Episode: 1199
Title: HPR1199: Old Time Radio on the web
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1199/hpr1199.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:30:23

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Hello, this is Frank Bell, and today I want to talk about one of my favorite things.
And that is old time radio, which is commonly abbreviated OTR amongst his fans.
What exactly is old time radio?
Here's an excellent definition, and actually it's not really that old time.
And I think of old time, I think of course carts and steam locomotives, and this was in
the days of steam locomotives, but long past the days of course carts.
Here's an excellent definition from the OTRFans.com website.
The link will be in the show note to all the websites, shows and personalities that I mentioned
in this broadcast.
Old time radio, often called OTR, refers to radio shows from the early days of radio broadcasting.
The term usually applies to dramas, comedies, mystery shows, westerns and variety shows that
were acted out by professional actors and sent out over the airwaves.
In the golden age of radio, families would sit around on their radio, listening to the
exciting shows, the way we sit around our television sets, watching them today.
The window of available old time radio shows is actually very small.
Most of them date from the 40s and the early 50s.
There are occasionally a few you might find from the 30s, but because of the limitations
of recording technology, many of the early shows were not recorded.
If they were recorded, the recordings were kept only a very short time.
Much like the prints of many of the early Hollywood movies, which have since disappeared.
In the 40s, recording technology began to improve first with the ability of recording
to disk in a way that was actually listenable.
If you've ever heard a song recorded in the 1920s, you know how low the fidelity was
and how really bad the sound quality was.
But with the coming of advances in recording to disk and then with magnetic tape, more
of these shows got recorded and stored, either by listeners or by the studios themselves.
I actually remember listening to radio when it was a medium of entertainment.
Now I was not of the generation of Ralphie in the movie The Christmas Story.
If you remember the scene where he ran home to listen to Little Orphananny after school.
By the time I was allowed to stay up past 7th or 30th or so, the evening entertainment
side of radio had pretty much disappeared, although there were a few holdouts.
I don't remember my family sitting up and listening to the radio, like Little Ralphie's
family did.
I do remember, however, listening to entertainment radio in the daytime.
I remember the author Godfrey Show, which was an hour long variety show on CBS.
It was followed by the Gary Moore Show, another variety show.
Then there were a couple of soap operas, one of which was the radio version of a guiding
light, the other of which I can't remember the name.
And they were followed by a 20 minute song and pattern show by Rosemary Clooney and Ben
Crosby, in which they sang several songs and talked to back and forth.
I learned recently the shows were actually recorded much in advance.
They record the voice and the pattern, and then the studio would interpolate the songs.
But it was fairly entertaining for the time.
Later on, I listened to regularly to a show from KYW when it was in Cleveland before it
moved to Philadelphia.
I caught it on the skip since I grew up approximately 800 miles from Cleveland, but in the evening
we had good skip, the raised bouncing off the ionosphere for those who don't know
what the skip is.
And Harp Morgan had a kind of odd ball, a news magazine, I guess it would be called,
these days going towards more offbeat subject.
And particularly every, I think it was Tuesday nights, he had a euphologist on his show.
A euphologist being someone who studied UFOs.
I just went back in the late 50s, early 60s, when people were convinced that not only
is their life on other planets, which is highly likely, but that they were interested
in us, which is highly unlikely.
And later on, I stumbled over Gene Shepard, who had an early evening show on WR in New
York.
If the atmospheric conditions were just right, I could listen to Gene Shepard.
In fact, the first one I recall listening was one in which he read a short story about
the Red Rider BB gun, which is one of the three or four stories which were aggregated
together to make that movie I mentioned earlier, The Christmas Story, about Ralphie and the
Red Rider BB gun.
And Gene Shepard was just delightful, a witty, funny and creative man delightful to listen
to.
So Radio has been a part of my entertainment for a long time, and I'm lucky enough to
remember it when it consisted of more than crackpot political theorists spewing hate,
giant corporations replaying playlist of very bad music or sports talkers talking about
players, sports and leagues, that no one cares about except the sports talkers and the
people they can gen up some kind of interest in.
About the only place on the radio dial, no, actually commercial radio as an entertainment
medium, as far as I am concerned, is dead.
Like news, information and entertainment you can find on the radio, you will find
at your local public station where there is still some creativity and some element of
good sense.
