1950's 'The Silly Season' is a story about reporters. According to Mr. Pohl's introduction, Mr. Kornbluth was a reporter. The silly season is usually in the late summer, when there aren't major stories happening, so the media puts out stories that aren't serious. I freely admit that what little I 'know' about wireless press services I learned from watching 'Kolchak the Night Stalker', but I was able to follow most of the jargon.

It's August 22 and HOT. Even the burglars aren't bothering to burgle. Sam Williams of the Omaha Bureau of World Wireless Press Service needs a story. The control bureau in New York is nagging. We get some entertainment with the possibilities he has and rejects. He's saved by a message from their stringer (freelance journalist) in Fort Hicks, Arkansas. It's a weird story, with a mysterious death involved. Williams passes it on. He also calls Edwin Benson, the stringer. Usually rural stringers eat up the praise Williams is giving, but not Benson. Williams finds out that Benson had climbed much higher in the news business than he has before Benson became a war correspondent during World War II.

The World Wireless Chairman demands Williams make a person visit for the story, which has become big. Williams visits Benson and learns what war disability cut his career short. Interestingly, that same disability kept Benson from any knowledge of the weird phenomenon that happened at Rush City, a hamlet in the Ozarks. The Fort Hicks Marshal, Pinkney Crawles had been visiting there. His was the mysterious death. By the time Williams gets to Rush City, the phenomenon has disappeared. Rush City Constable Allenby does confirm how Crawles was killed. (When Williams refers to Allenby as a stage reuben, he means he's the kind of country bumpkin portrayed in theaters.)

The strange phenomenon gets a lot of news coverage until the baseball World Series comes along. (I was amused by two political cartoons described), The next year there's a different weird happening, but it doesn't attract much attention, as a letter from Benson had predicted. The year after that, yet another weird happening gets no attention even though one person was killed. Interestingly, Old Man Emerson, present during the second weirdness, has the same disability as Benson and the same reaction.

The end is as Benson predicted, based on one of Aesop's best-known fables. I'm sure the characters wish that Benson had been wrong. ( )

Is it an alien invasion or just another false alarm? ( )