How did I make it almost to the end of this blog without ever doing a post on Old Time Radio?
I’ve been listening to OTR in some fashion or another since I heard that "Your Playhouse Favorites" episode of Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace" when I was seven or eight (as recounted here. I didn’t start tracking stuff down, though, until about fifteen years ago.
My place in Chicago used to be in the over the air range of Audio Noir, and I basically just left my kitchen radio tuned to that for years. Sooner or later I started looking things up online and eventually made my way to OTRCat. Now there are many places you can safely and legally download OTR, but I gladly pay OTRCat for the privilege because they've already done all the legwork: pictures, text, info, etc. and organized it all into nice downloadable packages (or CDs or MP3-discs if you prefer) of varying prices to fit your needs.
Before I found them I belonged to a few different Old Time Radio Clubs, and they ran the gamut from mostly okay to downright terrible. I wish someone at the beginning had told me "Hey, just go to OTRCat." Heed me, people of Earth: this is the way.
I linked to their site for most of the entries below - better than wikipedia and with sample audio in most cases. Here's fifteen(ish) OTR or OTR-adjacent things I've gotten a lot out of over the years, in alphabetical order.
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"Learn! Investigate! Instruct!"
No, it's not V-Ger's great-great-grandfather, it's a series from Dr. Philip Thomas, a physicist who worked for Westinghouse, who wanted to educate the public in entertaining radio dramas about, well, see title.
Its episode titles ("The Magic Cupboard," "The Cow That Stopped Plague," "The Place Where Time Begins") make it sound more like science fiction that science. Fun stuff.
Hosted by Harry Fleetwood and presented by the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YMHA, "Anthology" featured both the work and voices of many of the twentieth century’s most well-known poets as well as classic verse. And some forgotten ones, like "The White Cliffs" by Alice Duer Miller, read by Susan Dunne, whose daughter Irene Dunne played the lead in the movie based on the poem. You’ll hear Laurence Olivier, Dylan Thomas, Alec Guinness, Deems Taylor, and many more - twenty-six hours worth of more.
I’m surprised no one’s ever sampled the “This is Fleetwood” tagline from each episode or the "Good night and good reading." He was also a part of a different OTR legacy. The Civil Defense Authorities requested WNBC to play a radio tone through the night so that any necessary public announcements could be readily broadcast. The station complied but instead of just a tone choose to broadcast classical music, with Fleetwood hosting. The show continues today, though Harry of course does not. Corporeally anyway.
The theme was Richard Rodgers "Hard Work and Horseplay" from Victory at Sea. Which I am the proud owner of, now, on vinyl, in case anyone wants to celebrate that. (clink) Skaal!
“A Cavalcade of Kings features the dramatization of the fascinating history of the British Monarchy, including the battles, marriages, and other royal escapades starting in the tenth century through the reign of Queen Victoria.”
So says the official description. ‘Nuff said. At fifteen-to-twenty minutes an episode you’re getting a lot of postcard-sized glimpses of things, but that has its appeal, as well. I’m a bit of an Anglophile. And a Francophile and pretty-much-everyone-phile. It was fun to listen to this series while playing Age of Empires II on my computer - I recommend this method, if you're able.
The quintessential radio western, 1952 – 1961. It's easy to see how it continues to inspire fans in each new generation. One of the few OTR that does, I'd wager. (That and Fibber and Molly McGee. Seriously - two out of every three posts in my OTR group are about that show, it's really something.)
The television show was always playing somewhere when I was growing up. It's synonymous with a certain type of 60s-backdrop-visual that I don't care for very much (at least in color). I love the radio show, though. I'm a few seasons deep - it's going to last me for awhile.
The cast is great, and the audio production is great. It really gets into your brain, actually, and it's amazing how real Dodge City and environs become from steady listening. Excellent production quality. Kitty's saloon scenes, for example, featured a real honky-tonk piano being played live in a crowd of extras, all mixed with flair by sound engineers Ray Kemper and Tom Hanley.) Hats off to producer/director Norman McDonnell.
You know what you’re getting into with the stories (Dodge City, mid-1880's or so, Matt Dillon, US Marshall “the first man they look for, the last they want to meet,” loyal sidekick Chester, likes-his-drink Doc, and saloonkeeper-plus Kitty, played by William Conrad, Parley Baer, Howard McNearr, and Georgia Ellis respectively) but radio did allow for some frankess regarding murder and prostitution and what not than television did in the following decade.
