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Welcome to my old time radio page! Long before television arrived in the late 1940's and early 1950's, radio was everywhere. Major networks like NBC, CBS, ABC, and Mutual presented a variety of programs: sit-coms, news, mysteries, music, westerns, science fiction, drama, and much more. There was something for everyone! And old time radio was virtually free of the obscene language and violence that is so common on television today. Old time radio (OTR) was the "theatre of the mind." Listeners were invited to use their imagination to add pictures to the dramas coming out of the loudspeaker. With a good imagination, those pictures could be far better than anything ever seen on television! A horrible monster appeared only as scary as the listener wanted, and the western plains in Gunsmoke could spread for miles and miles all around... not just the 12-15 inch width of a tv screen. |
I was first exposed to old time radio when I was eight years old. My family was driving cross-country from Virginia to Colorado. To pass the long hours, my mother checked out several cassettes of Suspense from our public library and a tape of The Mercury Theatre On The Air's classic 1938 broadcast of "The War Of The Worlds." I was on the edge of my seat all the way through Kansas! Immediately, I was hooked. When we returned home several weeks later, I checked out all the other OTR tapes our library had, copied them, then started looking for more. Through catalogue orders, trades with other OTR fans, and rentals from OTR clubs like SPERDVAC and the Metro Washington Old Time Radio Club, my collection grew rapidly. Today, I enjoy everything from Jack Benny and Burns and Allen to Suspense and Inner Santcum to Gunsmoke to X Minus One to Johnny Dollar, to just about everything else on radio from the 1920's-1960's. |  |
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