Throughout the Golden Age of Radio, as a Nation, we believed in each other and trusted our institutions. At the same time, we questioned each other -- and our institutions -- when appropriate, and we demanded accountable news media and politicians -- accountable to all American citizens, as well as accountable to every other nation on our planet.

It’s become regrettably obvious that we’ve lost so very much of that -- through lack of intellectual curiousity as a society, and through an apathy that’s been shamefully encouraged by the media empires we’ve allowed to proliferate. We've too often tolerated a government that we’ve permitted to become less and less accountable to all of America’s diverse citizenry. And throughout the first eight years of the 21st Century, even less accountable to the very nations we fought for and died for through three world wars during this tumultuous era: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War and ‘policing actions’ that followed.

As we continued to listen to recordings from the Golden Age of Radio throughout the past three decades, it became increasingly obvious that each passing year brought an even greater divergence from the values, democracy, American identity, and national pride we encouraged, demanded and enjoyed throughout the Golden Age of Radio.

How can we retrieve these values once again for our children and grandchildren? We can start to listen once again. We can learn to listen intently once again. The roadmap for a return to all we once were as a Nation is contained within virtually every one of the approximately 600,000 radio recordings known to be preserved from this era.

Try it yourself if you have any doubts. I challenge every visitor to these pages to simply listen to Golden Age Radio and hear what we’ve lost. That’s the enduring message of Golden Age Radio and that’s the enduring message of this site and it’s pages. It can’t be more clear. It’s all there. Simply listen, compare what we believed then to what we’re being persuaded to believe now, and use what your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents used throughout the Golden Age of Radio to keep both society and our extraordinary nation on track. Close your own eyes, listen, and use what they had no other choice but to use -- their ears and the brain between them.

Here's some examples of what we're attempting to remind every visitor to this website and its resources:

If you lived as a child in the 40's, 50's, 60's or 70's how did you survive?

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we've lived as long as we have...

• As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of an open pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
• Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. (Not to mention hitchhiking to town as a young kid!)
• We drank water from the garden hose and not from a $3 bottle. Horrors!
• We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and junk, then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.
• We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones or pagers. Unthinkable!
• Our teachers encouraged us to play dodge-ball and sometimes the ball would really sting. We got cut and broke bones and chipped teeth, and there were no lawsuits from those accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame, but us. Remember accidents?
• We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it.
• We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugared soda but we were never overweight... because we were always outside playing. We shared one grape soda with four friends, from the same bottle and no one died from this.
• We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, WII, X-Boxes, video games of any kind, 250 channels on cable, video tape or DVD movies, surround-sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, Internet chat rooms ... we had pals for entertainment. We went outside and found them.
• We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them. Imagine such a thing! Without asking a parent! By ourselves! Out there in the cold cruel world! Without a guardian. How did we ever do it?
• ''Problems' were just that--problems! They weren't 'issues'. An 'issue' was a topic of concern. A 'problem' was when something had gone wrong with an 'issue'.
• We made up games with sticks and tennis balls, ate bugs and worms, swallowed our gum, got our toungues stuck to a metal objects in the winter, and though we were told it would almost surely happen, we didn't put out very many eyes with spitwads, nor did the worms or gum stay inside us forever.
• Little League and cheerleading had tryouts and not everyone made it. Those who didn't, learned to deal with disappointment..... they didn't arm themselves and go on a shooting spree.
• Some students weren't as smart as others so they failed a grade occasionally and were held back to repeat the same grade..... Horrors! Tests were not adjusted for any reason.
• Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. There was no one to hide behind. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard-of. Parents almost always sided with the law. Imagine that!

But the children of the 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's produced some of the best risk-takers, problem-solvers, innovators, and inventors in American History. The past 50 years have seen an explosion of social, political, and technological innovation and philosophy. We've had freedom, failure, success, conflict, and new responsibility, and we learned how to deal with all of it.

If you're one of them . . . .

Congratulations!

Take our challenge -- whatever your persuasion or affiliation. Your politics, ideology or religion don’t matter in the least. No one, irrespective of affiliation, can listen to Golden Age Radio without quickly realizing both what we’ve lost and how far we’ve lost our way as the Greatest Nation on Earth.

If we can keep making the site pay it's own way -- through the FTP Site, the program logs, historical content, streaming audio jukebox, and continued donations to the site's upkeep, then we can assure you that you'll see no commercial banners or other such web-clutter on this site. We'd be more inclined to simply give it up before we'd give in to the kind of naked commercialism you see reflected on the pages of 100% of this site’s competitors. We continue to rely solely on the good will of our site’s visitors and subscribers to help support the site.

This is not an OTR Site. A Vintage Radio site, yes. A Golden Age Radio Site, absolutely. A Retrospective and Nostalgia site, to be sure. Important distinctions. We accord this era's material the respect it deserves -- and demands. The writers, performers, technicians, producers, and directors that created these recordings earned -- and deserve -- better than Old Time Radio or even worse, OTR.