Old time radio though is a rich source of entertainment and information.
You can find contemporaneous newscast of World War II, for example, not that I listen
to those, and the adventures and dramas cowboy shows, detective stories, mysteries.
I'm a mystery buff, so my taste leans toward listening to old mysteries.
Not suspense, I have enough suspense in my real life, but mysteries.
My ideal mystery is the one that opens at the beginning with the body in the library
already dead and closes with the great detective revealing who done it on the last page.
After 200 pages of red herrings, distractions, false clues and general who shot John.
I will have to say that what I'm going to say is going to be very much from a US perspective
because the US is where I am, specifically Southeastern Virginia.
There may well be similar resources to the ones that I'm talking about in other countries.
I do have one I'm going to mention from Canada, but I have to, I'm limited somewhat by the
blinders that I have.
One other thing I want to say is that for anyone who has an interest in culture and
sociology and cultural change, listening to old time radio, it's a fascinating window
into the times in which it was made.
The portrayal of women is interesting.
They are almost always victims, psychics, or helpless bystanders, or sometimes romantic
interests.
The shows that I listen to are not big on romance, but sometimes there's an undercurrent
of that in some episodes.
Minorities are almost never portrayed, certainly not racial and ethnic minorities, with the exception
of Irish who are often portrayed as cops, and the Italians all talk like this.
Other appearances by minorities, Mexican Americans, and shows set in the Southwest, they tend
to be comic relief.
And these stories that I'm talking about, the detective and mystery shows, black people
hardly ever appear.
They just were not.
They weren't there.
So it's an interesting picture of the popular culture as one of the leading voices of
the popular culture, entertainment radio, would have people think what America was at
the time.
Oh, and Germans sometimes did show up on the shows, and looking at my notes here, before
World War II, Germans tended to be always portrayed as scientists, doctors, or professors.
Once World War II started, Germans were portrayed as spies, sadistic villains, or occasionally
as sympathetic refugees.
So with that, I want to mention some of my favorite old-time radio sites on the World
Wide Web, OTR on the WWW.
The first site I stumbled over about five or six years ago, which led me to discover
this world, was the OTR Network Library.
That's www.otr.net, maintained by a fellow named Ken Varga.
If you look at the website, it's labeled as beta.
As near as I can tell, it's been in beta ever since I discovered it.
It's got an excellent selection of shows.
They are listed alphabetically by title.
Unfortunately, the shows are all in real audio format.
Given that the site dates from about 2005, real audio at that time was one of the dominant
streaming formats.
It would have been a logical choice back then, if you wanted to listen to an NPR show,
where very likely was in real audio format.
Now there are many alternatives to it.
It is one of the most encumbered codecs, and if you're a Linux user, you're in trouble.
There used to be a very nice spin of real audio for Linux based on the Helix player.
Unlike real audio for Windows, it was very well-behaved.
It did not run low programs in the background without telling you that it was doing it.
It did not phone home to Seattle every five minutes.
It just played.
Unfortunately, the Helix project is dead.
There hasn't been an update to their website, which is player.helixcommunity.org.
There hasn't been an update to their website, and going on to two years, you can still
download real for Linux, either in sources, and for some versions, an RPM format.
Now I did get it working on my Slackware box using RPM to TGZ, which is a little program
which will convert an RPM style package into a TGZ for use with Slackware.
It will work flawlessly in the only case in which I've ever used RPM to TGZ.
I have it already on my Debian machine because I installed it before the project died, and
my Debian machine being Debian, it's been happily running squeeze now for two years.
But I cannot get it from my new 64-bit computer.
The 64-bit sources just are not available.
One show that they have an excellent selection of on OTR.net, one that is one of the best
written and consistently best active of any of the old-time radio shows, is Nightbeat,
in which Randy Stone, reporter for the Chicago Star, I believe, prowls the Chicago night,
looking for material for his next day's column.
These are mysteries, sometimes they are what we would call human entry stories, but they
are excellently done.
And I would recommend that as a starting point for just about anyone.
It's also notable for what may well be one of the worst radio shows ever done, Jeff
Regan, investigator, done by Jack Webb before the Dragnet days.
If you recall Dragnet, you will recall that Jack Webb did not try to act in Dragnet.
