A 14 minute track of an excerpt from a CBS Big Band broadcast on July 4, 1948... featuring The Band of Renown of Les Brown. Recorded when the latest craze of "Bop" music was at its peak... this features three songs related to that genre of music. Les Brown was known for his 50 year association with Bob Hope, his service to his country through performances of the USO... and for adapting his music as the music in the culture evolved.

Open the squeaking door and walk into the Inner Sanctum where Boris Karloff will star in "The Wailing Wall". The host of Inner Sanctum is played by Paul McGrath. The show originally aired on 11.6.45. This series was on the air from 1941-51 producing 526 episodes! A great show to exercise your imagination... try listening to it with your lights out... unless you are driving of course! Thanks for listening.

Brought to listeners by Molle' Shaving Cream... this network show brought together an excellent group of "radio row" actors with some major stars and writers to produce some very high quality work during the approximately 12 year run beginning in 1948. The show centers around the character Geoffrey Barnes, a crime fiction expert and connoisseur who served as host. Bernard Lenrow (photo) played Barnes. Actors like Ann Seymour, Raymond Edward Johnson, Peter Lorre, Richard WIdmark, Budd Collyer, Martin Gable, and Mandel Kramer helped make this show a very classy Mystery anthology series. This track is an Armed Forces Radio Service broadcast that features Peter Lorre as the narrator... the AFRS took some of the best of the network shows and broadcast them to our troops overseas. Enjoy "Nightmare" and thanks for listening!

NBC University Theater (also known by several other variations of this) was a radio series directed by Homer Heck that presented adaptations of classic novels. The series began in Chicago on WMAW an NBC affiliate... and ran from 1944-48. The broadcast then moved to Hollywood. The Chicago-based programs were unique in that the University of Louisville, University of Tulsa, Kansas State Teachers College, and Washington State College offered listeners college credit through associated literature correspondence course. Once in Hollywood the NBC changed the format to include adaptations of short stories and plays as well as novels. The NBC series won a Peabody Award and was considered one of the most distinguished radio programs of its day. Fortunately all the episodes still survive. The series ended in February of 1951. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was produced in 1947.

A popular comedy-variety program that ran from 1943-55 on CBS and later NBC. Got her start on the Rudy Vallee show a guest in 1931. She was a professionally trained singer, but played the part of a love-starved Ozark bumpkin. Great cast: Mel Blanc, Ruby Dandridge, Joseph Kearns, Sharon Douglas, Gale Gordon, Sheldon Leonard, Gerald Mohr and Hans Conried. During WW II she closed her show with a song "Goodnight Soldier" ("Wherever you may be...my heart's lonely...without you")

Vincent Price plays Simon Templar better known as "The Saint". He was a swashbuckling, devil-may-care Robin Hood type who, in his attempt to help clients, often kept just one step in front of the police and crooks... both of whom he opposed!. The character was created by author Leslie Charteris and has been made known to millions from books, magazines, and motion pictures. Show started on radio in 1945 and ended in 1951 with Price the most convincing and successful of the actors who played Simon Templar.

What makes this track particularly entertaining and interesting is that it is one of the very first musical broadcasts that featured swing music... back in 1937. The announcer, Don Wilson, even makes a point of introducing the fact that the show is unique as it is about to present a new form of music... and he goes into a brief explanation of what "swing music" is and how it differs from the traditional radio broadcast featuring an orchestra. It is quite good and the quality is fantastic for being 80 years old!

An Edgar Allan Poe classic... Tell Tale Heart... For a man who lived only 40 years (1809-1849) and certainly had his physical and emotional problems... he created some of the most incredible stories and poetry in American history. Boris Karloff stars in this Poe favorite story of a man who has super sensitive hearing... who kills a blind man...at least he thinks he did... but he can still hear the heart beating from underneath the bedroom floor boards where he "buried" the body. The Tell Tale Heart... Happy Halloween!

First heard as a summer replacement for the Abbott and Costello show in 1945... Mystery in the Air began as a crime series about a Detective Stonewall Scott... but in 1947 it switched genres to become a horror series of psychological and supernatural tales featuring the incredible character actor, Peter Lorre. The Black Cat is another show from that series which is on Heirloom Radio. Harry Morgan of Dragnet fame is the announcer. Lorre was the weekly narrator and often the raging psychopath! It is said the Lorre got so involved in the character he was portraying that he would end the half hour sweat-drenched and exhausted. According to historian John Dunning, only 8 shows from this series are known to have survived... this is one of them. Enjoy... and Happy Halloween!

The Hall of Fantasy was a radio anthology program that focused on murder mysteries (good vs evil). It originally aired from KALL studios in Salt Lake CIty, UT. in the late 1940's. The announcers were RIchard Thorne and Carl Greyson. Though they dropped the series in 1947 they were reunited at WGN in Chicago in 1949. They started the series up again, but this time focused on man's unfortunate encounters with the supernatural. The series went nationwide in August of 1952 on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" was perfect for the series and this is a very good adaptation of the work to a radio audience in 1953. There are about 112 episodes that still survive.