The Good Old Days of Radio Show

Today we continue 10 More Great Adventure Stories, and we are pulling back from adventure realism to a fanciful pulp adventure from 1949, "Seeds of Greed," from the Escape series. The story follows Kenneth Brown, a man who partners with a ruthless killer/fortune hunter to locate a sunken treasure. Visit our website: https://goodolddaysofradio.com/ Subscribe to our Facebook Group for news, discussi...

Today we’re featuring a rare, unrestored recording of a 1945 radio show, "The FreshUp Show," starring Bert Wheeler of the comedy duo Wheeler & Woolsey. This is a mix between a 1940s sitcom and a standup vaudeville style comedy, with a loose plot revolving around Wheeler's attempts to avoid marrying his boss's daughter by getting himself arrested. Visit our website: https://goodolddaysofradio.c...

Today we’re featuring a 1938 Mercury Theatre on the Air adaptation of Commander Edward Ellsberg's “Hell on Ice.” The play, a dramatic retelling of the disastrous 1879-1881 Jeannette Arctic expedition, recounts the realistic experiences of the crew, including their entrapment in ice, dwindling supplies, and eventual fate. This is a great example of Orson Welles's early work as a director and featur...

John has made veiled promises in the New Year that from time to time we will bring you something new and (hopefully) interesting direct from his vast collection of radio transcription discs. Today, we are starting with two episodes of a well-produced, virtually lost and forgotten 15-minute daily comedy series from 1945, The Jack Kirkwood Show. Kirkwood may be familiar to you from The Bob Hope Show...

Today’s adventure pick is from radio’s greatest adventure series, “Escape.” The story is about a man, Jason (played by Frank Lovejoy), who is hired by his uncle to assassinate Jake Finch in the South Seas. The problem: Jason is a hopelessly trapped alcoholic. John talks about Escape's significance, despite its budget constraints. And there’s a special surprise at the tail end of the show, with a m...

Today in keeping with a theme we began last week, we have for you a rare 1947 rehearsal for a Red Skelton radio show sponsored by Raleigh cigarettes. Apparently comedian Red Skelton often kept the comedy going for the studio audience for a while after his show went off the air. This rehearsal is about 15-minutes longer than the broadcast show and we get to hear improvisation and off-script convers...

“10 More Great Adventure Stories,” continues today, as we have selected some great adventure stories of daring that were dramatized from the Golden Age of Radio. Today a story from an author who is perhaps best known for his cat-and-mouse political thriller “Rogue Male,” Geoffrey Household. "A Rough Shoot," recounts the story of an Englishman who accidentally kills a man and hides the body, inadve...

Join us today as we’re featuring an interview with Simon Singer, a child actor known as "Stuffy Singer" who played one of the Beverly Hills Beavers on the Jack Benny radio show. Stuffy discusses his early career in radio and television, including his experiences working with Benny and other well-remembered personalities. We also listen to a 1953 rehearsal recording of a Jack Benny show, where the...

For the first episode of the New Year, we are presenting number two in our “More Great Adventure Stories.” This is a classic tale of mistaken identity, kidnapped royalty, and forbidden romance. The Prisoner of Zenda is a tale of chivalry and high stakes chess match against mustache twirling villains. This is a full-hour adaptation of the film, which is quite faithful to the original story, as pres...

2025 is on the brink, and sometimes you just need to pause the crazy of modern day to get some perspective. We’re jumping back to a New Year’s back in 1949 to hear the popular sitcom Our Miss Brooks. These ‘50s-ish sitcoms were professionally executed, with excellent performances, solid writing and music, and a crowd pleasing formula. There’s not much to find fault in, other than either you love t...

We’re beginning another tribute to today, with “10 More Great Adventure Stories.” These are stories of imagination and escapism, and thus are perfect for radio drama. Our first is a wild story that fits all of these criteria: "The Boiling Sea," about a cargo ship trapped in the crater of a newly forming volcano in the Pacific. It’s a story of survival, escape, and a great tale of cruel nature vs....

This is the finale of our annual time-traveling expedition to Christmas Past. And we are closing it out with a huge radio extravaganza. The 1945 Christmas Day radio broadcast sponsored by the Elgin Watch Company. This two-hour show features numerous big-name celebrities, including Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Red Skelton. The broadcast also has a real sense of relief, as America officially entered th...

