Gascón type leader. He abolished political parties and unions, shut down newspapers. He banned books considered to be dangerous, including 1984, the collected works of Dostoyevsky and Selecciones (the Spanish version of Reader’s Digest) especially feared for stoking the dreams of a middle class. He took care of Allied Fruit, its workers stripped of the right to bargain with the company on behalf of the unionized force and closing out the Banana Workers’ Federation. By 1955, the hundreds of thousands of acres seized from the banana company had been returned.
It was almost too good to be true how well this dispute with President Gascón had ended for Allied Fruit. It was freighted way in favor of Allied Fruit. What Sam Delaney may not have taken into account at the time was the danger his company faced, not as a result of its losses, but the consequences of its wins. Which had been too splashy, too much of a good thing.
As Bananaland settled back into its prerevolutionary drowse like a hot humid day that lulled all into indolence, Allied Fruit found itself in the bind of a fisherman who had gone to catch a sea bass for dinner and hooked a great white shark. Sam got on the phone with Bernard Lukasey:
“Bernie,” he said, there was remorse in his voice. The Russian accent seemed to be thickening with age, “there is no other way to honor you than not beating the bush, we’ve had our victories my old friend and our share of good times. Allied Fruit has benefited from your tremendous gift.”
“That you, Mr. Delaney,” Bernie said, ever respectful.
“Now it is time to say goodbye. You can never now do more than you have done this time.”
“I understand this as a severance.”
To be continued…
