“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty, ‘Hi-Yo Silver!’ The Lone Ranger!”
Bam! Bam! Bam! Gunshots ring out.
“With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early Western United States. Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion of justice. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!”
Now, imagine you’re a child in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. There’s no such thing as television, your family can’t afford to go to the movies, and your only source of information is the cathedral-style radio that takes a place of honor in your living room. The words written above activated the imagination of boys and girls all over the country, as they preceded each episode of the Lone Ranger, starting on station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan.
I first heard those words when I was around nine years old in 1974, at my Uncle Mike’s house, listening to the very first episode of The Lone Ranger on his reel-to-reel tape machine. I had watched The Lone Ranger TV show with my dad when I was younger, but I’d never heard of a radio drama before. I listened intently, enthralled with the voices and sound effects, and I could almost see the drama unfold in my mind.
When the Lone Ranger was over, he played “The War of the Worlds,” the famous radio broadcast produced by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds played out like it was an actual alien invasion being reported on the radio. And that was all it took. I was hooked for life. I hoped that someday I could get ahold of recordings like that for myself.
Though we didn’t have the Internet back then, I kept my eye out for any reference to radio shows. And sure enough, on the back of of box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, I saw it.
Superman Radio Show ad from Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
There was a SUPERMAN radio show?? I could hardly believe my eyes. How had I not known of this? Looking back, of course, it’s easy to know why. We didn’t have the Internet, and how else would the topic even come up? Not in conversation around my house, that’s for sure. But I wanted to know what the Superman radio show was like. There was no way I was ever going to get any of the records. $1.50 might as well have been a million dollars to me back then, and I knew my stepfather wouldn’t allow it anyway.
As I got older, I found out more about Old-Time Radio, or OTR. There were dozens of shows, thousands and thousands of episodes of radio drama, comedy, news, and more. Occasionally, I would run across a tape of them and I would buy them whenever I saw them. The Shadow was one of the more common and easily obtained shows. I was familiar with The Shadow because he had teamed up with Batman once in the comics, but the Shadow of OTR was an entirely different character.
Batman #259, guest-starring The Shadow
The Shadow of OTR was dressed normally, one would presume, as he went about town as Lamont Cranston, turning invisible when he became The Shadow. He didn’t carry a gun normally, although there were times when he would resort to using a pistol. He certainly never ran around with a pair of .45 automatics. But getting past all that, The Shadow on radio was simply a treat. The whole idea of a character who turns invisible is pretty easy to convey when you can’t see the hero at all!
Then there were those great Power Records, which combined a large format comic book with an audio drama. Remember those? Featured here is a Star Trek book and record set that I used to have with cover art by Neal Adams. I used to get these whenever I could, especially when they came out with one for the Six Million Dollar Man. There’s a guy who has a whole blog about just these items!
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I really got a healthy dose of radio drama. That was when our local NPR station started broadcasting the Star Wars radio show. What’s that? You didn’t know there was such a thing? Oh, yes. I hurried home each night to listen to it on radio in 1981. It took the Star Wars story and expanded it, filling in gaps where the movie had been edited. There was the usual clumsy expository dialogue that radio has to use to paint the images in your mind, but it used the original sound effects and some actors from the movie, including Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels. The actors who replaced the originals were no slouches, either. Brock Peters took the place of James Earl Jones, for example. You’d be surprised how good it really was, especially since they used John Williams’s Oscar-winning score.
My interest in old-time radio and radio dramas waned in my college years. There just wasn’t anything going on in my world. But when the Batman craze of 1989 came along, a couple of different items came to my attention and sparked my imagination. First, there were some cassette tapes adapting comic book stories that came out. The associated comic books came with them, and the tapes served to add an audio soundtrack. The first one I bought was an adaptation of the Untold Legends of the Batman. It was like the old Power Records, but there was no album cover.
As the next decade progressed, DC, Marvel, and even Disney kept putting out audio dramas. Stories like “Superman Lives!” as well as the “Complete Knightfall Saga,” along with the Rocketeer were all adapted to audio dramas. Later on, we would even see one for “Kingdom Come.” But the real fun came in 1994, when the theatrical version of “The Shadow” was released.