I'll listen to as much Johnny as anyone wants to make available. There's not a whole heck of a lot at this OTRCat bundle, but what's there is great, particularly the two-part History of Comedy Johnny did for NBC Radio. I always thought it was funny that Johnny Carson's thesis in college was literally "How to Write Comedic Jokes." (Even funnier that his minor was in physics! I don't know why, it's just a detail that always makes me laugh.)
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Some cool background on both the show and Edward Howard Griggs at the link. This series is one of my favorites.
“Whether the listener agrees with Dr. Briggs' conclusions or not is less important than acknowledging the true entertainment value of the material presented, which is, in fact, there in abundance. The Lives of Great Men does require the listener to be open to learning something rather than simply receiving entertainment, but learning is often its own reward.”
So say we all. More verbiage to speak to the V-ger in my heart.
The full collection - a staggering seven hundred and forty six hours - will set you back $160 over at OTRCat, and I've never taken that plunge, but I've dove in here and there. I encourage you to read the whole story over at the link - this is an important bridge between the Golden Age of Hollywood and the WW2-and-beyond era. Sort of an intermediate period between dynasties, as bridged by Cecil B. DeMille.
"The Lux Radio Theatre was a one-of-a-kind OTR show. Imagine the greatest Hollywood stars doing one-hour versions of their biggest motion pictures, complete with full orchestra, live on stage with a studio audience. Every genre is included, from darkest noir crime dramas to historical epics to bubbly musicals and broad comedies.
The stars of the movie are usually in the productions, although sometimes contracts or schedules meant that another star took the part. In some another star would be featured in one of the major roles. Some stars were paid upward of $5000 for their appearance on Lux Radio Theater. The productions were live, with full orchestra, and many Hollywood legends were unused to performing in public without the benefit of retakes. Needless to say, the performances in every show are singular."
What you see is what you get here. News broadcasts from the fifties on up. Fantastic. I throw a bunch of these on a flashdrive and listen to during dinner and then blurt out stuff about Kissinger and John Foster Dulles and what not. "Just listening to the news! Is this Biafra thing going to work out?"
All kidding aside, these are both fascinating glimpses of the news cycles of yesteryear - which really do drive home the cyclical nature of these things; take any year represented here and almost all of them could sub in for even 2020, the most strikingly different of recent memory - and some great primary sources. In particular, the University of Kansas audio biography of Eisenhower, hagiographic as it is, all the NBC Monitor shows, all the Years in Review from the legendary WKNR as well as the eternal BBC and even odder fare like the History of Radio Jingles or sports news (and argument) - all of it has a certain hypnotic quality that serves well for either background or close listening.
(Note: certain parties around my household seem to disagree on this last sentence. So it goes!)
You ever hear this one? Or the two sequels? Probably you have. I was late to the party on this one, but it's fantastic. I really love all the contemporaneous tie-in stuff for Star Wars of the original trilogy era. I'm slowly making my way through all the Russ Manning and Archie Goodwin newspaper comics as well. (Emphasis on slowly.)
You ever hear this one? Or the two sequels? Probably you have. I was late to the party on this one, but it's fantastic. I really love all the contemporaneous tie-in stuff for Star Wars of the original trilogy era. I'm slowly making my way through all the Russ Manning and Archie Goodwin newspaper comics as well. (Emphasis on slowly.)
Perry King as Han Solo, Brock Peters as Darth Vader, all the bells and whistles and plenty of the original cast. Solid gold, all of it.
Here's a fascinating radio show that dramatizes the major historical events between the years 1896-1934. Not in order, either - I thought that was just the way it was bundled up, but it was intentionally presented out of order. You'll occasionally hear people say certain events in American history were intentionally obscured, and I agree, of course - it's true. Some of the ones folks often mention are all over this series, though, which leads me to believe a lot of complaints about the past are rooted in different things than familiarity with how it actually was.
I mean, not that this is a documentary or what not, but the past is often surprising is all I'm getting at. That ethereal chorus of ooos and oohhhs is so damn eerie, it's like literally listening to ghosts. (They used to read advertising over this part, hence the long portion of wordless content.) One of the more memorable drives of my life was from Chicago to St. Louis, February 2018, in the aftermath of an ice storm; I left my house before the sun came up, and when it did I was about halfway down-state. IL is basically a prairie state once you get out of Chicago, so long stretches of farm, flat as the eye can see, punctuated by clusters of trees and the occasional farmhouse. All of that was iced over and silhouetted in the winter sunrise, with this - and all the ooo-ing and ooooh-ing - playing all nine hours. (The drive only took four, but I had a lot of St. Louis driving to keep doing.)
