One of the greatest gifts my father ever shared with me was his vast and detailed memory of the radio programs of his youth in the late 1930s and ‘40s – the detective stories, westerns, comedies, mysteries, and adventure tales that entered the living room of his boyhood home on East 144th Street in Cleveland by way of an invisible wave and took center stage in the theater of the mind.
By most standards, the era known as “the golden age of radio” began in the late 1920s and ended in the early ‘60s. Personally, I’m inclined to frame the period a little differently. I would argue that it ended with the advent of television in the early 1950s, when the box with a speaker that had dominated American living rooms for nearly three decades was pushed aside to make room for the box with a screen.
But a handful of producers, voice actors and audio engineers – many of whom were veterans of that golden age – made a valiant effort in the 1970s to bring it all back in a program called CBS Radio Mystery Theater.
The series was created by Himan Brown, who got his start in radio in the late 1920s by reading newspaper stories over the airwaves on New York station WEAF when he was just eighteen. Years later, Brown would go on to produce thousands of radio programs, including The Adventures of the Thin Man, Bulldog Drummond, Grand Central Station, and Terry and the Pirates.
Brown’s most memorable contribution to the golden age, however, was Inner Sanctum Mysteries – also known simply as Inner Sanctum – which aired from 1941 to 1952. He later recycled many dramatic elements of the original Inner Sanctum Mysteries – the creaking door sound effect in the introduction, the kindly yet vaguely creepy narrator, and the disturbing theme music – when he developed CBS Radio Mystery Theater.
CBSRMT premiered on January 6, 1974, and originally aired every weeknight. In later years, the rotation included three newly produced programs per week augmented by repeats of previously broadcast episodes. In keeping with the title, the early episodes were mysteries, but Brown and his team of writers later expanded the scope of subject matter to include horror, science fiction, westerns and historical dramas. Some episodes were adaptations of classic stories by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry, Edith Wharton, H. Rider Haggard and others. An adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol originally aired on Christmas Eve in 1975 and repeated every year thereafter until 1981.
The program also featured dozens of prominent actors whose pedigrees included some combination of radio, stage, film and television. Among them were Fred Gwynne, Celeste Holm, Kevin McCarthy, Mason Adams, Morgan Fairchild, Jack Grimes, John Lithgow, Howard Da Silva, Mercedes McCambridge, Keir Dullea, and many others.
It’s worth noting that Himan Brown and his team launched CBS Radio Mystery Theater only a dozen years after the golden age of radio ended unceremoniously when the final episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense aired back-to-back on the evening of September 30, 1962. It’s also worth noting that these two final episodes aired on the CBS network, so Brown and company essentially picked up in the same place where things had left off.
While the program may not have ushered in a new age of radio drama, its nine-year run was a respectable one, especially considering the lukewarm early response from some of its critics. The New York Daily News, for example, called the premiere episode “dull,” and their review of the second episode was equally harsh: “The premise may sound exciting, but the show wasn’t.”
I wasn’t aware of any of that bad press at the time – and I probably wouldn’t have cared if I had been. I used to catch the show now and then on a local AM station in Cleveland (I can’t remember which one) when I was in my early teens. I listened to it on the oldest radio in our house — a tube-powered tabletop relic from the late 1950s that sat on the desk in my bedroom. It somehow made the whole experience even more alluring. I noticed at the time that – much to my chagrin – the show didn’t seem to air consistently from one week to the next. The affiliate may have been slotting it into their programming at their own discretion – running it as a filler rather than adhering to a consistent schedule.
But when I did catch an episode here or there, it was magic. It was everything my dad had told me about – a theater inside the mind, where every scene was vivid and real, and the illusion was absolutely convincing.
And the best part: These weren’t archived recordings from decades past. These episodes were crafted in the here and now of the late 1970s. A small but dedicated group of producers, actors and programmers still understood the value of this kind of storytelling, and listeners all over the country – maybe a relatively small group, maybe those who were old enough to remember the golden age – were tuning in. I may not have been part of their demographic, but at fourteen or fifteen, I felt like I had somehow stumbled into a small, secret club – and my enthusiasm was sufficient criteria for junior membership.
CBS Radio Mystery Theater ceased production in 1982, and the last episode aired on December 31 of that year. All told, Brown and his team produced a total of 1,399 stories over a span of nine years.
It’s been almost fifty years since I first listened to those random episodes. My dad has been gone for fourteen years, and that tube-powered tabletop radio has been gone a lot longer than that. These days, the commercial radio landscape on the AM side consists almost entirely of news, talk and sports – and the talk is targeted at an audience whose world view is vastly different from my own. The FM side is now a hyper-compartmentalized domain of specialized music formats aimed at specific demographic groups.
Thankfully, the entire catalog of episodes is available on a comprehensive CBSRMT website that includes a complete episode guide, lists of actors and writers, and more. They’re also available on Spotify. Whenever I dial one up, I think of the program as – among other things – the proper farewell that the golden age of radio didn’t receive on that random Sunday evening in 1962 when families were tuning into Lassie, The Ed Sullivan Show and Bonanza on their TV sets.
CBS Radio Mystery Theater was a reminder of an earlier and more innocent era, when stories came to life like the warm glow of a vacuum tube inside a wooden cabinet, and a world of adventure – completely intangible yet irrefutably real – took shape in the ether and left an indelible imprint in the minds of an entire generation.