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Ink By The Barrel: Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men?

The Shadow did. And the convention dedicated to preserving his and other old-radio adventures is ending. But you can still hear lots of these great shows on the web.

In a hotel near Newark airport, set between railroad tracks and spaghetti-piles of New Jersey highway, the Friends of Old-Time Radio will sit in meeting rooms for the last time this weekend, asking and answering the question, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” The friends will no longer meet after their 36th convention, reports David Hinckley in the Daily News. They will go as silent as the medium they love.

Old radio fans celebrate the days when radio was television, and fllled the airwaves with crime shows, dramas, comedies, variety and news of a great war and the massive changes that followed. If you’ve ever heard of “The Shadow” or “Dragnet” or Jack Benny or Edward R. Murrow or a dummy named Charlie McCarthy, you’ve heard of the programs and the stars of the Golden Age of Radio. The radio you listen to now, the tunes and talk, is what we were left with once television took over the world.

The problem for the Friends of Old-Time Radio is they’re losing all their friends. In fact, they're dying. Few of the stars of the old shows are left to attend the convention, and the fans who heard these shows when they originally aired are getting long in the tooth. Norman Corwin is a good example. He died at age 101 on Tuesday. You haven’t heard of him, but he was the impresario of the radio age, its Spielberg and DeMille, and while he went on to write books, plays and movies, radio was his medium. His masterpiece, “On a Note of Triumph,” a massive drama that marked the end of World War II in Europe, was heard by 60 million people on V-E day.

This all begs the question, does it matter if a medium dies? Should you care about old-radio shows, or silent movies, or even daytime soap operas? To me, if the stories are great, and how they are told makes them different, special even, then they’re worth saving, and more importantly, experiencing. People still watch silent films, black and white and jittery, because those movies told stories in a unique way that disappeared when sound, and then color, were added to cinema.

I am too young to have lived through the Golden Age of Radio. “Suspense” and “Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar,” the last two dramas, left the air in September 1962. I was two years old. But in high school, I discovered some cassette tapes in a little wooden cabinet in the library. No one I knew was talking about old-time radio, so I thought I’d found a secret world, with stories told using voices, sound effects and organ riffs. I have never forgotten one in particular I heard in 1975, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” a dramatization of Kurt Vonnegut’s first short story. Two scientists fight to keep the military from turning the power of mind control into a weapon. Revolutionary stuff when originally aired in 1950. I can still hear the main character rolling dice at the end of the episode.

The good news signaled by the Friends of Old-Time Radio ending their conventions is that all the shows are now available everywhere, courtesy of the Internet, everywhere and free. It used to be the radio stalwarts would go to their meetings to trade reel-to-reel tapes, then cassettes and finally CDs. Lost episodes were searched out and duplicated. Now, go to the Internet Archive’s Old Time Radio collection and you can play or download thousands of shows for free, the copyrights long since expired. Other sites also offer all kinds of free programs, made possible by the dedicated folks who set out to preserve a medium that disappeared. There is also Sirius XM and web radio networks that broadcast shows 24/7.

The programs are great to put on an iPod for listening on walks, or long drives. I never tell my ten-year-old that “The Shadow,” “Superman” and “Blue Beetle” are old fashioned anything. So he listens. Spooky shows like “Inner Sanctum” send real chills. “Gunsmoke” tells tales of a gritty, dangerous and dark west in a way the movies wouldn’t try for another 20 years. And “Dragnet” on the radio was the original nuts-and-bolts police procedural, tough and no nonsense.

How good are they? Back when TV was new and radio still held some sway, a little boy was asked which he liked better. “Radio,” he said, “because the pictures are better.”

He was right. Those voices and sound effects fire the imagination, and you live the story, rather than watch it passively, in the same way books, black words on white paper, captivate us. We make the movies in our heads, and they are all the more powerful for it.

Since it’s near Halloween, try “War of the Worlds” if you have to pick just one. The radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’s novel, performed on Halloween eve in 1938, was produced by Orson Welles as if it were a series of news updates and interrupted broadcasts covering a Martian invasion. People freaked. They barred the doors and ran for the hills. It was the first demonstration of the power of a mass medium, and a lasting tribute to radio, where the pictures were better.

Rich Zahradnik blogs at richzahradnik.com.

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