Case Dismissed
January 30, 1954 – April 24, 1954 · 13 broadcasts
Case Dismissed was a public-service legal drama the Chicago Bar Association mounted in the winter and spring of 1954, produced at WMAQ -- NBC's Chicago station -- and heard Saturdays from January 30 to April 24. Across thirteen self-contained half-hours (twelve of which survive), it worked a single insistent premise: ordinary people talk themselves into legal ruin by taking bad advice, cutting corners, or simply never calling a lawyer, and each week's story shows how sound counsel could have turned catastrophe into, literally, a case dismissed. The subjects are the plain machinery of mid-century American life -- a will, a lease, an installment contract, an adoption, an arrest, a libel. Every episode was written and played by Chicago radio talent, among them Harry Elders, Jack Lester, Charles Flynn, Fern Persons, and Arthur Peterson, under producer Betty Ross and director Herbert Littow, with John C. Fitzgerald, Dean of the Loyola University Law School, hosting and reminding listeners that the dramas turned on Illinois law and might not hold elsewhere. It is small, earnest, late-era radio with a civic mission -- and it signs off, with a wink, on a recording of Kabalevsky's "The Comedians."
Episode Spine
1954
Case Dismissed was a public-service legal drama the Chicago Bar Association mounted in the winter and spring of 1954, produced at WMAQ -- NBC's Chicago station -- and heard Saturdays from January 30 to April 24. Across thirteen self-contained half-hours (twelve of which survive), it worked a single insistent premise: ordinary people talk themselves into legal ruin by taking bad advice, cutting corners, or simply never calling a lawyer, and each week's story shows how sound counsel could have turned catastrophe into, literally, a case dismissed. The subjects are the plain machinery of mid-century American life -- a will, a lease, an installment contract, an adoption, an arrest, a libel. Every episode was written and played by Chicago radio talent, among them Harry Elders, Jack Lester, Charles Flynn, Fern Persons, and Arthur Peterson, under producer Betty Ross and director Herbert Littow, with John C. Fitzgerald, Dean of the Loyola University Law School, hosting and reminding listeners that the dramas turned on Illinois law and might not hold elsewhere. It is small, earnest, late-era radio with a civic mission -- and it signs off, with a wink, on a recording of Kabalevsky's "The Comedians."