We were fortunate to obtain Mr. Corwin's support in answering two of our lingering inquiries in support of this article. We're indebted to Mr. Corwin for giving us a couple moments of his time to provide us with the verifications we requested.

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The Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) wasn't necessarily the most innovative network in Radio, but they did often manage to beat the 'big three' to market with many of Radio's most interesting genre programming, especially during the heyday of Don Lee-Mutual out on the West Coast. 2000 Plus did, indeed, beat NBC to the table by about a month. Dimension X followed closely on its heels. One might well conjecture that if MBS had brought 2000 Plus to the air even six months earlier, it might well have enjoyed the popular acclaim of NBC's Dimension X, for example.

2000 Plus, for its part, clearly had all the makings of a truly exceptional science fiction canon.

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The discovery of the Mark Saber series as separate and distinct from the CBS Mystery Theatre series was an interesting revelation to us. We'd long read that ABC Mystery Theatre (or Theater) was 'considered' part of Molle Mystery Theatre, Hearthstone of The Death Squad and the other derivations of that Hummert produced series.

Lo and behold, it was a fascinating--though short-lived--series in its own right, that was also airing over early Television at the same time, with an alternate cast.

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The ABC Screen Guild Theatre and Players were the seventh through ninth incarnations of the famous, long-running Screen Guild series in support of The Country House and Hospital of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. The ABC Season was comprised of programs in an hour-long format, with approximately the second half of the season sponsored by the Buick Motor Division of General Motors.

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The series is a tour de force for Gene and Kathleen Lockhart. Apart from the announcer, theirs are the only voices heard throughout the series. As best as can be determined, Gene and Kathleen Lockhart perform every role in the circulating recordings. Gene Lockhart, arguably the more widely known of the acting couple assumes the role of curmudgeonly foil to his romantic wife. It's also quite plausible that Gene Lockhart also wrote the scripts for the series. Kathleen Lockhart shines as the ever-romantic, ever optimistic, adventurer, dragging her reluctant spouse all over England, France and Italy. Kathleen's performance is the epitome of what one might imagine of the archetypal American homemaker of the 1930s devouring her first experience of international adventure.

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Revisiting Academy Award caught our attention when we realized that the program was almost universally referred to as Academy Award Theater (or Academy Award Theatre). Naturally no such program ever existed in Radio--either Academy Award Theater or Academy Award Theatre. In the process of setting the record straight and restoring the program to its rightful name, we also discovered--and corrected--even more misinformation regarding this fine, well-produced--albeit extremely expensive--program.

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Adventure Ahead! captured our interest after having developed a biography of Bernard Lenrow. In the process of that exercise we learned much more about this fascinating short-lived juvenile adventure series, while at the same time correcting much of the circulating misinformation about this program in the process.

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There's little dispute that this relatively short series--for Carlton E. Morse, anyway--raises as many questions as it answers. But then that's what continues to keep Golden Age Radio research as fascinating and fulfilling as it is; the more questions one answers, the more one often raises. At the least, in this instance, the answers are worth pursuing. For all its shortcomings and inconsistencies, Adventures By Morse remains something of a tactical--if not strategic--bridge between the longer network runs of I Love A Mystery, Carlton Morse's longest running adventure drama series. To the extent that it gave Morse more ammunition for the next round of network negotiations for I Love A Mystery, it's unlikely that Adventures by Morse provided Morse much leverage in the end.

On the plus side of the ledger, the source transcriptions for the circulating series of recordings are absolutely superb in every way. In this respect, the Morse Family Trust's decision to retain total control over Adventures By Morse has ensured the highest possible quality of the 1st-generation source transcriptions.

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The Adventures of Maisie remains a work in progress. There's no simple excuse for it. The entire first CBS run of the series appears to be shrouded in secrecy of one sort or another. As best as we can determine a good portion of it is still part of a combination of institutional and private holdings. The MBS run--as an MBS run--was rarely ever accurately described in contemporaneous newspaper listings. But in the process we corrected hundreds of little bits of misinformation regarding this exceptionally interesting program. Maisie's convoluted history alone makes for engrossing research. And of course the chance to do bioigraphies of two of Radio's greatest ladies--Ann Sothern and Lurene Tuttle--was a chance we couldn't pass up.

