Who knows what evils lurk in the hearts of men?

[captainsblog]

I made a reference the other day to "scary old-time radio," which I said I was too young to have ever heard. That wasn't entirely true. A month ago, I crossed the space-time continuum long enough to hear a good dosage of the stuff in its original form.

It was not quite a month ago, driving back from Syracuse on the night of the Lucy Kaplansky show there. (It's her birthday today, so I sent her a cake- or at least a recipe from the bakery connected to the cover of her latest album:)  That night in January, heading home at a late hour, I was still plowing through the neverland between Syracuse and Rochester when my radio scan came on a skeery old show about a man, a ghost, and a murder, from very very long ago.  It was clearly a blast from radio's dramatic past, complete with a public "service" commercial about keeping an eye out for subversives and traitors in our midst that sounded more like it was out of the G.W. Bush Administration, but the story turned out to be something called

THE HERMIT’S CAVE “The Author of Murder” 1942-45 Syndicated

And what was this doing on my car radio in early 2013?  According to the website of the NPR stations covering Central New York from Oswego to Utica, this is what:

Decades ago, WRVO began broadcasting old time radio with a small collection comprising twenty reel to reel tapes. Programs like The Lone Ranger, The Jack Benny Show, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and The Shadow. Today the collection includes nearly 5,000 reels and well over 13,000 broadcasts.

In 1970, Ellen Robinson, an old time radio enthusiast, joined several clubs that circulated classic radio shows on reel to reel. At that time, she offered to allow WRVO to make copies, and our collection grew. By the 1990s WRVO possessed approximately 7,500 programs.

This bolstering of our audio archive reached an unprecedented level when WRVO listener Ted Nettleton donated his collection of over 1,000 tapes – everything from comedy and mystery classics to operas and old movie sound tracks (and we mean the entire tracks!). Within these two collections are thousands of well known programs and hundreds of rarities including broadcasts of Kate Smith, RCA’s Magic Key, and a detective show unearthed for the first time in 50 years, The Affairs of Peter Salem. In 2008 Ron Zolweg donated another 900 tapes that helped to fill gaps in the WRVO library. Old time radio fans Ed Clute and Art Pierce helped develop our collection as well.

The Zolweg collection, and those donated by Ellen Robinson and Ted Nettleton, are meticulously catalogued. Those catalogs provide the comprehensive information heard during the on air introduction of each program. The entire collection has been named in memory of Ellen Robinson. Without her early assistance and the eventual donation to WRVO of her entire, extraordinary collection, Tuned to Yesterday would not be possible.

Tuned to Yesterday now airs at the same time, 10 p.m. to midnight, seven days a week. WRVO also presents two hours on WRVO-Remix.

Two hours a night (8-10 p.m. weeknights and 9-11 p.m. on the weekends), clicking the "WRVO-2 ON AIR" link under "now playing" on this page will bring you back to those thrilling days of yesteryear with whatever they happen to be recollecting from their collection's storied past. Tonight at 9 ET, for instance? After an hour of a Command Performance variety program, they'll be serving up an episode of Suspense from 1962 called "The Lost Ship" and a 1947 broadcast from the Escape series titled "Evening Primrose."

Just watch out for invisible snakes if you've been sent to bed to spend the night home alone in your crib.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

I heard it when I was a kid, thanks to Van Cristo Advertising Associates, who sponsored an old radio show on WCRB in Boston.

I heard it again on some middle-of-the-night radio station at a grain elevator northwest of Fort Worth in the early 80s.

There's one thing, though. Sturgeon's Law applies. 90 percent of old radio is crap. Abbot and Costello had a regular schtick of the "Who's on First" variety of wordplay, and the joke gets old in a hurry. A lot of the action/adventure shows were utterly formulaic. One that didn't pall on me was The Life of Riley. Digger O'Dell was pure comic gold. ("Digby O'Dell, your Friendly undertaker...") Another was Gunsmoke - that had good solid grownup stories and excellent sound effects.

The tapes that had the old ads in them were the best. "Johnson Wax presents Figger McGee and Molly. Johnson's Wax, the only floor wax with Solium (ping!), the Sunlighti Ingredient!" The Aldritch Family was sponsored by Jell-o, Little Orphan Annie was Ovaltine, and so on.

You've got a great public radio resource out there. Enjoy!

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I'm not scared of invisible snakes -- I'll just spread Jell-O on the floor...

[horizonchaser.livejournal.com]

Oh I love radio shows. My dad had eight track tape collections of The Shadow and The Lone Ranger ('Is that a white horse I hear coming?'), The Les Paul show and some others, and we'd listen to them when we had long drives.