Boxcars711 Old Time Radio

Inheritance . May 16, 1954. Program #6. NBC net. "Flight To Nowhere". Sustaining. Not auditioned. 4:30 P. M. The program is produced in co-operation with The American Legion. After the drama, the National Vice Commander of The American Legion, North Carolina, Thomas Byrd is the speaker. Albert McCleary (producer, director), John Wald (announcer), Robert Armbruster (composer, conductor), Thomas Byr...

YOU ARE THERE Aired: November 1939 to May 1940, CBS Blue Network A Dramatic Historical Recreation Imagine if CBS radio news existed when the Bastille was stormed in 1789, or if radio reporters were stationed in Ford Theater as Lincoln was assassinated, or again at the Battle of Gettysburg?  Indeed, such was the premise behind the CBS series, You Are There.  Audiences witnessed history through the...

'The man you love to hate!', psychoanalyst-detective and male chauvinist pig, whose detection powers were dazzling, but whose treatment of females, especially his fluttery secretary Miss Frayle, verged on the abominable. Written by author Ernest Dudley, Morelle was overbearing, sarcastic, patronising, contemptuous, cruel and unusually vindictive, Morelle was nevertheless doted upon by millions of...

The Clock , Imported from Austrailia, was a dramatic thirty-minute suspense and mystery series. It was written by Lawrence Klee and was first broadcast in November 1946. The story always began the same; âSunrise and sunset, promise and fulfilment, birth and death â the whole drama of life is written in the sands of timeâ. This is a great series where the main theme seems to be Retribution.  Storie...

Orson Welles hosted and narrated the shows. Mr. Welles opened each show slightly differently but followed a standard format. For example, the show, "The Bathtub", open as follows:"This is Orson Welles speaking from London." (Big Ben starts chiming in the background). "The Black Museum, repository of death... Here, in this grim stone structure on the Thames which houses Scotland Yard, is a warehous...

ENCORE THEATER was a 1946 Summer replacement series, sponsored by Schenley Labs, Inc. All shows had a medical theme, some concerned medical research, some covered personal stories of people in the medical field but all based on true stories. Schenley Labs, Inc. was the sponsor for the series. The shows aired Tuesday evenings from 9:30 to 10:00 PM over CBS affiliated stations. Members of the cast w...

Today's Show: "The Antidote" (7-13-35) and "Its Finally Over" (10-12-35) FIRST BROADCAST: April 1935 LAST BROADCAST: February 1936   CAST: Gale Gordon, Maurice Franklin, Bruno Wick, James Meighan PRODUCER: Himan Brown This science-fiction adventure originally began as a comic strip. Flash Gordon had saved the world by firing a rocket at the planet Mongo which was on a collision course with earth....

The first two seasons of General Electric Theater established the half-hour anthology format of adaptations of popular plays, short stories, novels, magazine fiction and motion pictures. "The Eye of the Beholder," for example, a Hitchcock-like telefilm thriller starring Richard Conte and Martha Vickers, dramatized an artist's relationship with his model from differing, sometimes disturbing psychol...

This hit radio series with Marie Wilson ran on CBS Radio from April 11, 1947 to August 23, 1954. The TV version, seen on CBS from January 8, 1952 until June 25, 1954, was the first series telecast from the CBS Television City facility in Hollywood. The movie My Friend Irma (1949) starred Marie Wilson and Diana Lynn but is mainly remembered today for introducing Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to movie...

NBC University Theater is an unusual series that focused on reenacting novels by great authors for college classes. Many accredited American universities such as Washington State College, University of Louisville, and University of Tulsa, used this dramatic series as a supplement to correspondent college courses. The series' creators made study guides to accompany the courses. Students studying gr...

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater (or CBSRMT) was an ambitious and sustained attempt to revive the great drama of old-time radio in the 1970s. Created by Himan Brown (who had by then become a radio legend due to his work on Inner Sanctum Mysteries and other shows dating back to the 1930s), and aired on affiliate stations across the CBS Radio network, the series began its long run on January 6, 1974. T...

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950) The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing Bradbury stories originally published in th...

Aliens in the Mind started life as an outline for Doctor Who. Although not commissioned for the show Robert Holmes was asked to develop the idea for Radio 4 however work commitments meant that the scripts were ultimately written by Rene Bascilico based on Holmes' original idea. Unlike the Doctor Who 'talking books' and stable-mate 'The Quatermass Memoirs' which are also due for release on July 3rd...

