I took the day off on Friday and went to the movies. This isn’t something I do often, but I was feeling really tired after teaching for eight days in a row. I mean, actually teaching, not the usual babysitting duty I perform as a retired teacher substituting. Going to the movies by myself isn’t a new activity for me. It’s something I did all through the 1990s, when I was working in Gary, Indiana. In the summer of 1996, I lived in Michigan City, Indiana. I had nothing to do in the afternoon after summer school got out, so I spent my time in the dollar movie theater. I would go to two, sometimes three movies a day until I had seen virtually every movie the theater was showing. I would buy however many tickets I needed and take advantage of their free refills on soda and popcorn and have a great old time for about 10 bucks. One of the best movies I saw that summer was That Thing You Do!, a wonderful movie directed by Tom Hanks. To this day, it remains one of my favorites.
I was much younger then, all of 31 years old. I’d hardly see anyone at the theater until late afternoon. Sometimes, I’d be sitting in the theater by myself, which I did not mind. Tom Hanks, who also played a supporting role in the movie, looked young too. That was not the case for either of us when I went to see A Man Called Otto. Who goes to the movies at 12:45 PM? Old people. You know, like me? And like Tom Hanks, who plays recent retiree Otto Anderson, a widower whose disposition is, shall we say, grumpy…also, like me. I loved the movie and its message. I walked out of the theater fully entertained and satisfied, something I haven’t been able to say very many times over the past several years of moviegoing.
Then last night, I watched A Man Called Ove on Amazon Prime. It was the film that A Man Called Otto was based on. Of course, both of those movies were based on a book by Fredrik Backman. Ove and Otto both follow the retirement of the widowered protagonist, who is embittered by the circumstances of his life. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but his becoming a curmudgeon is somewhat earned. He has had a rough time of it, especially since the passing of his wife, and that story unfolds throughout both movies. He’s reached the point where he wants to join his wife in death and contemplates suicide, but not without making almost everyone around him miserable first, and for a long time. His suicide is put off by forced interactions with his new neighbors, a young couple with two children, with whom Otto/Ove feels uncomfortable at first. Despite his interminable crankiness, he softens somewhat when he’s around them, and their mother, only to have the crusty veneer drop back down again when he returns home. Spoiler alert: Ove/Otto eventually finds new joy in life.
This movie hit me where I live. I’m not contemplating suicide, but I have been struggling to find my place in the world as a retiree, and as anyone who knows me would tell you, I am slow to change. It’s taken me some time to find out who I am, now that my identity is not 90% defined as being a teacher. Otto/Ove’s time in the cemetery, talking to his wife, also brought to mind the mortality that I’ve been thinking about lately. Death took two of my friends in late 2022, both unexpectedly, one only a year and a half older than I, the other younger than I am. It’s hard watching the people you’ve known for decades pass before you. It’s also hard watching people who’ve entertained you for decades passing before you.
For a while, there was a local radio station that I would listen to, called The Stream, when I wasn’t in the middle of a podcast, that played music from the 70s and 80s. And I would spend my short, eight-minute commute playing “Dead or Alive,” identifying the artist of each song as either dead or alive. And on some days, all three or four artists would be dead. It was shocking at times, how many of my contemporaries in that business were gone. There go George Michael, Robert Palmer, and Laura Branigan, all dead. That’s depressing. Now that station plays 80s and 90s music and has rebranded itself The Throwback. You would think it would get better, but no. Here comes The Beastie Boys, Stone Temple Pilots, and Nirvana. Well, crap. Yes, only one of the Beastie Boys is dead, but still. So, what are you to do, watching the world that you’ve known, begin to crumble and die off?
Yesterday, I found a box of my old Magic the Gathering cards in my daughter’s old room, which I’m cleaning out to make a new office. I sold off the good cards in my considerable collection years ago. This was just a box of the most common cards, land cards. Mountains, Swamps, Islands, Forests, and Plains. There were a couple of worthless generic cards in the box, too. Nothing to write home about, or so I thought. As it turns out, even the formerly worthless land cards from the first sets can be valuable. There was one particular land card that I had four of that were worth $25 each! What the heck? And the one “rare” card in the box that no one cared about 30 years ago, Nevinyrral’s Disk, from the Unlimited set, was worth $236! I traded the entire box of cards that I didn’t care about at our local game store for a video game console, and once I got the console home, much to my wife’s amusement, I spent the better part of an hour playing Gauntlet. When Gauntlet came out in 1985, I was a college student, dependent on scholarships, grants, and loans to pay for school. My parents contributed nothing to my education beyond high school. My dad even made me pay a share of the rent if I returned home in the summer. So I spent four years as a pauper and was only able to enjoy video games on rare occasions. That hour I spent playing Gauntlet yesterday was an hour spent with a smile on my face. A few weeks ago, I got a Star Wars console game, and each day I spend about a half hour playing all I want. I understand the idea of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) that goes around these days. I understand it all too well because I felt it 40 years ago. The difference is that now, I have the time and resources to do and experience the things I missed out on. I have the time to create, to write, to draw, to read, and to play.
I’m grateful to be able to write about my experiences here on the blog, and I’m going to continue sharing all the things I’ve done and haven’t had time or money to fully develop. Because now I have both, for however long I have left.
“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.
