The Golden Age of Radio, April 25, 2015

Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio, is on WBAI, 99.5, every Sunday night from 7-9 PM.
The show April 25,2015 started with the last episode of The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen and was followed by three shows written by Cathleeen Hite, from Gunsmoke, Escape and Night Beat.

The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen ran on the Mutual network from 1947-1948, was written by Gil Doud and Bob Talman and directed by the versatile Elliot Lewis, who also starred as Master Phillip Carney, captain of the cargo ship on its route through Asia.  The episode Schmid played on April 25 was 'The Winchester Rifle and the Ambitious Groom'", about the murder of the groom at a wedding on Singapore, where one "never goes to bed without them brass knuckles."  At the end, as usual, Carney and his crew are off again to the freedom of the ocean.

Nightbeat ran from 1950-1952 on NBC and the show Schmid played on this date was "The Bug Murders", broadcast on Sept. 25, 1952, directed by Warren Lewis and written by the prolific Cathleen Hite.  Frank Lovejoy plays a Chicago reporter covering the night shift and solves a series of murders that turn out to be perpetrated by the psychologist who had volunteered at the newspaper to help solve them. It is a show full of the sounds of the city and the people of the night.

Escape ran from 1947 to 1954 on CBS and this night's episode came near the end, "The Eye of Evil" from July 17, 1954.  The reliable John Dehner plays a man who goes to Burma to find a friend, the plot being quite similar to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The show was written by Hite and directed by Norman Macdonnel, and effectively captures the disorientation an American would feel in a Burmese jungle.

Gunsmoke ran on radio from 1952-1961, on CBS, and the star, William Conrad, was always bitter that the TV version replaced him with James Arness (some may remember that Conrad was a bit portly).  Gunsmoke was one of the first "adult Westerns," with its gritty realisn, and Schmid played the episode "Nelly Sitden", from May 1,1960, where Sheriff Matt Dillon gets injured by Indians and is taken in by an elderly woman, who had been around for many years and was friends with the Indians.  Cathleen Hite wrote the script and Norman Mcdonnel directed.

Up to this point there has been very little written on the aesthetics and auteurs of radio, a medium that had only begun to reach its artistic peak when it was eclipsed by television, where one did not need one's imagination so much (three of the four shows mentioned above did not take place in contemporary America).  If you are interested in learning more about radio you can listen to Schmid's show every week on WBAI and read John Dunning's excellent On the Air:  The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford University Press, 1998).  There are many shows that survive and they are readily available on the internet, some of them free and some quite inexpensively on MP3 disks.