“Keeper of the Book…what tale will you tell us this time?”

In 1944’s Off Mike, Arch Oboler of Lights Out fame described writing for radio as “hamburger writing,” noting that “the medium is a quicksand into which millions of words disappear without a trace. All the stories printed monthly in magazines, if assembled into one script, would not be sufficient to keep a network’s monitor loudspeakers chattering for a week.”

To be certain, radio in its Golden Age had a voracious appetite for material—George Burns once noted that while it was possible for a comedian in vaudeville to last a decade with a stage act consisting of only seventeen minutes worth of material, that could all end with one appearance on a weekly half-hour program. Therefore, it was not uncommon for shows to recycle previously broadcast material—long before the concept of recycling was considered environmentally proper.

I thought about this earlier today when I sampled a pair of episodes from The Sealed Book, a syndicated horror anthology broadcast over Mutual/WOR from March 18-September 9, 1945. The program, produced and directed by Jock MacGregor and featuring Philip Clarke as narrator, essentially recycled scripts (by Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan) previously broadcast on Mutual’s popular The Mysterious Traveler. The program would open with sinister laughter and a gong (on loan from Lights Out, no doubt), as “the Keeper of the Book” would unlock “the ponderous volume in which are recorded all the secrets and mysteries of mankind through the ages.” (You can certainly see why the book was sealed, then, since you don’t want that kind of information getting out.) The Keeper would then use the half-hour allotted to him by telling “tales of every kind, tales of murder, tales of madness, of dark deeds and events strange beyond all belief.”

It’s a pretty big buildup for a show that sounds as if it were produced for a buck ninety-eight, but it does have an enjoyable camp quality about it. In “I’ll Die Laughing” (5/27/45), John Dayton, his wife Laura, and attorney-friend Harvey go spelunking in an old cave that—according to a recently deceased prospector—contains Aztec treasure. Harvey, unbeknownst to his pal John, has an ulterior motive in this whole expedition—namely, murdering John and running off with Laura. Of course, as we have learned from a lifetime of Alfred Hitchcock Presents repeats, the best laid plans… I did learn one important thing from this episode—make damn sure your best friend isn’t a lawyer.

“Design For Death” (6/3/45) showcases the story of Carl and Dora Evans, a husband-and-wife team who are on the lam from the law and who pose as brother and sister in order to hide out in an old house where wealthy recluse Mordred Vance resides. Vance takes a shine to Dora and proposes to her, which suits her “brother” just fine, as the old man has a tidy sum of $50,000 tucked away as a dowry. The twist of the tale is, there’s something in Vance’s past that he isn’t quite forthcoming about. Both of these scripts, as stated earlier, appeared previously on The Mysterious Traveler: “I’ll Die Laughing” on May 7, 1944, and “Design” March 5 that same year.

The Sealed Book isn’t classic radio, but it’s certainly not dull; the acting is a bit melodramatic, though—particularly at the climax of “Design For Death” when both actors go back for seconds and thirds at the scenery salad/buffet bar. Though the show is cheaply done, it is of mild importance to OTR fans in one respect: it allows modern-day fans the opportunity to listen to additional episodes of The Mysterious Traveler. (All twenty-six episodes of Book are extant today.) With the advent of cassettes and CDs, of course, the repetition is noticeable now—I’m sure those members of the listening audience probably didn’t even bat an eyelash back then. Even big-budget shows like The Jack Benny Program weren’t immune to “recycling”; Jack’s stable of high quality writers weren’t shy about reworking previous scripts and gags. It reminds me of the famous remark: “Movies aren’t made—they’re remade.”

“I’m quietly yours, Ernest Chappell…”

Radio’s legendary Arch Oboler built his formidable reputation on the classic horror series Lights Out—to be sure, many of that program’s most memorable tales—“Cat Wife,” “Chicken Heart,” “Revolt of the Worms”—sprang from both his typewriter and fertile imagination. It seems unfair, however, that the individual who originally developed Lights Out—Wyllis Cooper—should receive such short shrift with regards to that series, though a lot of that is due to the fact that his work on the show (from 1934 to 1936) simply did not survive in the numbers that Oboler’s productions did and cannot be listened to by modern day old-time radio fans.

Still, Cooper’s splendid contributions to the Golden Age of Radio are available to OTR listeners, thanks to surviving recordings of his unsung and seldom-heard-at-the-time Quiet, Please, which debuted over Mutual Radio on June 8, 1947. Ostensibly a return to Cooper’s radio roots, the program has been heralded by radio historian John Dunning as “a potent series bristling with imagination,” in which listeners confronted a seemingly ordinary world where “the element of menace was ripe and ever present.” For me, the off-kilter nature of Quiet, Please explains why I’m such a fan of the series—rarely is anything explained or justified on the show, and this reminds me of the expression often used on Vic and Sade: “Stuff happens.”

Each week, the series would be ushered in a with an unforgettably eerie piano-and-organ theme (Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor), and host/star Ernest Chappell would relate in first person (sometimes in present tense, sometimes in flashback) an unsettling tale of, as he once characterized it, an “ordinary fellow who gets all bollixed up with the supernatural.” Chappell was a long-time radio veteran—he was the announcer on Orson Welles’ Campbell Playhouse—who at one time coached first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on her broadcast commentaries. Chappell’s wonderfully understated narrative approach to the show’s stories was a directive from creator-writer-director Cooper, who disdained “acting,” preferring a more deadpan, naturalistic “here’s how it happened” style that was later used for radio’s Dragnet. Many of the show’s productions often featured Chappell and Chappell alone, though the two broadcasts I listened to last night at work are exceptions to this rule.