When the Alec Baldwin movie came out, the radio shows made a huge comeback. A company called Radio Spirits started releasing audio cassettes and CDs of the old radio shows and I bought several sets of them. Then with the advent of the mp3 file format and the Internet, old-time radio was everywhere. Streaming sites popped up, and suddenly the world of old-time radio was no longer restricted to small gatherings with tape exchanges. Suddenly you could buy hundreds of episodes of long-forgotten shows on CD for pennies and listen to them on a computer.
I finally got to hear Superman on radio, and I was not disappointed. It quickly became my favorite radio show. The episodes were short, but in its heyday, it was on five days a week! I can only imagine what it would have been like to run home after school to catch the latest episode. Superman didn’t go up against the menagerie of villains from his comic book, but often the bad guys were gangsters, racketeers, and kidnappers. My favorite episodes, though, were the ones where he went up against racists and fascists, like the Knights of the White Carnation or the Clan of the Fiery Cross. It was quite progressive, especially for the 1940s. The only drawback to listening to old Superman shows is my inability to try Kellogg’s PEP cereal. “P-E-P! The sunshine cereal!” I wonder what it tasted like.
When the deluge of OTR programs began, I started doing research on this. My limited exposure to War of the Worlds, the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, and Superman, suddenly expanded. I started listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, The Saint, The Whistler, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, Gunsmoke, The Green Hornet, and more. I found books on the subject, and read the history. The more I learned, the more I loved it. I started making connections
One of Jack Benny’s supporting cast was lecherous bandleader Phil Harris, a bawdy southerner who constantly kept Benny, whom he called “Jackson,” on his toes. The first time I heard the voice, I just about jumped out of my chair. It was Baloo the Bear from Disney’s “The Jungle Book!” Not only was the voice the same, but the character was very much the same, a jazzy, hedonistic fun-loving guy who could sing scat. Amazing! Then, when listening to another episode, the unmistakable tones of Mel Blanc appeared in a voice similar to Speedy Gonzales. Then it hit me. The mice in “The Mouse that Jack Built,” a 1959 Warner Brothers cartoon, were the characters from this same Jack Benny radio program! When I saw the cartoon as a kid, I had no idea that Jack Benny was a radio star!
On the Fred Allen show, I caught Foghorn Leghorn in the form of Senator Claghorn. Then the floodgates came open. Many cartoons, whether on television or feature films, featured radio performers of old, many doing the same characters or voices that they were famous for decades before. Even “The New Adventures of Superman,” the 1966 Filmation cartoon, starred Clayton “Bud” Collyer as Superman, with Joan Alexander as Lois Lane. Narrator Jackson Beck, whose voice I know you would recognize, since he was active in voice acting for an incredible 73 years, was brought back to narrate Superman.
It wasn’t only voices and characters that were brought back for cartoons. When Mr. Whoopee’s closet would open on Tennessee Tuxedo and everything would fall out, I thought it was hilarious. Imagine my surprise when I was listening to Fibber McGee and Molly from decades before and heard the same thing happen!
Just a few years ago, I was rummaging through stuff in my basement and found cassette recordings of a role-playing game session from 1988. As I thought more about it, I realized just what we were doing. The gamemaster describes the action and plays the part of the characters not portrayed by the players. The players describe their action verbally and act out their characters’ roles, often using voices not their own. We’re not dressing up and acting things out (like LARPers do), but we are doing radio drama. There are a few static images and figures on a map to keep track of where everyone is, but otherwise everything is done by voice and description. They called radio “The Theater of the Mind.” I think it’s still alive and well. It’s just taken a new form.
But if you’re just interested in pure radio, it’s more popular now than it has been since the Golden Age of Radio. With the popularity of podcasts (radio, if you think about it), there are some that talk exclusively about OTR. It’s on Spotify; it’s even on YouTube. Old-Time Radio is everywhere!
Update, 1/25/2023:
I grabbed all four of the Superman radio records on Ebay for $21!
