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 …

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. Kirk…

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 spec…

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 w…

“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 a…

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 re…

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, whic…

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 m…

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 survi…

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…

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 accou…

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 …

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…

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 a…

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 t…

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 classi…

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 …

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 q…

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 In…

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 …

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 …

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…

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…

All this month we are celebrating actor Vincent Price, featuring in particular his work on radio. As usual, we have done our best to select programs that show Price's range and versatility as a performer, so you will be hearing everything from horror to comedy to drama. Price's style often felt very classical, leading many to believe he was British…

This is a broadcast we've been avoiding on this podcast, since it's been overdone by just about every old time radio program in history. But there is still so much interest in this historic broadcast, especially among younger listeners, we caved. So here is the famous panic broadcast in which real people really believed that real Martians had lande…

This is the last Halloween-themed comedy show for now. Our Miss Brooks was a late-40s through 1950s classic sitcom that leaned heavily into character comedy. It was led by Eve Arden, who carried her persona of the wise-cracking character she developed in the movies, over to a high school English teacher, who was perpetually broke, ever pining for t…

Well, our Carlton E. Morse series is wrapped up, and we are still one week away from our official Halloween show, so instead of starting something new, we are going to anticipate the dark and stormy night with this creepy little number from Wyllis Cooper. As usual, Quiet Please takes a little bit of figuring out ("are we listening to a comedy or a …

J. Carrol Naish was one of the great dialect performers from vintage film and radio. For a brief period he became known for a well-written radio show from Si Howard, about a number of immigrants struggling to acclimate to American culture. As you might imagine, this gave the writers plenty of fodder to mock modern pop culture. This Halloween show c…

OK, we're here. Somehow we've survived our 10 week excursion through creepy, ghoulish happenings, disappearances, buried pearls, wandering phantoms, and lots and lots of weird noises. In this finale of "City of the Dead," Morse lays out in meticulous detail all of the explanations behind what was seen and heard in his cemetery. We will leave it to …

Our "Creepy Comedies" series continues all through the month of October with "America's Favorite Young Couple" Ozzie and Harriet. This is their 1948 Halloween themed episode, a nostalgic look back at "trick or treat" from the past, with a nod to the future. Ozzie is determined to have a spooky time at Halloween by visiting a neighborhood haunted ho…

We continue with the Carlton E. Morse classic today, The City of the Dead, in Episode 9 titled "The Trail of the Phantom Churchbell." As tensions rise, Captain Friday has mysteriously vanished, leaving Phyllis, Jimmy, and their companions in a harrowing situation. With black pearls, mysterious kidnappings, and a haunting church bell, the group trie…

In this second installment of our October comedy-horror series, we're bringing you a classic Abbott and Costello episode from January 13, 1944. Though not technically a Halloween show, this one features the legendary Peter Lorre. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello deliver their signature slapstick humor and rapid-fire wordplay, a great "flee when flu flie…

We're so close to the end of The City of the Dead, we can smell it. Literally. It's episode 8 of Adventures by Morse, with more weird twists and turns in the old creaky cemetery. "The Kidnapping of Clawfoot" begins with a series of strange occurrences: Captain Friday goes missing, a ghoul is caught digging in Ernie Morton's grave, and tensions rise…

In this special October series, we are going to be presenting comedy programs with a spooky twist. We start by featuring the Jack Benny Program from October 31st, 1948—just before the iconic show moved to CBS during the network talent raids. This is one of Jack's best Halloween themed shows, as he goes trick-or-treating with the "Beavers." Join us …

Nameless unremembered, acts of kindness and love

Step back into the atmospheric world of bony creeps and cobwebs as we continue our trek through City of the Dead, episode 7. In this production from 1944, Captain Friday and Jimmy Parker continue to explore the ancient cemetery for answers. And yep, Captain Friday disappears! Carlton E. Morse's adventure serial is coming to a head! Visit our websit…

Welcome back to The Good Old Days of Radio Show! This week, we're diving into a classic comedy episode featuring Henry Morgan and his sidekick Arnold Stang, broadcast on May 7th, 1947. In this episode Morgan skewers the absurdities of 1940s vacation planning with his own fictitious travel agency, pitching 'Lovely Camp Schmo.' Also a spoof on the wo…

