The Good Old Days of Radio Show

It's kind of a spooky week here, and we are going to keep with the creepy crawlies of the season with a fun offering today: a 1943 broadcast of Lux Radio Theatre with “A Night to Remember,” starring Robert Young and Ann Sothern. It's a comedy/murder mystery about a writer and his wife who move into a creepy Greenwich Village apartment, discover a dead body, and begin uncovering blackmail and suspicious dealings among th...

It's Thursday and time for another unusual episode of the supernatural series Quiet, Please!: “Kill Me Again,” written and directed by Wyllis Cooper. This one is about a man who sells his soul for a million dollars, only to be immediately murdered and sent to the afterworld. There’s just one problem: He arrives “innocent”, leaving the underworld’s director, Mr. Hellman, with no legal grounds to p...

Today we have comedy and variety with a 1945 episode of Request Performance, the CBS variety program sponsored by Campbell’s Soup. The series lasted only 29 episodes, about half of which appear to be unavailable. It was a very expensive show with a large list of top celebrities of the era, a fact that would soon lead it to early cancellation. This one has Frank Morgan, Rudy Vallée, Diana Lynn, and Jimmy Lydon, and produced by...

Today another eerie classic from Quiet Please: “Camera Obscura,” written and directed by Wyllis Cooper. This is a ghost story about a guilt-ridden murderer confessing to the killing of a man named Philip Vandervert years earlier. But his past comes back to haunt him after he visits a strange tourist attraction in Santa Monica. Inside the darkened building, a lens projects live images from outside onto a circular table, ...

A listener sent us some rare, uncirculated discs of The Bob Hope Show. This is one originally broadcast on December 17, 1946. It’s a Christmas-season broadcast packed with music and comedy, featuring singer Jane Harvey, bandleader Desi Arnaz, and special guest Gene Kelly. Bob and the cast joke about Hollywood life, Christmas shopping, and the usual headaches of getting through the holidays, including a department-store sketch...

We’re back to Wyllis Cooper today and his dark fantasy series Quiet Please. This time we meet Walter McCoy, a mechanic who has spent four years secretly building a working time machine at a remote farmhouse. When Walter travels fifty years into the past, he finds himself in 1897, where a run-in with the local sheriff leads to an unexpected romance with a young woman. But when Walter is forced to make a hasty return to his own...

It’s the first Tuesday of the month, and in keeping with our goal to bring you a long “lost” radio show, we have another Adventures of Sam Spade, starring Howard Duff as the hard-boiled San Francisco private detective. The episode is “The Firebug Caper” from February 6, 1949 and finds Spade investigating a series of suspicious building fires that point to a large insurance fraud scheme. The theme gives...

It’s October again, and John is back, bringing us an imaginative and tongue-in-cheek early episode of the classic supernatural radio series Quiet Please: “Bring Me to Life,” originally broadcast in 1947. It’s about a struggling writer who discovers that his typewriter can bring his characters to life. With this fun premise, and Cooper’s knack for quirky and realistic dialogue, “Bring Me to L...

Well, this week John is hurrying back from the East Coast through massive storms, and was not able to be here in time to record a podcast. But stepping up to the plate, and for the very first time on the podcast I might add, we are welcoming Zach Eastman, Vice President of SPERDVAC, who has very kindly agreed to pinch hit today as our emergency fill-in host. Zach brings us a rare 1945 episode of Inner Sanctum Mystery, “Portra...

This is the final episode in a mini-tribute to writer Robert Bloch. John Tefteller and historian Karl Schadow continue our look at the rare and largely forgotten radio horror series, Stay Tuned for Terror. The series produced 39 episodes, but only four recordings are known to have survived. In this episode, we hear the final two. The first follows a scientist who attempts to resurrect Adolf Hitler. The seco...

We're continuing where we left off, exploring the radio work of Robert Bloch. This time John Tefteller and researcher Karl Schadow dig into a nearly forgotten piece of radio history: Stay Tuned for Terror. Originally broadcast in 1945, this unusual horror series adapted Bloch's own pulp stories into fast-moving fifteen-minute stories of the supernatural. Only four of these broadcasts are have been foun...

This week, John Tefteller and radio historian Dr. Joe Webb are wrapping up our epic, 10-week saga into the  The Whistler radio series, landing with one of the very last episodes from 1955. The story follows a husband who believes he has found the perfect way to hide his infidelity, by turning to murder. But as listeners of The Whistler knew, carefully planned crimes never unfolded the way they should, and secrets always had a ...

We’re joined this week by researcher Karl Schadow to take a look at the remarkable career of writer Robert Bloch, best known today as the author of Psycho, but whose work in radio deserves a look. Bloch got his start writing for the pulp magazines, including Weird Tales, where he developed his style of horror influenced by H. P. Lovecraft. In this episode, we hear a radio adaptation of Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," ...

Once again John Tefteller and radio historian Dr. Joe Webb are here to continue our 10-part series featuring the popular radio series, The Whistler. Today we are featuring a story about a man who has built a comfortable life through deception and is now working with a blackmailer to take advantage of his wealthy wife. But when Mr. Penny threatens to reveal secrets from his past, the partnership quickly turns into a dangerous game. ...

Finally we come to the broadcast we've been building toward: Jack Benny's 1949 Ford Theater radio adaptation of The Horn Blows at Midnight. After spending the past few weeks hearing the incredible build-up to this broadcast on his own show, we finally get to hear the story itself. Benny stars as Nathaniel, an inexperienced angel sent to Earth with a very serious assignment: blow his trumpet at midnight and signal the destruction of...

This week, John Tefteller and radio historian Dr. Joe Webb continue our 10-week Whistler series. We’re in  1948 today with a story that follows a gifted violinist whose obsession with owning a rare instrument drives him to commit an unthinkable crime. But while week after week people tuned into Lights Out! to hear villains getting their gruesome comeuppance, The Whistler reminded listeners that getting what you want alwa...

We are continuing our run of The Jack Benny Program as we get even closer to Jack's much-anticipated radio adaptation of The Horn Blows at Midnight. In this February 1949 episode, Jack is taking violin lessons. Guest Claude Rains shows up. He is locked into the contract to play opposite Benny in The Ford Theater adaptation, and naturally, it’s a last ditch plea to get Jack to “throw” the program. This is a hilario...

This week, John Tefteller and radio historian Dr. Joe Webb continue our Whistler series with a story about Clyde (no, this has nothing to do with the Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show). He is a jealous ballroom dancer who believes his young wife is about to leave him for her new dance partner, Ricky. Determined to stop them, he puts together “the perfect plan” to commit murder and pin the crime on his unsuspecting rival. But,...

We continue our run of The Jack Benny Program as we get closer to Jack's much-anticipated radio adaptation of The Horn Blows at Midnight. In this episode, Jack gets pressure to call off the show, first from the producer of The Ford Theater, Fletcher Markle, and then the powerful studio executive Jack Warner (one of the legendary Warner Brothers). Jack Benny, known behind-the-scenes for his strict adherence ...