With my newfound wealth, I was able to buy Justice League of America #143 at its new price of sixty cents, but then the money started burning a hole in my pocket the next Sunday after church, even with no new issue of JLA to buy. First, I had to buy some BBs. I had received a Daisy BB gun for Christmas from my mother, and an ample supply of BBs to last quite a while. Fortunately, the same general store that carried my comic books also had tubes of ammunition. At 50 cents each, that gave me an alternative when there were no comics I wanted.
I had taken hunter safety in sixth grade, and already knew how to handle actual firearms safely, so a BB gun was good practice for me, even though I had fired real guns by this time already.
When I wasn’t out shooting up the woods with BBs, I was still reading and drawing all the time. And now that I wasn’t restricted in enjoying superheroes, I started making up my own characters, and even combining superheroes with Star Trek-like ships that I created. After all, the Legion of Super-Heroes had their own cruiser that looked like a cross between the Enterprise and a Klingon ship. It clearly borrowed quite a bit from Star Trek.
The Legion Cruiser
When the next Sunday came along and I still had money to burn, I did something that was near-unthinkable. I spent a dollar on a comic book. A whole dollar! It was crazy, but the Neal Adams cover beckoned to me.
World’s Finest #245
Batman and Superman fighting Martians? Eighty pages? I had to have it! I hadn’t seen stories with the Martian Manhunter since I was a little boy, reading Justice League of America. This is why covers are so important. They sell comic books! Sadly, the interior art left me a little cold. There’s nothing wrong at all about Curt Swan’s art. Nothing at all. But he wasn’t Neal Adams. However, there was a logo for the Martian Manhunter which I thought was one of the coolest logos I’d ever seen.
That wasn’t the story that caught my attention the most, though. That was the Black Canary story later in the book. My 12-year-old eyes were drawn immediately to the circular panel.
I think this was the first time I had ever really considered a woman taking her clothes off, let alone a woman superhero, and it made me feel strange. I couldn’t name the feeling or describe it in words at that time, so I just tried to shrug it off and finish reading the comic. But for some reason, I kept coming back that page to stare at it. How many people can name the day when puberty first hit them hard? For me, it was Sunday, March 20, 1977.
On Sunday, January 30, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries premiered on TV. I could not wait for this show!
Reading was incredibly important to me during the abuse years. I had read every Hardy Boys book in the library of whichever elementary school I was attending, and it was my intention to read every last one of them. Yes, they were formulaic. Yes, they slightly unrealistic. Two teenage boys who not only had their own car, but owned their own speedboat (the Sleuth)? Talk about fantasy for a young boy! But read them I did. If we were going on a car trip with hours worth of driving, I always maxed out my library borrowing with two Hardy Boys books that I hadn’t read yet. And my backup book was the 1974 Guinness Book of World Records, which was one of my most prized possessions. It clocked in at 672 pages, and I didn’t have to worry if I stopped in the middle of reading it. I wasn’t going to lose the plot.
But here we were, seeing the Hardy Boys on TV? Wow! The first thing I remember is their hair. Parker Stevenson played dark-haired Frank, and pop star Shaun Cassidy played blond-haired Joe, the younger brother. But something was wrong. These boys had long, feathered hair.
Joe Hardy (Shaun Cassidy) and Frank Hardy (Parker Stevenson)
The Frank and Joe I knew didn’t have long hair like hippies! They were all-American boys!
Suddenly, I realized I sounded just like my stepfather, Steve. He had a firm rule about my hair. It was not allowed to touch the top of my ears. Keep in mind, this was the seventies. Are you kidding? My hair was kept shorter than Archie Bunker’s; shorter than Hawkeye Pierce’s; shorter than Barney Miller’s! That put a little seed into my brain that I thought I would try to sow later. I was going to ask my dad if I could grow my hair longer, so that it touched my ears. I felt like a conspirator.