Jack Webb couldn't act, and if you listen to any of his early radio efforts, it becomes
very, very clear.
Other interesting shows that I first discovered there was The Man Called X, about Ken Thurston,
US agent, dispatched two trouble spots throughout the world to shoot the trouble.
One little twist almost in every episode of A Man Called X, there's a scene in which
hello, I'm Ken Thurston, and the other person says, oh, are you The Man They Called X?
Which leads me to think that X's cover really wasn't all that good.
There also I discovered Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons, that was a show I actually heard
of.
At that site, I also discovered Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons.
That was a show that I had actually heard of.
It was on many, many years, Mr. Keane was played by at least two different actors.
Hopefully Mr. Keane will never be looking for me because every lost person he tried to
trace seemed to end up dead.
I do want to note at this point that even though I'm talking about these shows in the
context of OTR.net, because that's where I first discovered them.
They are available at many of the other sites I'm going to mention.
There's no site that has exclusivity on these.
Because as nearest anyone can tell, these shows are not under any copyright.
They were made at a time when copyright actually had to be applied for, which is no longer
the case, as of 1978.
Most of them were never submitted for copyright, and in any event they have aged out of the
copyright as it would have applied under the laws of their time, they will have a link
in the show notes to a nice article about the copyright status of these shows.
Other site I'd like to mention, a very nice one, one of my favorites, is Old Time Radio
Fans, that's www.oldtimeradiofans.com.
This one offers shows an MP3 format.
It's a much smaller site than OTR.net, very much a hobbyist site.
The shows are listed under categories such as mystery, sci-fi, drama, variety, and so
on.
I have pretty much exhausted the shows that I would like to listen to on this site.
Selection is relatively small, but it has good taste and high quality.
Another site that I like is OldradioWorld.com, maintained by a fellow named Brendan Tran.
It's much like the site I just discussed.
It's a hobbyist site.
The shows are an MP3 format.
It's a limited selection.
Mr. Tran has concentrated on his personal favorites, the shows that he's enjoyed.
He's not trying to provide a library of wide-ranging shows.
One show I stumbled over there that I quite enjoyed was one called The Adventures of Leonidas
Witheroll.
It is not classic literature, but I enjoyed it because Leonidas Witheroll is a character
created under a pen name by a mystery writer named Phoebe Atwood Taylor.
And I really do enjoy her books.
If you like mysteries and have never read the AC Mayo stories or the Leonidas Witheroll
stories, chase them down.
There are a brand of mystery or a type of mystery that's referred to as a cozy in which
the story is told for the telling of the story, usually an amusing story with slightly
cock eye characters, not for the quality of the puzzle.
Another site that I'm going to mention, not one of my favorites, but it has a great
historical interest, is the CBS Radio Mystery Theater fan site, www.cbsrmt.com.
It claims to have all 1,399 episodes of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater hosted by EG Marshall
except for its last year when it was hosted by Tammy Grine.
These shows are fairly unevenly written, but some of them are fine, there are a couple
in which a young Abraham Lincoln is featured as the detective, one in which a young Thomas
Jefferson is featured as a detective.
Most of them though, as I read the capsule descriptions of the shows, seem to lean a little
more to suspense than to mystery.
They do have some interesting Sherlock Holmes adaptations, off the top of my head, I think
they have a version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and a couple of others, they have an excellent
search feature, so if you want to look them up, you can just search for Sherlock Holmes.
I must warn any true Sherlockians amongst you who want to go listen to these, that they
do violence to the original stories by introducing subplots and characters, which are not actually
in the canon, and if you are a Sherlock, you will know to which canon I refer.
Probably the site I visit the most is the Old Time Radio Theater, which originally was
entitled The OTR Mystery Theater, and the URL is still www.mysteryshows.com, maintained
by a fellow named Brad.
These shows are an MP3 format, it is a hobbyist site, it's one of the largest selections
of all, he claims to have almost 50,000 episodes of various shows, it is a membership site,
there are approximately 2500 episodes of shows available on the front page of the website,
at no charge without having to pay a membership fee.
For a $10 lifetime membership fee, you get access to the rest of the library, and there
are some excellent, excellent shows there, I'm going to mention two shows that are on
the front page, which might wet your appetite, there's one called Crime Photographer, sometimes
it aired under the name of Casey Crime Photographer, it usually opens and closes with Casey and
his assistant Annie hanging out at the Blue Note, their favorite bar, where the bar
keep ethylbert presides over the festivities.
