Private Radio

When the night comes
When no one knows
I can feel it
I've got my private radio
– Vanessa Carlton

Everyone has private passions – and no, I'm not referring to those which occur “with the shades pulled down." I'm speaking of the secret hobbies, the discreet habits we enjoy but do not necessarily share with others. Take television, for example. When I was a kid, I was more or less open about my love of Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica; I didn't talk much about my obsession with the original Dr. Who, a show which was, when I discovered it in 1979 or so, almost totally unknown in America. It was not because the show was unknown that I remained silent: it was because those who did know about it either found it ridiculous (because of its very low budget) or boring (because the hero, though always confronted by violence, almost never used it himself). One could say my refusal to openly embrace the renegade Time Lord was an act of cowardice (no child likes to be “different”) but at least fifty percent of my motive arose from a feeling of greed. When a squirrel locates a nut, he buries it; when a child discovers he enjoys an unpopular activity, sport, hobby or TV show, he keeps it not only to himself, but for himself. It becomes a private pleasure, all the more pleasurable because he enjoys it alone. Mixed up with this greed and the thrill of secrecy is an unassuming form of arrogance: only he is intelligent enough to have discovered this hidden treasure. Those who do not know are not smart enough to know.

This logic applies to older children and adults as well. When one discovers a band when it is still relatively unknown, one becomes a member of an exclusive society, and membership in that society is jealously guarded. Back in the 80s, the Metallica fans in my high school regarded themselves as a special musical elite; only they understood the pleasures of heavy metal, and only they were willing to endure social exile to indulge in those pleasures. A few years later, when Metallica broke into the musical mainstream, these very same people were aghast and angry. They attacked the “poseurs” and “casuals” that had jumped on the bandwagon (no pun intended) without having to suffer hostility and ridicule. At the same time, they attacked the band itself for “selling out” (which in musical terms more often means “becoming popular” than an actual financial transaction). For these metalheads, Metallica was a private pleasure no more.

As I stagger into middle age, I have discovered, half my amusement, half to my chargin, that many of the underground or semi-underground passions of my youth and formative/collegiate years have now “sold out” and become mainstream: Dr. Who would be the classic example, but comic books, action figures, science-fiction conventions, fantasy films, the UFC, and any number of previously “nerd-tainted” (or “extreme”) subjects are now “cool” and therefore safe to embrace. I am, however, not as hostile to this process as I was a few years back, when I, like the Metallica fans of my high school, reacted with anger and contempt to those who never had to suffer for their passion, but simply ambled in, late to the party, and reaped all the benefits. I like to ascribe this to maturity – I'm 45, it had to happen sometime – but whatever the cause, I have decided to share something with you that I have seldom shared with anyone: not so much in the hopes you'll embrace it, but rather because I no longer wish to selfishly hoard it for myself. The subject at hand is what is known as “old time radio.”

It's probably hard for the modern American, born, say, in the 1980s or 90s, to grasp the power that radio once held in this country – indeed, the entire “civilized” world. Before and even for a short time after the advent of television, radio gripped and dominated the fields of news and entertainment in a way which has only two modern analogs: television in the 60s – 90s, and in the internet from the later 90s until now. But from 1920 until the mid-1950s (the so-called “Golden Age of Radio”), most everything we associate with pop culture either sprang from, or was popularized by, radio: sports, hard news, celebrity gossip, game shows, and every form of episodic series you can imagine, from drama to horror, from sci-fi to comedy. This fertile period produced a number of shows which were later continued (or re-invented) as television series or films – good examples would be The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, The Green Hornet, I Love Lucy, Dragnet, Perry Mason and the soap opera Guiding Light, to name a few; but, as is so often the case, the vast majority of what was popular then did not translate well to the new medium of TV, and began to recede from memory as the years passed. Part of the reason was technical: radio shows were recorded on bulky magnetic tapes which were often miscatelogued, misplaced, damaged, destroyed or simply discarded when a studio folded or storage space ran low. What's more, from the mid-50s until the late 70s, there existed no medium by which these shows could be cost-feectively sold to the public: the practice of recording them on vinyl was cumbersome and expensive, and each 75 rpm disc could hold, at most, only two episodes – a ludicrously small number considering the price. It came as no surprise then that children raised during the early-mid Television Era had little knowledge or interest in the radio programs of their parents' generation; however, by the end of the 70s, the rising popularity of the small, sturdy and relatively inexpensive cassette tape made it both possible and profitable to market shows from the Golden Age of Radio in the same manner as musical albums.