When he said yes, I thought I was getting away with murder. I started asking for more crazy stuff. I asked if I could wear blue jeans and tennis shoes to school. He looked at me like my head had spun all the way around. “Of course you can!” I couldn’t take these things for granted, because previously, I had had to wear slacks and dress shoes. Tennis shoes were for gym class only, I can’t tell you how much fun it was wearing hand-me-down platform shoes out at recess.
The next day of school, Monday, January 31, I walked in like I owned the place. I had the 1977 equivalent of swag, with my informal pants and shoes. And I could almost feel my hair growing out already, and it was all thanks to Frank and Joe.
With winter coming to an end in Northern Michigan, all sorts of nature came back to life, including porcupines. I had never seen a porcupine before, but my dog, Ladybug, met one in the woods beside the house one evening. They had a disagreement that left over 100 porcupine quills in her mouth and nose. True to his word, my dad made me responsible for the care of my dog. He gave me a pair of needle nose pliers and showed me how to remove the quills, pulling them from as close to her skin as possible. I wasn’t prepared for the whimpering mess Ladybug became.
As I pulled my first quill, she tried to shake away from me, crying out. And on it went, for over two hours. I had to hold her head tight, wrapped partially in a towel, over and over again. Fortunately it was a Saturday night. She was bleeding from each hole that the pulled quills left behind, and I would have to occasionally stop to clean her up. I think I cried as much as she did, but I swear she looked at me with gratitude when they were all gone. I gave her ice cubes to try to curb the pain, but she wouldn’t have any of that, so I took her outside where she could eat snow. And she did.
Astonishingly, on Sunday morning, she practically acted like nothing had ever happened. I was grateful that it was going to be a normal Sunday, because I knew there was going to be a comic book waiting for me at the store in a few hours. After church, though, I had quite a shock. The price of Justice League of America had risen from 50 cents to 60 cents! Fortunately, I was still rich from raising money for the library book that I didn’t have to pay for. But this was not going to go well in the future. I would have to save an extra dime for the week when Justice League of America was going to hit the stands.
Justice League of America #143
The cover of JLA #143 was shocking. Wonder Woman hitting Superman? What could be behind this? It was true that Wonder Woman had been acting a little hostile toward Flash and Green Arrow two months previous, but hitting Superman? Why? As the story began, I felt uncomfortable. I was not used to my heroes disagreeing, let alone, arguing strongly enough that one of them would leave the team. I know Marvel comics did that a lot, but not DC comics. They were the Super Friends, after all, as seen on TV! By the time the issue was over, it was revealed that The Construct, the villain from the previous issue that had been vanquished by The Atom, was behind controlling a whole slew of characters, including Wonder Woman and several supervillains. And by the end of the issue, in true DC style, the status quo was restored, and Wonder Woman was back in the Justice League.
I was a big fan of status quo back then. It provided comfort and stability when I needed it.
The other McClain family Christmas tradition besides the McDonald’s gift certificates was the LifeSavers Sweet Storybook. It was a thrill to open one of those every year. We weren’t often allowed to have candy of any kind in my mother’s and stepfather’s house, so the expectation was that we would have the whole storybook gone by the time we left from our dad’s and grandparents’ houses.
The current version of the storybook
Currently, the LifeSavers Sweet Storybook contains six rolls of the 5 Flavor assortment. So boring. But back in the 1970s, The LifeSavers Sweet Storybook contained TEN rolls of LifeSavers of various flavors. When you opened it up, it held five rolls of LifeSavers on each side! And you would get not only two 5 Flavors rolls, but Wild Cherry, Butter Rum, Tangerine, Spear-O-Mint, Pep-O-Mint, Orange, Root Beer, and Tropical Fruit! It felt scandalous to be carrying more candy in my pocket than I would eat the entire rest of the year.
When I sat down to write this little memory, I did a little digging and found out that LifeSavers Sweet Storybook dates all the way back to 1935 (when they packed 12 rolls!) and have been a Christmas tradition ever since. Having seen a couple of images, I kind of want to try Clove-flavored LifeSavers, as well as Molas O Mint.
