One of old-time radio’s true blue veterans—not to mention one of the preeminent voice artists of any generation—celebrates her 89th birthday today.  Janet Waldo, whose instantly recognizable voice has been heard since the 1930s on radio, television and movies, is still active in show business today as one of the performers on the weekly radio […]

  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 […]

Francis Albert Sinatra—Oscar-winning actor, Grammy-winning recording artist, and star of the Emmy Award-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music (1965)—would have celebrated his 97th birthday today.  A retrospective of his amazing career would eat up more than the allotted bandwidth of the Internet…so Radio Spirits thought a focus on Ol’ Blue Eyes’ relationship […]

My introduction to the man who would have been celebrating his 103rd birthday today goes all the way back to 1982.  In listening to a local public radio station while attending college at Huntington, West Virginia’s Marshall University, I happened upon a dramatic excerpt in which two men encounter a mysterious fog…that turns people inside […]

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 […]

Two of the entries in Columbia’s Whistler franchise (based on the popular CBS Radio West Coast mystery program) rarely turn up in the rotation when the film series is shown on Turner Classic Movies.  This is a shame, because the first of these—1944’s The Mark of the Whistler—comes close to rivaling the debut movie, The […]