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The first--and most elusive--of the Nero Wolfe adventures over the years. This one got its start on the old New England Network with J.B. Williams as Nero Wolfe. By the time it first aired over a national network, Santos Ortega was holding the role of Nero Wolfe. And by the time the first series of The Adventures of Nero Wolfe had run their course, it was famous character actor Luis van Rooten who finished out the role of Nero Wolfe.

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One of the Golden Age of Radio's most collected programs--and one of the slowest to enter complete circulation. It was also one of Radio history's most inaccurately understood or documented programs. We set all of that straight in one of our earliest--and most successful--research efforts.

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Arguably Golden Age Radio's most collected detective genre program, the history of Sam Spade, Detective was a confusing muddle before we tackled it. In the process we almost fully documented it, resolved most of the previous disparities and identified its most accurate chronology to date. We also enjoyed giving William Spier, Howard Duff, Dick Joy, and Steve Dunne their due. We'd already memorialized Radio's First Lady, Lurene Tuttle, with our Adventures of Maisie article and log. And no, we didn't overlook Dashiell Hammett either. He's memorialized below, in The Adventures of The Thin Man. And yes, he not only did The Thin Man, but also The Fat Man, and Secret Agent X-9.

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The extraordinary success of The Thin Man series in Film virtually guaranteed an equally successful run over Radio. And for many of its seven incarnations that was certainly the case. One of Radio history's most mis-scheduled series it was also, thankfully, quite well documented in the era's newspapers. We unraveled the mysteries of The Thin Man over Radio for you, and provided one of the most well-documented logs of this fascinating program in the process.

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The premise of The Adventurers' Club was ideally suited to its timeslot and intended audience--aspiring juvenile adventurers. Heard well outside Chicago, over the CBS Network, the series was produced in the Chicago Studios of WBBM. During the course of its fifty-two programs the fascinating series relates first person accounts of some of modern history's most engaging and captivating adventurers.

Conceived and created by The Adventurers Club of Chicago, several of the adventurers profiled were members of the Chicago Adventurers Club, America's second oldest such club, founded in 1911. Indeed, the Chicago Adventurers Club founder, Major Robert Foran, was the subject of Program No. 40, from October 11, 1947, The Story of Robert Foran and Program No. 51, from December 27, 1947, The Story of Robert Foran. The club he founded was predated by The Explorers' Club of New York, founded in 1904, and itself predated the Los Angeles Adventurers' Club, founded in 1912.

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The second most elusive Nero Wolfe series starred legendary silent screen idol Francis X Bushman as the agoraphobic genius detective. Elliott Lewis serves as Francis X Bushman's Archie in the one existing circulating exemplar. Now that we have it accurately documented for the first time, we can only hope that other exemplars will begin to surface.

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This was an all too long overlooked little gem from the beginning of the careers of two of Radio's most beloved broadcast journalists--Charles Kuralt and Carl Kasell. Also a sentimental favorite for all UNC-Chapel Hill grads across America, it was a fascinating anthology of American History vignettes.

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American Novels was one of the many initiatives of the NBC University of The Air and NBC Inter-American University of The Air productions produced between 1942 and 1948. The theme of NBC University of The Air's American Novels was "books that live." These were distinctly American novels that continued to provide the same message and substance irrespective of the era of their first printing. These were timeless stories of human struggle, resolve, and reaffirmation that both encouraged and inspired the reader--or in this instance, the listener.

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The center of attention with this NBC Presents offering was a series of eight radioplays by George H. Faulkner, an NBC staff continuity and script writer. The theme uniting Faulkner's eight radioplays was the human element of some of America's greatest historic figures. There was one other uniting element--George Faulkner had already penned most of these radioplays for Cavalcade of America (in addition to another 30-40 Cavalcade of America scripts). Given that this was a Summer replacement for Cavalcade of America, one might well call this brief series, Cavalcade of America 'Lite'.

