Radio nights, jazz on the dial, and the first electric everything.
The parlor reorganizes itself around the radio set the way it will one day reorganize around the television. Iceboxes still drip, but the wires are coming: the iron, the toaster, the vacuum. Saturday means the picture show; the flapper hem scandalizes the church pew.
The radio set - the first machine the whole family sat down in front of, on purpose, at the same hour.
The decade parties on borrowed money while the farm belt quietly fails; Prohibition makes ordinary people into casual outlaws; in October 1929 the music stops.
A sharecropper hears the same broadcast as a banker; an immigrant mother learns English off the dial. The twenties roar loudest for the few - but the radio does not check your bank balance.