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Spring has come to Beverly Hills, and Jack Benny is out in the backyard in overalls and long white gloves, planting string beans again — last year's crop was so small the bugs were picking them. This time he has a miracle fertilizer. Between Rochester refusing to taste his "mushrooms," Dennis shooting the garden hose he mistook for a snake, and Mary demanding her dime back for the cucumber seeds, Jack dozes off on the sofa and dreams the beans came up after all: a beanstalk through the clouds, a fall broken by the Los Angeles smog, a rabbit who asks "What's up, Doc?", and a giant with a hen that lays golden eggs. From March 28, 1954, with Mary Livingstone, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Dennis Day, Don Wilson, Bob Crosby, and Mel Blanc.

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Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were the fastest, loudest comedy act in America, and their weekly NBC show turned every broadcast into a scheme that got away from them. In this November 1944 outing, Lou's old grade school — P.S. 15 — decides to honor its most famous dropout, and Lou heads back to the classroom to collect the tribute he has been waiting a lifetime for. The ceremony never stands a chance: between the guest of honor's own memory of his school days and baby brother Sebastian turning up with a plan, the whole occasion comes apart at high speed. Classic burlesque crosstalk from the pair who gave the world "Who's on First?"

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For more than twenty years Jack Benny ran the best-loved comedy in American radio, and the joke was always himself: vain, penny-pinching, stuck forever at 39, and hopeless on the violin. In this April 1954 broadcast it is spring-cleaning day at Jack's house. Rochester has the place turned inside out, Dennis Day breezes in to announce he is enlisting, and Jack retreats into a book for some peace and quiet -- which is when the show hands itself over to the story. Jack becomes a distinguished psychiatrist, the patients start filing in, and Mel Blanc arrives as a man who is absolutely certain he is a refrigerator.

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Connie Brooks teaches English at Madison High, dodges her blustering principal, and never quite gets a date with the biology teacher. In this May 1950 broadcast, Mr. Conklin's prized rare black orchid becomes the center of the week's trouble — and Miss Brooks, as always, ends up standing closest to the wreckage. Eve Arden stars with Gale Gordon as Osgood Conklin, Jeff Chandler as Mr. Boynton, and Richard Crenna as Walter Denton.

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Lights Out was radio's premier horror series, and it reached its best-remembered form when writer-director Arch Oboler brought it back to CBS in 1942 — a half hour of dread delivered to a country already living through a war. Oboler used the show as readily for human terror as for the supernatural, and "Execution" is one of his sharpest wartime thrillers. In an occupied French village, a German officer claims a woman fired on him from a darkened window. The reprisal is announced at once: unless she comes forward, fifty women of the village will hang. What follows is a long, airless night of suspicion, silence and terrible arithmetic, as neighbors weigh one life against fifty and wait to see who will speak. No ghosts, no monsters — only what people do to each other under occupation.

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The Adventures of Sam Spade let Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled private eye tell his own stories — every case dictated back at the office to his secretary Effie Perrine, period, new paragraph. In "The Sinister Siren Caper," broadcast March 16, 1951, a badly rattled man turns up in Spade's office with a warning he can't laugh off: his life is in danger from a red-headed woman. Spade takes the job. Stephen Dunne stars as Spade with Lurene Tuttle as Effie, in one of the last capers of the series' final NBC season.

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Quiet, Please was radio's quietest horror show and its strangest — Wyllis Cooper wrote and directed every episode, and Ernest Chappell told them to you in a calm, confiding voice with nothing behind it but an organ and a lot of deliberate silence. In "Whence Came You," an American archaeologist named Austin comes back to Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo and sees a woman in the lobby who is gone before he can cross to her. Out at the dig, a newly opened chamber holds a gold-robed figure with the head of a hawk, a wall painting of Osiris and his daughter — wearing the face of the woman from the hotel — and a stone slab that comes down behind him. What waits in the dark has been waiting a very long time, and it knows his name.

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Gerald Mohr played Raymond Chandler's private eye as radio's toughest and wittiest detective, working a Los Angeles of rain-slick streets, cheap hotels and expensive lies. In "The Orange Dog," a woman hires Marlowe to find her missing sister, last seen with a man named Horner. The only lead is a phrase that means nothing to anybody — the orange dog. Bodies start turning up, a Treasury agent among them, and the trail runs into Chinatown, where Marlowe nearly gets taken at gunpoint. By the time he learns what the orange dog really is, he is standing in the middle of a counterfeiting ring, with two questions still open: whether Horner is dead at all, and whether the missing sister ever existed.

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Gunsmoke was radio's great adult western — Dodge City, Kansas in the hard years of the cattle trade, with William Conrad as U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon. In this early episode from May 31, 1952, an army payroll is stolen and a major gives Dillon an ultimatum: get the money back, or Dodge City goes under martial law. The trail runs straight to Connie Dell, a young woman with a taste for bad company, who may be the marshal's best lead or his prime suspect. With Parley Baer as Chester, Georgia Ellis as Kitty, and Howard McNear as Doc.

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Howard Duff stars as Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco private eye in the show that made Sam Spade a weekly habit — wisecracks, fast talk, and real menace underneath, dictated each week as a case report to his long-suffering secretary Effie Perine. In "The Bow Window Caper," a respectable physician hires Sam to do something about his wife: she is wildly jealous, she turns up at his office and drives the patients out, she is wrecking a practice he spent years building — and now she has started talking about a gun. What looks like a delicate domestic errand curdles fast, and Sam finds that in a marriage this poisoned, nobody is telling him the whole truth about who is really in danger. Originally broadcast November 9, 1947.

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