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 […]

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 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 […]

Since the days of the nickelodeons, serials (or “chapter plays,” as they were also called) entertained motion picture audiences by spreading out a story over several installments, generally 20-30 minutes in length.  They were quite popular during the silent era, with crowds flocking to see actresses like Pearl White and Ruth Roland at the mercy […]

The actor born ninety-eight years ago on this date in New York City had one of the most easily recognizable voices of all his radio brethren and sistern.  But were it not for a surprise bout of illness, Gerald Mohr would have become “Dr. Gerald Mohr”—he was a Columbia University medical student who found himself […]

Radio actor Jack Webb was fortunate in that he had just landed a small role as a lab technician in a 1948 Eagle-Lion film noir entitled He Walked by Night…and in between takes, he would find himself engaged in conversation with L.A. police Sergeant Marty Wynn, who was serving as a technical adviser on the […]