“Often the Guthrie and Crissman families would spend weekends together, going for long drives and having picnics at the beach. Woody invariably was the life of the party at such times, mugging and joking, very much on, jabbering away at Roy and Georgia and Aunt Laura and the rest. One evening, a family picnic at Santa Monica beach was interrupted when forty blacks pulled up in a truck and raced onto the beach, intent on routing the white picnickers––or so it seemed to Woody and the Crissmans. Roy called the police, who eventually came and chased the blacks away.

Woody, whose social conscience had been rather dormant since he'd made it in radio, celebrated the event with a little newspaper of the sort that he'd always produced for the friends of the Corncob Trio. It was a blatantly racist document called the “Santa Monica Examine 'Er.” The cover page was filled with cartoons of cliché jungle blacks, and it was followed by two pages of gossip columns with jokes like: “what makes a nigger's feet fly fastes'? Ansewer: A uniform.” And a report of the event by “Rastus Brown” which begins: “After Joe Louise [sic] done won de crown fo bein the wuhlds mos bestas boxuh, all de Niggas evawha automatickly got de idee dey wuz tuff too, so dey went out to celibrate how tough dey wuz. Santa Monica beach wuz de place an de white folks say dem coons got plum wile...”

The bulk of Woody's newspaper, though, was a long narrative poem, “Clippings from the Personal Diary of a Full-fledged Son of the Beach,” a parody of “Hiawatha” describing the events at Santa Monica that night. Considering that the poem was merely a five-finger exercise, something he tossed off between radio shows the day after the incident, it was a surprising––and disturbingly clever––piece of work. It begins:

As in leisure there reclining
In the firelight brightly shining
On a coney hot dog dining
On the ancient sands of time.
I was with fond friends and neighbors
There relaxing from their labors
(And the trip was quite a favor
'Cause I didn't have a dime.)

The saga continues through sixteen more eight-line stanzas. Forsaking his hot dog (“Man cannot live on buns alone”), he decides to go swimming and, while in the water, hears someone yell: “What is that Ethiopian smell/Upon the zephyrs, what a fright!”

We could dimly hear their chants
And we thought the blacks by chance,
Were doing a cannible dance
This we could but dimly see.
Goes the sea's eternal pounding
Like a giant drum a-sounding
Set their jungle blood to bounding;
Set their native instincts free.

Apparently, the “Santa Monica Examine 'Er” wasn't an isolated incident, either. On October 20, 1937, Woody received a letter from a listener...
[Klein, pp.94-95)]

Note: Klein's dates for Braddock-v-Louis; Guthrie's newspaper and KFVD's hiring of Jack Guthrie don't match up.