Radio’s first western
drama
appears to have been
Death Valley Days
, which first aired on September 30, 1930, over
NBC’s
Red network. The series came about when the Pacific Borax Company wanted to sponsor a dramatic show about the Old West (which fit in with the “20 Mule Team” trademark of its cleaning product). The narrator was the “Old Ranger,” who had known the cowboys, prospectors, gamblers, miners, and villains who populated the stories. The series was immediately popular and ran through September 1951. It transferred to
television
and had a lengthy run in that medium as well.
Two long-running western series aimed primarily at children debuted in 1933:
The Lone Ranger
, which was first broadcast from Detroit’s WXYZ on January 31, and
The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters
, which first aired over NBC on September 25. Both series would last into the early 1950s.
The Lone Ranger, the masked man who rode a great white horse named Silver and fought crime, accompanied by his “faithful Indian companion,” Tonto, remains an essential part of American folklore. The series was not always a prime example of radio storytelling at its best; much of its action was conveyed by a narrator (most memorably, Fred Foy) rather than through
dialogue
and sound effects. It was lively and colourful, however, and it remained popular in syndicated reruns.
Singing cowboys of the movies translated well to radio, as proved by the long-running series
Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch
(January 1940?May 1956) and
The Roy Rogers Show
(November 1944?July 1955). Another
movie
cowboy, Buck Jones, had the syndicated series
Hoofbeats
in 1937, and
William Boyd
gave
Hopalong Cassidy
a radio run from 1948 to 1952. During the 1950s, with westerns dominating television, a flurry of “adult westerns” appeared on radio as well. Among them were
Hawk Larabee
(which began life as
Hawk Durango
in 1946) and
Tales of the Texas Rangers
, starring
Joel McCrea
, in 1950.
The most influential adult western,
Gunsmoke
, did for the western what
Dragnet
had done for the police drama by
eschewing
cartoonish characters and substituting the grit, grime, and blood of the Old West. The cast was headed by William Conrad, whose deep rumbling voice gave the character of U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon an instant authority and an air of tragedy. Producer-director Norman MacDonnell and head writer John Meston gave the show a realistic quality never heard before: the sound-effects team caught every
nuance
, making the listener see the worn wooden boardwalk and taste the dust of
Dodge City
.
Gunsmoke
was violent yet compassionate, grim yet often warmly funny. Arriving at the end of radio’s Golden Age (airing from April 26, 1952, to June 18, 1961),
Gunsmoke
was one of the medium’s finest programs.
The horror
genre
was very effective on radio because of the gruesome and frightening images that could be suggested by purely aural means. One of the earliest radio horrors was
The Witch’s Tale
, which debuted in May 1931 over WOR in
New York
and ran on the Mutual network starting in 1934. In that same year
Lights Out
, a true milestone in radio horror, was launched by producer-director Wyllis Cooper; in 1936 Cooper accepted a Hollywood screenwriting job and left the series to writer-director
Arch Oboler. The show (which frequently aired at midnight so as not to be heard by the young and impressionable) became radio’s ultimate gore fest, filled with various grisly dismemberments accomplished by imaginative sound effects. Oboler tried to make some important points about society’s mores in his stories, balancing the gory with
allegory
.
A blend of the ghoulish and the murder mystery came with producer
Himan Brown’s
Inner Sanctum Mysteries
(January 1941?October 1952), which almost always involved a murder and some supernatural element. An
ironic
finish was virtually a given; for example, in “Elixer Number Four,” an episode from 1945, a character played by Richard Widmark murders a scientist who has created a serum that gives immortality, only to be sentenced to prison for life. Weird characters abounded, their antics punctuated by the most uninhibited pipe-organ “
stings
” in the history of radio. The show’s best-remembered trademark was the ominous squeaking, creaking door that opened each episode and slammed shut at the episode’s conclusion.
Suspense
(June 1942?September 1962) was certainly the longest-running horror-oriented show, as well as the most star-studded. As hinted by its title, the program was more suspenseful than horrific, and it was almost always rooted in contemporary everyday reality. The series’s best-remembered story, frequently
reprised
, was “Sorry, Wrong Number, ” actress
Agnes Moorehead
’s tour-de-force portrayal of a bedridden woman who accidentally overhears a murder plot on her telephone, unaware that she is the intended victim. Despite shrinking budgets during its last years,
Suspense
continued to deliver first-rate programs until the final day of the series?and of network dramatic radio?on September 30, 1962.
Toward the end of radio’s Golden Age, science fiction found a more mature voice than had prevailed on such earlier juvenile shows as
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
(November 1932?May 1936) and
Flash Gordon
(April?October 1935).
Dimension X
(April 1950?September 1951) had some remarkable sound effects, and it featured radio
adaptations
of stories by the likes of
Ray Bradbury
. The series was the springboard for the later
X Minus One
(April 1955?January 1958), which featured “stories of the future, adventures in which you’ll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds.” Bradbury’s stories were again featured in this series, as were those by such writers as Robert Bloch and
Isaac Asimov
.
Soap operas?so named because many of them were sponsored by detergent companies?were 15-minute serial dramas that aired each weekday. These were open-ended stories: as one conflict seemed to be resolved, another sprang up, keeping the listener interested for weeks, years, or even decades. The form developed in Chicago radio. In 1926
Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll
proved that a program told in serial form could succeed with their show
Sam ’n’ Henry
. Once the show evolved into
Amos ’n’ Andy
in 1928, the approach worked on a national level as well.
Three main
creative
forces dominated the soap opera world.
Irna Phillips
, a former teacher from Dayton, Ohio, began writing and starring in
Painted Dreams
for Chicago’s WGN in 1930. After a dispute with that station, she revamped her show in 1933 and sold it to NBC as
Today’s Children
. Soon she created another fine program, the first of several series that revolved around characters with inherently dramatic occupations.
The Guiding Light
, which debuted over NBC in January 1937, was originally about a minister and his family, and it stands as the longest-running soap opera in history,
broadcasting
on both radio and television from 1952 to 1956 and finally airing its last television episode in September 2009. Phillips also created several other shows, as well as many of the trademarks that extended to soap operas in general. She found that the organ was the perfect musical accompaniment and that it worked well for transitions from one scene to the next. She developed cliffhanger endings that brought listeners back every day, but she also realized that interesting characters would keep them returning for years.
The husband-wife team of Frank and Anne Hummert was one of the most
prolific
creative forces in radio; eventually, they produced more than 60 series. One of their early shows,
Betty and Bob
(NBC-Blue, October 1932), involving “just plain folks” caught up in extraordinary circumstances, became the
archetype
for many future series, including
Just Plain Bill
,
The Romance of Helen Trent
,
Ma Perkins
,
Backstage Wife
,
Lorenzo Jones
, and
Stella Dallas
. The Hummerts ruled their empire from their home in Greenwich, Connecticut, creating the basic story outlines and characterizations for their many shows; these were then fleshed out by six editors and 20 staff writers.
The third major creative force in radio soap operas was playwright and short-story author Elaine Sterne Carrington. Her shows tended to be more subtle, gentle, and family-oriented than other soaps on the air, which were rife with heartbreak, amnesia victims, and the occasional murder trial. Carrington’s main work began life as
Red Adams
and eventually was transformed into
Pepper’s Young Family
, a domestic drama that ran in varied formats from 1932 to 1959. Her two other long-running programs were
When a Girl Marries
(1939?57) and
Rosemary
(1944?55).
Many other daytime serial dramas, created by other hands, graced the airwaves between 1933 and 1960. At the genre’s height there were more than 200 radio soaps.