I don't remember exactly how old I was when my father handed me my first old-time radio cassette, but I do remember the circumstances. We were on a family trip to the beach, probably around 1980, and it was my habit on such long drives to take with me a tape-recorder equipped with a small microphone. My older brother and I often used to pass the time by improvising farsical sketches – absurd, Saturday Night Live-style spoofs of our favorite programs – and possibly to avoid having to listen to our attempts at comedy (punctuated by many vulgar sound effects), my dad bought a tape at a roadside store and handed it to me to play. The show was called The Shadow and the episode, “Death From The Deep.”

I didn't know this at the time, but The Shadow was one of the most popular radio programs which had ever been recorded; it produced over 650 half-hour episodes from 1937 until 1954, and during those seventeen years, saw no less than six men play the title role, the first being none other than the great Orson Welles – indeed, it was Welles' voice that I heard when I pressed PLAY on that tape recorder.

Now, you must understand that I was raised on television. I knew nothing, and cared less, about scripted radio programs and if I had been introduced to them even a few short years later, when adolescence began to harden the faculties of my imagination, I might have listened for a few minutes, shrugged, and tossed the tape on the floor of the car. But I was at precisely that age when a boy's imagination is not only enormous but extremely vivid; an age when a simple ghost story, told in an offhand manner with scarcely any details, can produce mental imagery so terrifying that the boy might not be able to sleep for three days after hearing it. And so when the sinister music of The Shadow kicked in, accompanied by the diabolical laugh of The Shadow himself, I was instantly transported out of that big white Buick and into another, darker world. In that world, a wealthy young man named Lamont Crantson used the power of invisibility which he had learned while studying the occult in the Orient “to bring terror to the hearts of sharpsters, lawbreakers and criminals.” Adopting the alter-ego of The Shadow, he fought crime in all of its guises, natural and supernatural. Indeed, probably no superhero in history faced such a panopoly of evildoers: psychopaths, gangsters, mad scientists, enemy spies, saboteurs, racketeers, counterfeiters, arsonsists, human traffickers, kidnappers, crooked politicians, mass murderers, and, on rare occasions, foes with super-powers of their own. But what really drew me in to The Shadow – and later, to other radio serials as well – was not the concept but the execution. The Shadow, at its best, was tightly written, finely acted, and highly atmospheric. The sound effects created a sort of internal landscape within my mind – I could “see” the rain-drowned streets, the brooding fogs, the abandoned warehouses, the tough-talking gunsels in Fedora hats and trenchcoats, fingering their guns and knives as they stood beneath the harsh glare of the streetlamps. I had vivid mental images of Lamont Cranston, his lovely sidekick Margo Lane, their friendly antagonist Police Chief Weston, and even the submoronic cab driver who hacked them about town, Shreevie. Intellectually, I knew the sound of cars, horns, gunshots, crowds, creaking doors, barking dogs, rolling thunder, etc. were mere sound-effects, and the heroes and villains merely actors in shirtsleeves, speaking into microphones as they turned the pages of scripts, but this knowledge had absolutely no effect on my enjoyment of the show. The thing English teachers refer to as “the suspension of disbelief” was, in my case, absolute. When the radio played, I was there, wherever there was – be it a tomb in Egypt, the conning tower of a submarine, the cockpit of a bomber or a ski lodge in the mountains. Late childhood and early adolescence are tough times for anyone, and the ability to escape it all, to simply disappear into the Amazon or beneath the sea, to forget about bullies in gym class or that god-damned book report that was due next week and join The Shadow on his adventures, was the sort of spiritual morphine other kids sought by immersing themselves in music or following sports. But the effect, for me, was the same.