When my wife and I got married over 22 years ago, she asked me if I had any Christmas traditions. She had already shared hers with me, but I had never really wanted to share most of my family stories at first, because, well, there’s always a dark side. This one is no exception, but as I always add as a disclaimer, I promise that the story comes out all right in the end! And that leads me to one of my favorite McClain family Christmas traditions:
For most of the five years that my parents were divorced and before I went to live with my dad, we lived at least two and a half hours apart, if not four hours away from him. This led to fewer visitations than my dad was allowed. He was allowed to have us for one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer, and one week at Christmas. Because of poor choices on his part, he could rarely afford to make the 150-mile drive. Neither would my mother meet him halfway. So, my Grandma and Grandpa McClain stepped in one time in 1973, and drove all the way down to pick us up.
On the way back north to Mesick, we were driving through Big Rapids, Michigan, back when US 131 was fairly new and went straight through the heart of that town. And Grandma and Grandpa had been on the road for almost four hours by that point. So, we stopped at McDonald’s to eat. We went inside, and Grandpa McClain asked me a question I’d never been asked before: “What do you want?”
I stood there, dumbfounded. I honestly didn’t know what to say. Whenever we went somewhere with my mom and her husband, and had no choice but to eat on the road, I was given a hamburger Happy Meal, and my brother and half-sister, who were six and seven years younger than I was, would split their own Happy Meal. That’s not enough to eat for a nine-year-old, you say? I would have agreed with you. So, I stammered, “Um, I always get a Happy Meal.” My grandpa looked me dead in the eye and said, “I didn’t ask you what you always get. I asked you what you want.”
This was the most pressure I had faced up until that point in my life. I knew exactly what I wanted: Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun! Some of you are now singing it to yourselves. Others have no clue what I’m talking about. The Big Mac had recently experienced a very popular ad campaign simply laying out its ingredients in a catchy tune. I had wanted to try one for over a year but knew there was no chance. And now there was.
I said, “Could I try a Big Mac, please?” My grandpa ordered it immediately.
“What size fries do you want?” Oh, my gosh. I thought I was going to die.
“L-large?” He ordered it.
“What do you want to drink?”
“I’ve always wanted to try a vanilla shake like my mom orders.” And I got one. And it was glorious.
My brother got a full Happy Meal to himself (he was only three) and we sat down to enjoy this fanciful feast of fast food. I was in heaven. I ate everything in front of me and made slurping sounds as the last of the vanilla shake was vacuumed from the bottom of my cup. Then, the other shoe fell.
“Do you want anything more?” Wow, I thought, here’s where I go for broke.
“I’ve heard about this new burger, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Could I try that?” I never heard my grandpa roar as loudly as that before that day, and I never did again. I thought he was going to double over laughing. He brought me back a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and I ate all of that too.
“Ma, this kid has a hollow leg just like his father did.” Grandma readily agreed with him, smiled, and winked at me. What a great trip that was!
I assume that Grandma and Grandpa later told my dad that story, because for every Christmas after that, my brother and I received a book of TEN 50-cent McDonald’s gift certificates in our stockings so that we could order whatever we wanted when we went to McDonald’s. Do you have any idea how much food $5.00 could buy in 1974-75?
By now, if you read my stories with any regularity, you know what to expect. Here it comes.
We had thought we were going to eat like kings, but my mother simply took the gift certificates away from us and whenever we stopped at McDonald’s, she used them to buy us our usual. A hamburger Happy Meal for me, and my brother and sister would split one. Even when I went on a school field trip where we were required to bring money for McDonad’s, I was only given enough gift certificates to buy a Happy Meal; two gift certificates, totalling $1.00. I explained one time why my dad had given them to us, but all that earned me was a good hard slap in the face.
It didn’t matter, though. Literally, it was the thought that counted. I knew there was someone who loved me. Those little gestures, those small glimmers of hope, sustained me until the day I was able to leave that household in January 1977. And that’s why to this day, Magi puts a McDonald’s gift card in my stocking; They don’t make gift certificates anymore, but even though my dad and grandparents are all gone, I still know there’s someone who loves me.
My annual McDonald’s gift card, which was in my stocking this morning!
