Western
**Frontier Fighters** turned the opening of the American West into a weekly quarter-hour of living history. Each of its thirty-nine episodes framed one explorer, pioneer, or turning point -- La Salle claiming the Mississippi for France, Lewis and Clark reaching the Pacific with Sacagawea, the fall of the Alamo, the driving of the golden spike, Custer's last stand, the purchase of Alaska -- as a narrated exposition folded around a short dramatization, three to five voices carrying the scene in the seven minutes a 15-minute transcription left after the sponsor's music.
The series was cut as electrical transcriptions by the Radio Transcription Company of America (TransCo) and later redistributed by Broadcasters Program Syndicate/Bruce Eells & Associates. Long dated to 1935 in the hobby, its only newspaper-documented run is the 1938 season the Peak-Hagedon Funeral Home sponsored over NBC affiliate KTSM in El Paso, Texas, Wednesday evenings from January 5 to September 28. Radio veteran Hanley Stafford -- who would become Fanny Brice's long-suffering 'Daddy' on The Baby Snooks Show -- is the one named performer; the writers, director, and the rest of the TransCo stock company went uncredited. Romanticized but broadly accurate, the vignettes remain a brisk, vivid tour of the frontier.
Thriller / Drama Anthology
Subtitled "radio's outstanding theater of thrills," Suspense was CBS's premier anthology of dread -- a self-contained suspense script every week, usually built around a leading Hollywood star. It ran just over twenty years, from 1942 to 1962, and its pedigree was extraordinary from the start: the audition show, an adaptation of The Lodger for the summer series Forecast in 1940, was directed by Alfred Hitchcock himself.
The show's defining era belonged to producer William Spier, whose control set the house style; under Elliott Lewis in the early 1950s the material reached new sophistication. Mystery novelist John Dickson Carr adapted many early scripts, and Joseph Kearns hosted as "The Man in Black." Its most celebrated half-hour was Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number" -- a bedridden woman, played by Agnes Moorehead, overhearing a murder plot on a crossed line. First aired in 1943, it was restaged seven times over seventeen years, always with Moorehead, and spawned a 1948 feature film.
Honored with a Peabody Special Citation in 1946, Suspense stands among the premier dramas of radio's Golden Age, its run of landmark episodes -- from "The Hitch-Hiker" to "Donovan's Brain" -- chronicled in Martin Grams Jr.'s definitive history.
Western
"Hi-Yo Silver, away!" -- few sounds in American radio are as instantly known. The Lone Ranger, a half-hour Western that began on Detroit's WXYZ in 1933 and ran to 1954, followed a masked former Texas Ranger and his friend Tonto through the Old West. Its signatures became cultural shorthand: silver bullets, the Lone Ranger's Creed, and the William Tell Overture finale, by Rossini, "inseparably associated with the series."
Conceived by station owner George W. Trendle and writer Fran Striker, the show was produced live at WXYZ with classical music throughout -- Smetana, Wagner, Bizet, Mendelssohn. The title role passed through several voices, most enduringly Earle Graser (some 1,300 episodes) and then Brace Beemer, who had been the program's narrator. One of OTR's most famous transitions came in April 1941, when Graser died in a car crash: to bridge to Beemer, scripts had the Ranger badly wounded and only whispering for several episodes. John Todd played Tonto across the run.
An enduring icon of American culture, the Lone Ranger spawned a 1949-1957 TV series with Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels, plus comics, books, and films. He even shares a bloodline with another Striker hero: the Green Hornet, Britt Reid, was written as his grandnephew.
Situation comedy
Eve Arden made the wisecracking schoolteacher an American archetype as Connie Brooks, the sardonic English teacher of fictional Madison High in this half-hour CBS sitcom. A blend of workplace and domestic comedy, it had Brooks sparring with gruff principal Osgood Conklin, pining chastely for the bashful biology teacher Philip Boynton, and getting chauffeured around by squeaky-voiced student Walter Denton. It began on CBS in 1948 and ran through 1957.
The casting tells its own story. Gale Gordon settled into Conklin only after a quick early shuffle -- Will Wright played him in the audition, Joseph Forte in the first episode. Boynton went from Jeff Chandler to Robert Rockwell, while a young Richard Crenna turned Walter Denton's adolescent voice into a career launchpad, supported by Jane Morgan as landlady Mrs. Davis and Gloria McMillan as Harriet Conklin. Arden herself was already an established film comedienne, Oscar-nominated for Mildred Pierce in 1945.
Our Miss Brooks became a signature radio-into-television success, adapted for TV (1952-1956) as one of the medium's earliest hits and even running concurrently with the later radio seasons before a 1956 feature film. That rare radio-plus-TV-plus-film simultaneity marks the great medium transition -- and the role gave Arden a warm, enduring place in the American imagination as the schoolteacher everyone wished they'd had.
Western drama
Have Gun, Will Travel is the rare Western where radio followed television. A half-hour CBS show, it starred Paladin -- a West Point-educated, black-clad gentleman gunfighter for hire, based at San Francisco's Hotel Carlton -- who advertised by calling card: "Have Gun, Will Travel / Wire Paladin, San Francisco," beneath a chess-knight emblem. He charged steep fees, famously around $1,000 a job, yet often threw in with the underdog.
John Dehner carried Paladin on radio, leading every episode, backed by CBS Hollywood's deep rep company -- Ben Wright, Virginia Gregg, Harry Bartell, Vic Perrin -- while Richard Boone played the role on TV. The radio version drew heavily on the television scripts, transcribed in Hollywood, and ran from 1958 to 1960 across roughly 106 to 107 episodes (our spine holds 107, including a surviving 1958 audition of three different voice tests).
The TV series it sprang from was a giant -- Nielsen's number three or four every year of its first four seasons -- and its writing room held a notable name: Gene Roddenberry wrote 24 episodes years before Star Trek, many of them adapted for radio. The franchise reached into books and film, and the catchphrase itself became valuable enough to draw trademark-infringement litigation.
Western drama
Hopalong Cassidy brought the clean-cut, black-clad cowboy hero to radio in a half-hour Western that ran from 1948 to 1952, mixing new adventures with adaptations of the wildly popular William Boyd films. The series was born of television: when Boyd's 66 Cassidy movies found a huge new TV audience, a radio show followed, transcribed by Commodore Productions in 1948-49 and aired afterward over a winding network path -- syndicated, then Mutual from January 1950, then CBS that September.
Boyd owned the character outright and starred in every episode, the lead anchored by Andy Clyde as comic sidekick California Carlson -- though for a curious stretch of episodes 28 through 53, Clyde was replaced by a rotating cast of substitutes for reasons never explained. The screen and radio Hoppy was a sarsaparilla-drinking, children-friendly hero, a deliberate softening of author Clarence E. Mulford's original literary Cassidy, who was "rude, dangerous, and rough-talking" and limped from a leg wound.
"Hoppy" became one of the first great multimedia sensations. The licensing blitz spun off Capitol Records "record readers," Fawcett and DC comic books, a King Features comic strip, and even Hoppyland, a Los Angeles amusement park that opened in 1951 with Boyd himself as an investor.