We are time traveling again, and it’s back to Christmas Eve of 1945 today, to listen to a lesser known A-tier radio program. "Names on the Land," features Frank Morgan as a train conductor on a fictional journey across America. The show uses the alphabet to highlight the origins of various town names, weaving together anecdotes and historical accounts, as a celebration of the land and humor of the...

Most remember Mel Blanc as “The Man of a Thousand Voices,” most notably the beloved cartoon character Bugs Bunny. But of course he played almost all of the most remembered voices in the Leon Schlesinger cartoons, as well as having a prolific career on radio. In 1946-’47 Blanc had his own sitcom, a vehicle to show off his tremendous comic character talents. The show is not at all remembered today,...

We're jumping into our little time-sleigh today to zip back to a couple of days before Christmas 1949, when the series "Suspense" presented comedian Eddie Cantor in an amusing little story about a couple of button-down accountants who get rooked into betting some of the company's funds on a racehorse. This is a sharp departure from Suspense's usual tense thriller format, as they did occasionally d...

We are back to Christmas comedy today with one of radio's most popular couples, George Burns and Gracie Allen. Their special guests in this Christmas episode are Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, as Gracie uses some backhanded manipulation to get Charles to be Santa Claus in an amateur theatre production. Also, we are doing a Baby Snooks skit about Snooks getting caught raiding the Christmas g...

Today we are pausing briefly to observe Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. There were a whole lot of shows with great WWII themes, and a few times a year we have a chance to feature one of them. This one is from The Cavalcade of America war years. Normally this series dramatized events from American history or historical figures. But for a while after the US entered the war, they did mostly action-pack...

It's December, and that means we are officially plunging into our Christmas bag of goodies. This year we will be featuring popular shows of the era, including some dramas. We are starting out with one of the best traditions on radio (and later TV), the Jack Benny shopping episode. For 2024, we are featuring the 1948 version of this Christmas classic. So come with us back in time when folks still d...

Happy Thanksgiving! We are celebrating with a program that is a little lighter than last year's offering. It's a Thanksgiving program from Edgar Bergen, 1945. Edgar Bergen was radio's ventriloquist, and his lead act was the puppet Charlie McCarthy. This was before ventriloquist dummies became the subject of horror movies. The guest in this show is 7-year-old Margaret O'Brien, and they do a very si...

We are ending our month-long tribute to Vincent Price with a zany comedy. It was a successful movie from 1950, adapted for radio here in 1951, about an intellectual named Beauregard Bottomly (played by Ronald Colman), who goes toe-to-toe with the slimy president of a soap company, Burnbridge Waters (Vincent Price), set on a background of  radio/TV quiz programs. The humor, just like the film, is h...

Our month-long tribute to the classic horror villain Vincent Price continues today. And this is your more traditional Vincent Price story, and a great role where he gets to exude menace and suspicion. Starring alongside Price, and the reason we picked this particular story, is another one of our favorite villainous character actors, the original Invisible Man, Claude Rains. It has to do with a ser...

We are featuring actor Vincent Price all through the month of November. Of course, he is well-remembered today for being a spooky character in film, but that reputation began later in his career. Often people forget that he played all sorts of roles before he was typecast in the more grisly roles. Today we are bringing you a comedy show with Price as a guest, and here in '51, he was already buildi...

We've featured some Norman Corwin dramas here in the past (links in the description). Corwin was particularly noted as one of radio's most literary figures. He was certainly known for some hard-hitters, but did some light scripts, such as this one. Of course, having a reputation to uphold, he could not settle for anything easy, and so you have the entire thing written in verse. The cast is impress...

Author Leslie Charteris had a popular and long-running book series about a suave character named Simon Templar, nicknamed "The Saint." During a time when quirky literary detectives got a treatment on radio, "The Saint" had a brief run starring Vincent Price. Of course, any similarity between the Saint of the novels and radio was purely coincidental. But the dialogue was surprisingly snarky, and wo...

November is Vincent Price month, featuring the astounding body of radio work from this beloved actor. This is Thursday, and as is our inclination, we feature slightly darker tales on Thursdays, and we don't have to look far to find a great mystery/horror story starring Vincent Price. This is a story of paranoia, as two old friends take a trip to an isolated cabin in the woods, with one (played by...