Cloak and Dagger first aired over the NBC network on May 7, 1950. It had a short run through the Summer on Sundays, changing to Fridays after its Summer run. The last show aired Oct. 22, 1950. This is the story of the WWII special governmental agency, the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services. Its mission was to develop and maintain spy networks throughout Europe and into Asia, while giving aid to...

The Screen Director's Playhouse . From 01/09/49 to 09/28/51 this series was greatly enjoyed by the radio listening audience. It opened as NBC Theater and was also known as The Screen Directorâs Guild and The Screen Directorâs Assignment. But most people remember it simply as Screen Directorâs Playhouse. THIS EPISODE: WATERLOO BRIDGE is perhaps best described as one of a number of films "with an En...

The Great Gildersleeve  1941-1958 In 1941 Throckmorton P Gildersleeve spun off into his own radio program, becoming the first radio character to do so. He had originally appeared on Fibber McGee and Molly in 1937 and left to become the Water Commissioner of Summerfield and to raise his niece and nephew. The series had the same appeal as todays soaps because each episode was connected. Gildersleeve...

Curtain Time, like First Nighter, presented romantic drama in a theater setting complete with the announcer shouting, âTickets please, thank youâ. The shows announcer was Harry Halcomb who was later known best for his appearances on the 60 minutes television show. Great scripts and superb acting, Curtain Time is truly an Old Time Radio Classic. Mutual Network, local KNX show sustained, heard Frida...

The first portrayal of Phillip Marlowe on the radio was by Dick Powell, when he played Raymond Chandler's detective on the Lux Radio Theater on June 11, 1945. This was a radio adaptation of the 1944 movie, from RKO, in which Mr. Powell played the lead. Two years later, Van Heflin starred as Marlowe in a summer replacement series for the Bob Hope Show on NBC. This series ran for 13 shows. On Septem...

Frank Merriwell , the much-loved fictional hero of Street and Smith's Tip Top Weekly, was first introduced to readers on April 18, 1896. Merriwell was the creation of writer Burt L. Standish (real name: Gilbert Patten), and embodied a new type of dime novel hero, one who relied as much upon mental as physical prowess. The Yale-educated Merriwell possessed "a body like Tarzan's and a head like Eins...

First show: Mar 3, 1980 Original shows: 103 Last show: Dec 10, 1980 Number of programs aired including new and repeats: 210 Hosts: Lorne Greene, Andy Griffith, Vincent Price, Cicely Tyson, Leonard Nimoy In December 1979 the Mutual Broadcasting System acquired the Sears Radio Theater renaming it, the MUTUAL Radio Theater. It retained the same format as before with the same theme for different night...

EDGAR ALLAN POE'S "FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER" The NBC Short Stories were very high quality productions. Authors ranger from Shelley to Bradbury to Edgar Allen Poe. In this episode, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, as like many of Poe's stories, does not use the typical, first person point of view where the protagonist tells a personal account of a crime that he or she has committed. Instead, the n...

The Secrets of Scotland Yard was a successful crime drama series, initially airing internationally between 1949 and 1951. Selected episodes finally came to a US radio network for a brief run much later in 1957 over the Mutual Broadcasting System. The series boasted well over 100 episodes, one of which, "The Bone From A Voice Box", apparently served as the prototype for another well remembered Towe...

The Life of Riley , with William Bendix in the title role, was a popular radio situation comedy series of the 1940s that was adapted into a 1949 feature film and continued as a long-running television series during the 1950s. The show began as a proposed Groucho Marx radio series, The Flotsam Family, but the sponsor balked at what would have been essentially a straight head-of-household role for t...

Bob Hope first appeared on television in 1932 during a test transmission from an experimental CBS studio in New York. His career in broadcasting spanned sixty-four years and included a long association with NBC. Hope made his network radio debut in 1937 on NBC. His first regular series for NBC Radio was the Woodbury Soap Hour. A year later The Pepsodent Radio Show Starring Bob Hope began, and woul...

Dadâs Army was a British sitcom about the Home Guard in the Second World War. It was written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft and broadcast on BBC television between 1968 and 1977. The British Home Guard consisted of local volunteers otherwise ineligible for military service, usually owing to age, and as such the series starred several veterans of British film, television and stage, including Arthur...