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As a natural extension of NBC University of The Air, NBC also embarked on several NBC Presents and NBC Theater Presents network-sustained and sponsored initiatives upon reevaluating the success and acceptance of it's University of The Air intiatives of the 1940s. 1948 marked the year that NBC determined that the public was seeking accurate and informative programming, to be sure, but that much of the public audience of the post-War years was somewhat put off by the word 'University' in the titles of such programming. From that point forward, NBC's more prestigious, signature productions bore the "NBC Presents" title in one form or another. As one of the formalized NBC University of The Air initiatives, The American Story was almost certainly its most ambitious and authoritative of the era.

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Another sadly overlooked gem from The Golden Age of Radio, we couldn't resist giving this fine production its due. Sponsored and promoted by the fine ladies of The Ladies Auxiliary to The Veterans of Foreign Wars, they assembled a splendid patriotic anthology to both educate and inspire the 4th to 8th graders of America. In the process we managed to fully provenance every single broadcast.

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This is another of the famous Norman Corwin projects for CBS during the World War II years. Produced by no less than Edward R. Murrow himself, Norman Corwin both wrote and directed the programs. An ambitious attempt at one of the first dramatic Transatlantic presentations over shortwave, the long distance broadcasts weren't as successful as the lessons learned from the early broadcasts' failures.

We managed to reconstruct an entire log from multiple newspaper provenances and verification and confirmation of our findings by Norman Corwin himself. This series also provided us the opportunity to memorialize our own Joseph Julian, as well as one of the most important composers in British History, Benjamin Britten.

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The Arch Oboler's Plays franchise aired in one form or another over a period of almost thirty-three years, counting the original canon of fifty-three new radioplays, the subsequent special canon of twenty-six radioplays for the Mutual Broadcasting System (1945), then a 1964 revival, and finally a 1971 revival. The original canon of scripts encompassed some ninety-plus original stories. And, as dyed in the wool Lights Out! fans will surely point out, a good number of Lights Out! stories were reprised among the Arch Oboler's Plays canon over the years as well.

By the second year of Lights Out!, America was under the spell of the diminutive giant of a playwright, Archibald 'Arch' Oboler and his spellbinding, highly personalized writing style. While clearly a genius in his own right, it's also clear that much of his writing style had been informed by Wyllis Cooper at the least. Cooper's own writing style almost routinely employed a highly personalized point of view, so as to further attenuate the listening experience of his radioplays to the greatest degree. Given young Arch Oboler's close association with Cooper with Lights Out!, it's difficult to divorce Wyllis Cooper's writing style from Oboler's in many respects. There's no question that Oboler more than differentiated himself with his Arch Oboler's Plays seasons, but it's also quite clear that even after cranking out some sixty-seven original radioplays for his own breakout dramatic franchise, that he was even then being influenced by his association with Wyllis Cooper.

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Neither CBS nor the Bakers of America spared any expense to bring one of CBS' finest drama anthologies to the air. There's no question that CBS would have loved continuing the series beyond thirteen episodes, but once the June Convention had come and passed, the promotion had accomplished its purpose for Bakers of America. This had to have been an incredibly expensive production to mount. One glance at the roster of leading stars shows Hollywood actors well worth the $3,000 to $5,000 appearance fee they'd have commanded by 1953. Add to that, CBS Pacific Net's finest supporting actors, one of their brightest up and coming directors, Norm Macdonnell, music direction by Wilbur Hatch, announcer and spokesman, Wendell Niles, and you have a $10,000 to $15,000 a week production at the least.

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The entire four-installment arc of Battle Stations! stands as one of the finest two-hour documentaries on the history of The Navy produced during World War II. It's a tribute to both The Department of The Navy and NBC's Department of Special Events that they managed to mount such an enduring tribute to The Navy's Sea and Air Arms with such consistent production quality and fascinating content throughout. Supported by America's finest voice talent from both coasts, the New York-based production continues to be a stirring, inspirational account of The Navy's struggle to compete for resources with The Army, while diversifying itself enough to not only preserve its own rich history of contributions to America's defense, but create an even more important and enduring force for the protection of America and it's allies in the process.