Join us for episode six of our trek through Carlton E. Morse's classic radio series, The City of the Dead (1944). In this episode, titled "The Ghoul in the Grave," Captain Friday and his companions uncover more about the elusive black pearls and the unsettling skeleton that seems to have a mind of its own. It's 1940s pulp adventure/mystery/horror a…

In this episode of The Good Old Days of Radio Show, host John Tefteller takes you back to November 4, 1945, with a twist on a classic pairing. Featuring an episode of Request Performance, the American version of Command Performance, you'll hear Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce—famous for their portrayals of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson—swap roles i…

In this episode, we're back into the creepy world of Carlton E. Morse, one of the great writers of Mystery Radio. We feature Adventures by Morse from 1944, a 10-part cliffhanger series titled The City of the Dead. The story follows Captain Friday as he uncovers chilling mysteries in an old cemetery where the dead may not rest in peace. High adventu…

In this episode of "The Good Old Days of Radio Show," host John Tefteller takes a break from our usual programming to delve into the oft overlooked world of old-time radio preservation. John shares his personal journey as a collector, starting in 1972, and the challenges he faces in saving these historical treasures. With a growing collection that …

In this thrilling episode of The Good Old Days of Radio Show, we continue our journey through Carlton E. Morse's gripping horror series, Adventures by Morse. Join us for Episode 4 of The City of the Dead, titled "Old Claw Foot," where we once again encounter phantom figure, and three bodies in a secret cellar. Visit our website: https://goodolddays…

Today grab your cup of Joe, we're feet first into a classic period of the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, originally broadcast on January 3, 1946. This episode deals with the post-war housing shortage as George and Gracie decide to repurpose their den to help a returning serviceman. Their neighbor, Meredith Willson (famed writer of "The Music M…

Today we dive into another chilling installment of our special action-packed radio serial from 1944, featuring the suspenseful third episode of "Adventures by Morse: The City of the Dead," titled "The Body That Walked Off." Captain Friday and his crew face a chilling discovery as a grave is reopened, and a dead man’s body mysteriously vanishes. Vis…

This week, we shine the spotlight on the legendary W.C. Fields, a comedic genius whose biting wit and unique persona left an indelible mark on the entertainment world. In this episode, we explore one of WC Fields' final performances from October 1945, featuring his famous "Temperance Lecture." Visit our website: https://goodolddaysofradio.com/ Subs…

We bring you chapter two in Carlton E. Morse's "City of the Dead" radio serial. This week's chapter, "I've Dug Up Something Ghastly" continues the atmospheric mystery tale as the mayor is shot in an old church, leading to the involvement of Captain Friday (played by Elliot Lewis), the mayor's son and a private investigator. Visit our website: https…

It's been awhile since we've brought Red Skelton to the show. Skelton's humor is energetic and fun to listen to, revolving around his wild and eccentric characters. This episode is all about "People Celebrating," featuring sketches with Clem Kadiddlehopper and "The Mean Widdle Mean Kid." Visit our website: https://goodolddaysofradio.com/ Subscribe …

Ghosts cry, a phantom bell tolls, and a claw-footed monster roams around at night in "The City of the Dead." Today we begin a 10-Part Carlton E. Morse mystery/thriller from his brief syndicated series "Adventures By Morse." This is "I Love A Mystery" on steroids. A dark, foggy mystery set in a graveyard, with Morse at his imaginative best. Visit ou…

It's episode number 12 of a series. And now we are counting down to the last few episodes in this late radio comedy, "The Stan Freberg Show." In this episode, we get an interview with a test-pilot while on a high-speed rocket sled, how to fix a kitchen faucet, and a live version of Freberg's popular Capitol Record parody of "Sh-Boom." Visit our web…

It's the last in our series of "10 More Great Sci-Fi Stories" as presented on vintage radio. Today, we depart from Dimension X and X Minus One to present a post-apocalyptic story by George R. Stewart, a best-selling author who was the great granddaddy of the "disaster" genre. His story The Earth Abides imagines what it might be like to be the last …