Why I consider "where I was when I heard it" to be pertinent info, I don't know, but man, I barely want to tell you about the show itself and mostly about that drive. Weird. Things I hear while driving often impact me powerfully - or differently, at least.
Not an OTR by any stretch, but a fantastic program, now defunct alas but that link still houses plenty of archived stuff - I don't know if the iTunes podcast is still available. Years back, I would download the episodes and then burn them to disc. (It gets worse: the vehicle I drove then only had a cassette deck, so then I'd tape those discs to cassettes.) Anyway, this serves me well these days as I have a folderful of forty episodes or so, and they all hold up well.
Well, if you like this sort of thing (audio collages that sort of circle a given topic rather than linearly explore it). I slipped the "Once Upon a Time" episode onto an old mix for my then-wife back in the just dating phase and she thought there was something wrong with her CD player. Whoops! Not her thing, hey that's okay.
Also not her thing! Or most people's. Even my Dad's - I dropped all of this on a flash drive for him and thought he might get a kick out of it, but I think he was mostly baffled. I remember asking him when Good Morning, Vietnam was big if he remembered much Vietnam radio and he said hardly any. Ah well.
ARMED FORCES VIETNAM RADIO (AFVN)
As for me the fun here is in all the great ads and promos, the Chris Noel and DamBusters stuff, Pat Sajak on the DamBusters (he doesn't do much, it's just a fun historical footnote), the AFVN 1968 special "A Year in the Life of Man", and the strange numbers-station-esque air traffic offerings.
Like Lux Radio Theater, there's enough here to keep you busy - not just the news (but there's hundreds of hours of that), but Tommy Dorsey, GI Jive, Artie Shaw, You Can't Do Business with Hitler - for longer than the actual war.
Also not OTR but a great book set in that world. Some disagree - the Goodreads reviews are all kind of harsh - but I kind of love it. I'm used to parting ways with wisdom both conventional and esoteric when it comes to Garrison Keillor.
WLT is disparaged in a lot of those Goodreads reviews as Prairie Home Companion just in OTR. And overly juvenile. I honestly did not find it to be either of those things - juvenile, sure, but not overly so. When I first started listening, it was doing stuff like this sketch - performance and production steeped in OTR technique. I stopped listening to NPR and PHC by extension four or five years before GK stepped down and they renamed it. I'll always champion select works of Keillor's; this is one of them.
Like Lux Radio Theater, there's enough here to keep you busy - not just the news (but there's hundreds of hours of that), but Tommy Dorsey, GI Jive, Artie Shaw, You Can't Do Business with Hitler - for longer than the actual war.
Not to mention stuff like Hop Harrigan, America's Ace of the Airwaves. Those came out just around the end of 1943, so the tide had just begun to turn. And boy does Hop let his Nazi enemies know it. The episodes are fantastically titled "On the Trail of the Death's Head Squadron," "Hey Joe, You Dumb Jerk!" "Back to Nazi Island" etc.
I've barely scratched the surface with this one, but I've liked what I've heard. This is on tap for 2022 - and probably beyond.
The Man with the Million Dollar Expense Account. Not as impressive as it used to be, I guess. Johnny works for the Universal Adjustment Bureau, which sends him all over the country and into all sorts of situations. It’s a great set-up for a show. They should reboot it – the concept lends itself to any era and can be taken in all sorts of directions.
Many actors played the role of Johnny over the fourteen years of the show’s existence: Dick Powell, Charles Russell, Edmond O’Brien, John Lund, Gerald Mohr, Bob Readick, and Mandel Cramer, but the most closely tied to the role (arguably) is Bob Bailey.
“(Each show) always began, "expense account, item one," with him telling about cab fare, then went on through the air fare, his trip across the country, and so on through the adventure. At the end of the show, he would finish his expense report and sign it, "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar." Nothing was too small for the account, including a nickel for aspirin or the two cents that Johnny felt like if he followed a wrong lead. (…) Yours Truly Johnny Dollar aired for the last time on September 30, 1962, just before the final episode of Suspense. This was the last broadcast of the Golden Age Of Radio.”
I've barely scratched the surface with this one, but I've liked what I've heard. This is on tap for 2022 - and probably beyond.
Shatner did a stretch of episodes in May 1974. I was born in '74 and there are some years where I just collect everything in them. So, I'd have gotten to this one anyway, but throw in a Shatner/Serling connection and holy moley. Insert meme of just-taking-of-the-money.
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Thanks for reading, folks.
