Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion for justice…and you only need to look back eighty years ago on this date in 1933 to find the debut of one of radio’s legendary heroes and a true pop culture icon.  When The Lone Ranger made its first appearance over WXYZ […]

Before actor Raymond Burr stepped into his first courtroom in the fall of 1957 as TV’s Perry Mason, he was known primarily as a movie heavy (if you’ll pardon the obvious pun).  He practiced villainy in films noir such as Pitfall (1948), His Kind of Woman (1951) and The Blue Gardenia (1953).  He also had high-profile […]

This past Monday, January 14th, marked the 107th birthday of actor William Bendix…who graced the silver screen during the 1940s/1950s in such movie classics as Wake Island (1942), Lifeboat (1944) and Detective Story (1951).  Tomorrow, January 17th, is the 99th birthday of writer-director-producer Irving Brecher.  Brecher wrote such screenplays as Shadow of the Thin Man […]

Sixty-five years ago today, the program that finally found a way to make good use of the one-of-a-kind comic talent of Julius “Groucho” Marx premiered: You Bet Your Life.  A “quiz show” that really served as mere window dressing for Groucho’s rapier wit, its debut over ABC Radio was originally met with a bit of […]

Eighty-two years ago on this date, the world’s greatest detective made his debut over the airwaves…and let’s make one thing clear—it’s the world’s greatest consulting detective, in case you were expecting to hear about Sam Spade. Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary literary sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, saw the last of his adventures published in 1927…and three years […]

My introduction to old-time radio came about in the 1970s, when the “nostalgia boom” was well underway.  WOUB, Ohio University’s FM radio station, had a feature that aired every Monday night entitled, appropriately enough, “Monday Night at the Radio”—and it was through that program that I was initiated into “the theater of the mind” with shows […]

One of the joys that results from an immersion into the world of old-time radio involves discovering little-known or forgotten series that might have completely disappeared from the historical record had not a handful of broadcasts survived.  The upside is finding a show that’s better than its reputation (and in many case, superior to its […]

When “the Golden Age of Radio” came to what many acknowledge as its official end on September 30, 1962—there were only two major network dramatic offerings left standing.  One was Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar—a crime drama starring Mandel Kramer as “America’s fabulous freelance insurance investigator.”  The other was the real warhorse—billed as “radio’s outstanding theatre of […]