This brief series is a fascinating patriotic documentary that should be a must listen for everyone who's ever either served in the Navy, may be contemplating a career in The Navy, or who's had loved ones and family who've served in The Navy. Indeed, for anyone else curious about Naval traditions or history, this fascinating series is as compelling as anything else produced during the World War II era, with the possible exceptions of The Pacific Story and The Man Behind The Gun.

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Best Plays came under the 'NBC Presents' banner for NBC, their premiere drama programs throughout the Golden Age of Radio. In this case, the finest 20th Century Stage plays then available. It was also an opportunity to memorialize the great Ernest Kinoy, who wrote many of the adaptations and plays for the series and who, of

course, would go on to produce some of the finest science fiction dramas of the 20th Century as well.

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During the Fall programming season of 1954, NBC's News Division began airing a series of highly produced, intimately detailed biographies of high-profile celebrities, beginning with Sigmund Romberg and Sir Winston Churchill. The initial two documentaries received such wide acclaim that NBC News aired a subsequent documentary on Ernest Hemingway, the first broadcast to be characterized as a Biography In Sound, first airing on December 19, 1954.


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Paul Frees, arguably Radio's single most prolific, widely heard voice throughout the Golden Age of Radio and The Golden Age of Television, was particularly busy between 1948 and 1952, as CBS sought vehicle after vehicle for him to lead. Between those years, CBS showcased Frees as the lead in:

• The Player (1948) as all scripted characters
• Studio X (1948) as all scripted characters
• The Green Lama (1949) as Jethro Dumont, The Green Lama
• Crime Correspondent (1949) as Larry Mitchell, Radio Crime Reporter
• The Man In Black (1951?) as 'The Teller of Tales'
• The Black Book (1952) as 'The Teller of Tales'

This of course, in addition to Frees' various announcing, narrating and character acting roles in scores of other CBS dramatic vehicles. He'd been the announcer on Suspense for 100+ episodes throughout that period, as well as acting in both Suspense and Escape! throughout the same period. In addition, out on the west coast, ABC had Frees airing a nightly D.J. program from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.. Clearly one of CBS Pacific's plum performers, in spite of the number of starring vehicles CBS created for him, either his other professional demands--or CBS' understandable need of him supporting other CBS programming requirements--limited almost all of his starring vehicles to a couple of months in duration--or less.

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The Black Museum was--and remains--a documentation challenge. And yet, we've managed, in the process of documenting six different runs of The Black Museum, to provide something of a 'rosetta stone' for comparing and piecing together all known titles broadcast. This one will remain a work in progress, although we're simply polishing the apple at this point.

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King Features, Chic Young, the Blondie films and the Blondie Radio features worked hand in glove throughout this same twelve year period. Cross-indexes and promotions between the comic strip, comic books, feature films and Radio series' all worked to promote Blondie throughout the U.S., Canada and internationally.

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Bold Venture is one of the programs we originally set out to thoroughly document and correct in the process. While technically still a work in progress, of the circulating examplars of the series, we've fully documented and correctly sequenced the circulating run after years of misinformation regarding this historic series.

In the process we learned a great deal more about it's three primary stars, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Jester Hairston. Jester Hairston, especially, was a fascinating rediscovery for us.

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Box 13 was a sentimental favorite that also gave us an excuse to create a biography of Alan Ladd, one of a handful of actors who actually got involved in producing, flogging, and distributing their own syndicated Radio programs. Ladd's Mayfair Transcriptions Company not only produced Box 13, but several other important programs of the era, most notably, The Damon Runyon Theatre.

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Bright Star, in addition to the obvious, proven talent and popular appeal of Dunne and MacMurray, supported its stars with Elvia Allman, one of Radio's most versatile, popular, and experienced comediennes. The productions also featured such artists as Sheldon Leonard, Betty Lou Gerson, Virginia Gregg, Parley Baer, Will Wright and Howard Culver. The scoring was composed and conducted by Irv Norton and his orchestra. Harry Von Zell announced and narrated the first twenty-six programs and Wendell Niles announced and narrated the last twenty-six programs of the run.

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