In the years following that fateful beach-trip, I gradually accumulated more episodes of The Shadow on tape, and also began listening to other programs as well, such as The Green Hornet and Inner Sanctum Mysteries. (I was also fascinated by news broadcasts from the Second World War.) My enthusiasm for Old-Time Radio was not always consistent, but the ebb periods, sometimes lasting for years, were inevitably followed by “flows” where some incident would rekindle my interest with interest, and I would buy a half-dozen new tapes and spend hours listening to them with the greatest pleasure. There were in effect two crucial moments in my personal relationship with OTR. When I was well into my twenties, my mom bought me, at Christmastime, an enormous box-set of Shadow episodes; but at that point I had fallen into an ebb-period and simply went home and shoved the package beneath my bed, where it lay half-forgotten for years. At the age of thirty, however, I found myself in the peculiar position of working in Rockville, Maryland but living in York, Pennsylvania. The 75 mile commute began to bore me senseless, and one day I remembered my mother's gift, hauled it from amdist the dust-bunnies, and threw it into the front seat of my car. Over time I slowly worked my way through every one of those fifty episodes while driving through back-country roads, often perversely delighted when, on moonlit winter nights, I would find myself actually unnerved by some of the gorier stories, just as I had as a boy of ten. The second moment came in 2007, when I belatedly discovered that thousands of OTR shows were now available in MP3 format, often for free – including the entire existing catelogue of The Shadow, which at that time included probably a hundred or more episodes I had never heard. At that time I had just moved to Los Angeles and was stuck in a laborious temp job at a defense industry subcontractor: the only way to stay sane in that hot, noisy, dusty warehouse was to screw in the earbuds of my iPod and retreat, mentally, into the world of The Shadow as I sweated amongst the spare parts. And when I had listened to every last one, I began to expand my horizons to other shows. They included Inner Sanctum Mysteries, The Line-Up, Escape, and Suspense, just to name a few. At the suggestion of Stephen King, who devoted a long section of his book "Danse Macabre" to radio, I also began to listen to the radio plays of Arch Oboler and the Ray Bradbury Theater as well. Had I the room here, I could a tale unfold about the deep and abiding pleasure listening to these programs has brought me over the years. In gyms, on walks, during drives, and sometimes late at night when I couldn't sleep and needed something to occupy my restless brain, these shows – written by long-dead writers, performed by long-dead actors, recorded in long-demolished studios when my own parents were yet unborn – have been my faithful companions.

I could write a great deal more about old radio, the immense diversity of its programming, the jaw-dropping cleverness of some of the writing, the brilliance of its vocal performances. I could spin yarns about how marveously cheesy some of the stories were (The Shadow story “The House of Horror” involved: a trap door, a mad scientist, a talking parrot, a gypsy fortune-teller, and a machine which could transfer human brains into the bodies of gorillas), or how emotionally affecting some of the others could be (Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on the Air did brilliant renditions of Julius Caesar, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Apple Tree, and Les Miserables, to say nothing of War of the Worlds). But that is for another time. For now, however, I will simply say that the mere act of writing this blog has led to a joyous discovery. As I stated before, The Shadow produced about 650 episodes during its run on radio, but two-thirds of the original recordings were lost, including the last five seasons in their entirety. That amounts to about 425 missing shows. In recent years, however, a renewed interest in Old Time Radio has led to the discovery of about fifteen episodes previously MIA. This gave me hope that more might yet be unearthed, but as time passed and nothing “new” appeared, these hopes began to dim. However, while doing a little research for this blog, I visited the Old Time Radio Reseachers Group Library and found that no less than eleven previously “lost” episodes of The Shadow have appeared since my list visit to their site about six months ago. I immediately downloaded the lot, and will have the satisfaction of listening to all of them in the days and weeks to come. And no, it is not lost on me that one of them, “Cold Death,” stars Orson Welles, whose voice, coming to me from that clunky old tape recorder in the back of that clunky old Buick all those long, long years ago, sparked my love affair with radio in the first place.