In between the two visits to the Blue Note, Casey and Annie in the search for pictures for
his newspaper, find themselves in some kind of mystery or other, it may be a murder mystery,
it may be a robbery, it may be blackmail, it may be extortion fraud, but some sort of
mystery, it's generally acted with a nice sense of humor, the atmosphere is kept light,
it's hardly a dark, noir show of any sort, but it's quite good fun.
And another one there that's fun is called Mystery is My Hobby, in which the amateur sleuth
Barton Drake appears with the police detective to solve the mystery, it's a classic buddy
show, but instead of two cops or two amateurs is the amateur and the cop.
Every episode manages to end with Barton Drake explaining that he solved the case, because
Mystery is My Hobby.
There is also at the internet archive a very large, old time radio collection.
It's so large, it's almost impossible to navigate, unless you have some notion of what
you're looking for, the choices are just overwhelming.
The shows are available in MP3 or Odd formats, I'm going to mention three shows, I've discovered
there which I enjoy listening to, one is called The Fat Man, which opens with something
like, he crosses the street, he walks into the drugstore, he's putting a penny into
the scale, weight 239 pounds, fortune danger.
And that cast you back to a time in the culture when 239 pounds was considered fat as I walked
down the street, it seems to me to be average anymore, but that's another story.
Another interesting show you can find there is Rex Saunders, in which Rex Harrison plays
with the detective.
They're quite well done, the titles always have the word murder in them, the titles are
a little heavy, but the show itself is a lot of fun.
And then there are episodes of The Saint, starring Vincent Price.
Now those of you who are familiar with The Saint Stories will know that The Saint is an
Englishman, Vincent Price is not.
Over the years, Leslie Chartres wrote The Saint Stories, he created a very firm and clear
characterization of The Saint, and Vincent Price is not yet.
If you recall when Roger Moore, who played The Saint on television, played James Bond,
my feeling was what you got was not James Bond, Sean Connery was James Bond, always
will be.
What you got was James Bond, if James Bond had actually been The Saint.
So what you get with the Vincent Price version of The Saint is something entirely other than
Leslie Chartres actual Saint, but these shows are generally fun to listen to, they light
hearted, and they have a twist of humor to them.
To other sites I want to mention briefly, there's one called My Old Radio World, www.myoldradio
world.
This is a Canadian site, the one thing I don't like about it is that by default the shows
play an internal player, some kind of script on the web page.
I love the internal players, that's just me, but I have to say this site has an immense
collection over 50,000 episodes and probably a much greater variety, geographic variety
than the others, it has a lot of BBC shows, Australian shows, Canadian shows, site is
exactly out of Canada, and right under the auspices of a Canadian computer services and
supply company in Montreal, and it's worth checking out if you're looking for something different
from what you would find at these other sites, which are pretty heavily weighted towards
United States Radio.
The last one I want to mention is Radio Lovers, www.radiolovers.com, again an MP3 format.
It's part of the board.com network, I went to board.com and it appears to be an online
game humor and all around how to fall into the computer for hours at a time and not accomplish
anything, site, the sort of games that would appeal say to my girlfriend, she likes to play
word games, gravel and mixed up word type puzzles, and it seems to be that sort of games
and some joke sites and so on and so forth.
Radio Lovers.com does not appear to be particularly commercial, it's not a membership site
or anything like that, the one thing, again it's MP3 format, but the one thing I do want
to mention if you decide to visit there looking for something, the collection is much larger
than it appears on the front page.
For each of their categories there is a link to show more, and if you click that you will
see many more titles than appear on the front page for that particular category.
There's also a link to show all the shows and it opens up to quite an extensive list
arranged alphabetically by title.
I know that there are many other old time radio show sites out there on the internet.
I've stumbled over some of them, but these are the ones that I have found the most enjoyable,
the ones that keep me coming back to them.
If you want a diversion to listen to something new and to realize that at one time radio was
more than a box spewing hate and cheap mass market music tracks, check out some of these
old time radio selections, I think it'll be pleasantly surprised.
You can return to the thrilling days of yesterday year with Sarge of Preston and King, strongest
of the lead dogs.
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