My love of Old Time Radio began with The Shadow. Back in my college radio days I got on some mailing lists with catalogs of esoteric recordings. These were back of ‘zine catalogs, mouse type on a single photocopied page with handwritten corrections, send a SASE for a copy of the pricelist kind of things. Within a year or two of my dawning interest, all of this back page stuff pretty much disappeared along with the ‘zines, moving onto the Internet. Sure, it was the early days, but it wouldn’t be long before those types of classified ad pricelists by mail were a thing of the past.

Anyway, in one of these catalogs I found a couple of inexpensive cassettes that I bought for long drives, going to gigs or back and forth between Boston and New York. It was the beginning of an insane collection, but most things big have to start out small…or, at least less big.

One tape I got was War of the Worlds. The other had a couple episodes of the Shadow. Classic, early episodes after the Shadow show format changed from a Tale From the Crypt style show to the more recognizable Lamont Cranston, man about town, version. The first season of Lamont Cranston as the shadow starred Orson Welles. And it was magnificent. Truly, truly, like a couple of Ambersons.

It was dark and moody and less comic-booky than the later seasons. In ran up through the 50s, so there was plenty of time for evolution. In fact, some of the later seasons, long after Welles left the show, were among the most enjoyable to listen to. They were more polished and often better written, if a bit safer or tamer. Radio seemed to go tame and lose a lot of its edge after World War Two. The same goes for movies and even a lot of music, I think. The woo hoo 50s really did end up begging for the 60s.

But in the late 30s, the world was on the verge of massive conflict and the tense energy pervaded all media. Thus, when I first heard the Shadow some 14 years ago, hissing out of the cassette player in my car, it was truly extraordinary. Radio show sponsors in those days were coal and cigarette companies, shaving cream and hair tonic peddlers. Latter day phisoderm and little blue pill merchants, maybe, but who cares. And a couple years later, they’d start asking all good Americans to buy War Bonds and follow the rationing rules.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The Shadow knows. Ha ha ha ha ha!

[brought to you by Pennsylvania’s finest anthracite, Blue Coal]