Radio: The Coliseum of Nostalgia

By Stefan Kanfer

The radio listener saw nothing: he had to use his imagination. It was possible for each individual to enjoy the same program according to his intellectual level and his mental capacity. With the high cost of living and the many problems facing him in the modern world, all the poor man had left was his imagination. Television has taken that away from him.

--Fred Allen

Radio. To a generation raised on the Top 40 and all-news formats, the word means little more than an appliance for interrupting silence. But to anyone over 35, it connotes a vast and magic theater of sound, a great coliseum of trivia and nostalgia. That coliseum will be opened to visitors this month when radio takes a giant step backward. The new CBS Radio Mystery Theater will broadcast an original drama every night of the week --including Sundays. The plays take full advantage of aural illusions and allow listeners to collaborate as they did in a vanished era.

Nothing was impossible on oldtime radio. The endomorphic William Conrad (TV's Cannon) could have been the lean, rangy Marshal Dillon of Gunsmoke. Midgets walked the earth in those days--voicing the roles of children. Babies were enacted by women who specialized in gurgling noises. Fire was a sound-effects man crinkling cellophane; thunder was a copper sheet vigorously shaken; rain was birdseed falling on paper; a galloping horse was two coconut shells rhythmically handled.

But alchemy operated on the air waves. Sound effects entered the ear; a world rose in the mind, full of actors and sets to rival the most elaborate constructions of C.B. DeMille. It is doubtful if anything since the soothsayer at the campfire so gripped the collective human consciousness. It was no accident that ancient radios were often shaped like cathedrals. Listeners gathered round them with a concentration that bordered on worship. (In accordance with the nostalgia revival, those Gothic appliances are being remade, but now they are composed of plastic and run on transistors.) Oldtime daytime broadcasts were principally devoted to the knitted brow and the purling organ of soap operas. Our Gal Sunday asked the question: "Can this girl from a mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?" Answer: No--five afternoons a week. Backstage Wife followed the fortunes of an unassuming lady, Mary Noble, married to a matinee idol--a situation so potent that Bob and Ray's parasitic satire, Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife, has outlived its host.

Stella Dallas, Ma Perkins, John's Other Wife and scores of others were devoted to the most reliable ingredient in theatrical history: domestic crisis. None achieved the longevity of One Man's Family, a series of almost Biblical length; its 3,256th and terminal episode was labeled Chapter 30 of Book 134. Contemporary TV soaps like As the World Turns and The Secret Storm are lineal descendants of the old radio shows. The pauses are still pregnant--but so are the new heroines. And much of the subject matter deserves an R rating. There were no married priests and no abortions in the afternoons of yore.

The peculiar period between after school and prime time was known in radio as no man's land. It thus became every child's territory. An ominous waltz introduced I Love a Mystery, featuring Jack, Doc and Reggie, proprietors of the A-1 Detective Agency--"No job too tough, no mystery too baffling." Superman was brought on with the sound of the bullet he could outspeed and of the locomotive he could overpower. Terry and the Pirates, Buck Rogers and Little Orphan Annie were liberated from the frozen postures of the comic strip. Captain Midnight; Tom Mix; Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, among others, became the aural equivalents of the dime novel and the magazine serial.

It was in the evening that radio attained its greatest cultural influence. Millions of children received their first exposure to classical music when they heard the background to The FBI in Peace and War (Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges), or to The Lone Ranger (Rossini's William Tell Overture, Liszt's Les Preludes), or to The Green Hornet (Rimski-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee). The Hornet and the Ranger were creations of Fran Striker and George W. Trendle, who furnished them both with similar appurtenances. The Masked Rider of the Plains had a faithful Indian companion, Tonto, and a 200-carpower horse, Silver. The Green Hornet had a faithful Japanese valet, Kato (during World War II Kato abruptly became a Filipino), and a supercar with the name of a horse, Black Beauty. The supernatural thrived in a Poe-like atmosphere on Inner Sanctum and Lights Out --programs that featured echo chambers, creaking doors and the indelible clack of skeletons rising from granite tombs. Dashiell Hammett's detectives, Sam Spade, The Thin Man and The Fat Man, gave audiences a private eye and earful; other ops--Philip Marlowe, Philo Vance and Martin Kane--were even more hardboiled. Ben Hecht himself could not glamorize the press as well as oldtime radio. Britt Reid (the true identity of the Green Hornet) was a newspaperman; so, for that matter, was Clark Kent, Superman in mufti. Front Page Farrell had an adventure a day. Big Town recounted the trials of Steve Wilson of the Illustrated Press, a crusader second only to Casey, Crime Photographer.

Evil had no chance against such moral exemplars. The Shadow, who was invisible to malefactors, informed them that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit." Dr. Christian, an M.D. with the deductive powers of Nero Wolfe, announced that "when you've lived as long as I have, you'll find justice always gets the breaks. [PAUSE] Wrongdoing never pays off in the end." Once the criminals were run to earth, Mr. District Attorney would prosecute them to the full extent of the law; there were few defense-attorney heroes in the old days.

It would be a mistake to consider all of these programs classics -- even of nostalgia. Radio drama was never with out deep and regrettable flaws. Homilies passed for wisdom; exposition could be ungainly. Caricature and stereotypes were the order of the broadcasting day, from Tonto's "Kemo Sabe" to the caricature of black servants on almost every soap opera. Still, radio drama, like its heroes, tended to be greater than any of its faults. If it was naive, it was no more than the reflection of a simpler epoch. If it was repetitious, it allowed each listener to color the backgrounds and populate the casts with the agility of a dreamer. (As any oldtime listener can testify, the five senses are not necessarily great collaborators. Film comedy, after all, never achieved the same explosive laughter once sound came in. Conversely, broadcast drama was never as gripping once pictures accompanied the words.)

Is radio drama in for a resurgence? That seems no more likely than the comeback of silent two-reelers. All that can reasonably be expected now is a brief eavesdropping on the past -- an opportunity to employ the long-rusted faculty of imagination.

A great many stage and film actors used to stimulate that faculty, among them Jeff Chandler, Van Heflin, Richard Widmark, Agnes Moorehead and E.G. Marshall. To many performers, ra dio drama remains more than a warm memory. Moorehead and Marshall, for example, are returning to CBS Radio Mystery Theater at far less than their customary salaries. "There is a place for the spoken word in our lives," Marshall insists. "Just think of how much fun it will be to turn off the lights at home, rest your eyes and get involved, using your mind instead of just sharing."

The notion is too appealing to ignore. A generation ago, a crusty radio character named Titus Moody told the world that he refused to own a radio because "I don't hold with furniture that talks." Like many other items of the '40s, that furniture and that talk have assumed the burnished quality of rare and precious antiques.

.Stefan Kanfer

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