We hope this explains why you don’t see OTR-this or Old Time Radio-that all over this site. It's with the deepest regret and disappointment that we've all been forced to witness the interest in -- and collection of -- Golden Age Radio or Vintage Radio recordings devolve into baseball-card collecting or a level of tawdry commercialism that demeans and insults the memory of the thousands of gifted technicians, artists, innovators, entrepreneurs, performers, and true fans of this wonderful era of communication. For too long now, Golden Age Radio recordings have become simply commodities within the OTR community. We deeply regret that -- for the sake of both the Golden Age Radio collecting community, and out of reverence for the memory of those who fostered and contributed to the extraordinary enduring legacy of scripts, talent, performances, innovation, creativity, and recordings from the Golden Age of Radio.

We're losing more and more of these wonderful performers, technicians, artists, and radio visionaries with each passing year now. It won't be long before all we have left to remember and honor any of them will be the recordings, photos, transcriptions, and ephemera of the era. We hope we can convey the need to continue to preserve the works of this era -- and persuade even more true Golden Age of Radio or Vintage Radio enthusiasts to continue to do the same with their own collections.

We set out to raise the bar for Golden Age Radio sites. We'd hoped to elevate interest in, discourse in, and stewardship of The Golden Age of Radio to the level it deserves. To that end, our entry to the Internet 8 years ago has been gratifyingly successful. Many of our competitors -- and imitators -- have begun to rise to the challenge.

Make no mistake about our available resources. This site is owned by only 3 individuals, and is created, operated, and maintained by only two individuals. To the extent of our joint resources, we want this site to continue to grow to be so compelling, so useful, and so indispensible as a Golden Age Radio Tribute, History, Reference, and Collecting site, that our visitors bookmark it and return to it week after week to help in their pursuit of Golden Age of Radio interests -- be they collecting, radio history, the sociology of the era, or just pure online escapism over a lunch break.

Why even bring this up? Simple. If you can’t determine the identity of a website’s owners, why patronize them? It’s just a matter of principle -- one of the many principles we used to demand of all of our information providers throughout the Golden Age of Radio.

We live in a society that's grown all too cavalier in recent years -- yet another consequence of how far we’ve diverged from the values and expectations of the Golden Age of Radio. The Web Site and FTP Site aren’t smoke and mirrors operations. The only way we can make up the costs of this site -- and make it pay its own way -- is to request donations for it’s support and upkeep. You don't see flashing pop-up banners and in your face ads here. This is a site to browse and enjoy at your leisure while listening to some wonderful Golden Age Radio shows as you poke around.

As jaded as many so-called OTR Collectors have become, we get all manner of demands for more and more free Golden Age Recording downloads through our comment line.

In this regard, it seems we’ve been hoist by our own petard. We were one of the very first sites on the Internet to provide upwards of 650 megabytes of monthly streaming Golden Age Radio downloads throughout the site. Our imitators and competitors have learned that this is a very successful means of driving traffic to a site. Unfortunately our resources are not as unlimited as those of our almost universally commercial imitators and competitors.

We’ve created a monster of our own making, with OTR freeloaders returning week after week to our pages for nothing more than the new Golden Age Radio episodes we offer each month. This is not -- repeat not -- our intended audience. We have no interest whatsoever in pandering to the worst of the OTR Community. We receive several emails each month demanding even more free episodes, or a means of making it even easier for them to obtain them -- as opposed to actually visiting and reading our new and updated features each month so as to learn about this amazing era and it's proponents.

We continue to showcase as many as 300 of these Golden Age Radio recordings each and every month. But you have to actually visit our pages and features to retrieve them. An outrageous imposition, we know, but that’s the reality of it. If they were paying us $29.95 a month to download our shows I suppose I’d understand their demands. That’s simply not the case. No one pays one red cent for any of the shows we stream from the website. We don't think it's too much to ask, to require those visitors returning to our pages for no other reason than to download the new recordings each month, to actually navigate to the pages and features they’re located on. If that strikes them as too much to ask, then our simple response is "Oops! Our bad." Is a simple page hit too much to demand? We don't think so.

In addition to the 240,000 recordings themselves, you'll find tens of thousands of bits of historical and nostalgic ephemera in almost every major show folder on the FTP site -- or right here on the 5,000 pages of our website. We restore or rehabilitate every single graphic that we use for either the web site or FTP archive -- or post in the collection for supporting material. We crawl all available resources on a weekly basis. As more and more of these restored, cleaned or enhanced materials make their way into circulation, we continually create an even better resource pool of high quality graphics, reference materials, or techniques -- so that everyone eventually benefits.

We’ve also encoded, remastered, or cleaned over 800 gigabytes of the existing 3-terabyte collection. And as always, we welcome any and all contributions of remastered or newly encoded upgrades to our existing archives.

And perhaps most importantly we care -- about our quality and our subscribers. We're proud of the thousands of manhours we've devoted to this effort. The almost 700,000 visitors to the site since its inception would seem to directly reflect the degree to which we have cared about this fascinating legacy.