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For more than twenty years Jack Benny ran the best-loved comedy in American radio, and the joke was always himself: vain, penny-pinching, stuck forever at 39, and hopeless on the violin. In this April 1954 broadcast it is spring-cleaning day at Jack's house. Rochester has the place turned inside out, Dennis Day breezes in to announce he is enlisting, and Jack retreats into a book for some peace and quiet -- which is when the show hands itself over to the story. Jack becomes a distinguished psychiatrist, the patients start filing in, and Mel Blanc arrives as a man who is absolutely certain he is a refrigerator.

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Connie Brooks teaches English at Madison High, dodges her blustering principal, and never quite gets a date with the biology teacher. In this May 1950 broadcast, Mr. Conklin's prized rare black orchid becomes the center of the week's trouble — and Miss Brooks, as always, ends up standing closest to the wreckage. Eve Arden stars with Gale Gordon as Osgood Conklin, Jeff Chandler as Mr. Boynton, and Richard Crenna as Walter Denton.

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Lights Out was radio's premier horror series, and it reached its best-remembered form when writer-director Arch Oboler brought it back to CBS in 1942 — a half hour of dread delivered to a country already living through a war. Oboler used the show as readily for human terror as for the supernatural, and "Execution" is one of his sharpest wartime thrillers. In an occupied French village, a German officer claims a woman fired on him from a darkened window. The reprisal is announced at once: unless she comes forward, fifty women of the village will hang. What follows is a long, airless night of suspicion, silence and terrible arithmetic, as neighbors weigh one life against fifty and wait to see who will speak. No ghosts, no monsters — only what people do to each other under occupation.

🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com
📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

The Adventures of Sam Spade let Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled private eye tell his own stories — every case dictated back at the office to his secretary Effie Perrine, period, new paragraph. In "The Sinister Siren Caper," broadcast March 16, 1951, a badly rattled man turns up in Spade's office with a warning he can't laugh off: his life is in danger from a red-headed woman. Spade takes the job. Stephen Dunne stars as Spade with Lurene Tuttle as Effie, in one of the last capers of the series' final NBC season.

🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com
📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Quiet, Please was radio's quietest horror show and its strangest — Wyllis Cooper wrote and directed every episode, and Ernest Chappell told them to you in a calm, confiding voice with nothing behind it but an organ and a lot of deliberate silence. In "Whence Came You," an American archaeologist named Austin comes back to Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo and sees a woman in the lobby who is gone before he can cross to her. Out at the dig, a newly opened chamber holds a gold-robed figure with the head of a hawk, a wall painting of Osiris and his daughter — wearing the face of the woman from the hotel — and a stone slab that comes down behind him. What waits in the dark has been waiting a very long time, and it knows his name.

🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com
📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974