“The Thing On the Fourble Board” (8/9/48) was the first show I previewed, and is often cited as one of Quiet, Please’s classic broadcasts. It’s the story of an oil-drilling “roughneck” (Chappell) and his geologist friend (Dan Sutter) who discover evidence of human (?) life in soil samples taken from the Earth. This intriguing tale takes an extremely bizarre twist towards the end, and though I think its reputation is a little inflated, the mewling sounds emanating from the “thing” (Cecil Roy) are definitely bloodcurdling. In the second show, “Presto Change-O, I’m Sure” (8/16/48), a master magician (Edgar Stehli) hands a teenager (Chappell) a magic wand that bestows upon him supernatural powers. Granted, it’s no classic, but it’s still entertaining in an offbeat way—very reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode (“The Magic Shop”) I saw as a kid. Ed Latimer, Peggy Stanley, and Brad Barker round out this broadcast’s supporting cast.

The strength of Quiet, Please lies in the realization that even its weakest episodes constitute prima facia evidence of Wyllis Cooper’s imaginative talent; indeed, it’s the outstanding writing in the show’s scripts that drive the action, such scripts being described by Radio Life beginning “as immediately and forceful as opening a door on a madman’s monologue.” But when Quiet, Please was good, it was very, very good—among my favorites are “Northern Lights” (“a…e…i…o…u…”), “My Son, John,” “Whence Came You,” and “Nothing Behind the Door.”

Quiet, Please spent its roughly two-and-a-half year radio run as a sustained series, mostly on Mutual before it moved to ABC Radio on September 19, 1948 and wrapping up its all-too-brief stay June 25, 1949. Although nearly all of its original 104 broadcasts are extant today, a great majority of them are in poor or substandard sound. To wrap up this essay, I echo the thoughts of the esteemed New York Herald-Tribune radio critic John Crosby: “Most of the Quiet, Please dramas are weird, ingenious and intimate affairs. Above all, they are pure radio.”

”It…is…later…than…you…think…”

My introduction to famed horror maven/radio playwright Arch Oboler dates back to the autumn of 1982, while I was attending Marshall University in Huntington, WV. I had come across a blurb in a student magazine describing a Halloween program (“Sticks,” from ZBS Productions) that would be broadcast over various public radio stations that very weekend—what made this production so interesting was that it would be presented in a form of “audio 3-D,” which you could experience via headphones. I turned on my radio that Sunday afternoon and tuned into the local NPR affiliate in an attempt to locate it.

Instead, I stumbled onto a curious dramatic excerpt where two men, exploring an old, abandoned house, encounter a mysterious fog that turns its victims inside out! Yipes! I remember saying to myself. After that segment concluded, the host introduced and interviewed Arch Oboler, writer-director-producer of the classic Golden Age of Radio horror show Lights Out. (I later learned that the “inside out” segment—commonly titled “The Dark”—and a second excerpt played during the interview, “A Day at the Dentist’s,” were culled from a 1960s era Capitol LP entitled Drop Dead!

Though Oboler is usually considered the driving force behind Lights Out, the origins of the series actually lie with a man named Wyllis Cooper, an NBC staffer at its studios in Chicago. Cooper created, wrote, directed, and produced the fifteen-minute horror series, first broadcast over the Windy City’s WENR January 1, 1934 (the show expanded to thirty minutes in April of that same year). On April 17, 1935, it landed a berth on NBC nationwide, and was usually broadcast around 11:30 or 12 midnight, as intuited by its opening: “This is the witching hour! It is an hour when dogs howl, and evil is let loose on the sleeping world. Want to hear about it? Then turn out your lights!”

Lights Out was an excellent blend of well-written scripts, top-notch performances, and revolutionary sound effects, billed enthusiastically by NBC as “the ultimate in horror.” Some of the names among the Chicago-based talent involved include Harold Peary, Willard Waterman (both Peary and Waterman played The Great Gildersleeve), Mercedes McCambridge, Arthur Peterson, Macdonald Carey, and Betty Winkler. But the show occasionally attracted big-name Hollywood stars as well, most notably Boris Karloff. The series was especially boastful of its sound effects: spare ribs snapped with a pipe wrench allowed listeners to visualize human bones being broken, and bacon in a frypan gave a realistic impression of someone being electrocuted.

Cooper left Lights Out in 1936 for a burgeoning Hollywood screenwriting career (among his efforts: two of the Mr. Moto films and the 1939 Son of Frankenstein, the third film in Universal Studios’ successful Frankenstein franchise) and was replaced by Oboler, another unknown NBC staffer who was at that time writing for Rudy Vallee and the Grand Hotel series. Oboler wasted no time in putting his own personal stamp on the program with his first script, “Burial Services,” the story of a paralyzed girl buried alive. (Oboler was off to a good, controversial start: NBC received more than 50,000 letters of complaint after that debut broadcast.) Many of the best-remembered Lights Outs sprang from Oboler’s prolific typewriter: “Cat Wife,” a classic chiller where a cuckolded man (Boris Karloff) must deal with his tramp of a wife after she is transformed into a human-sized cat; “Revolt of the Worms,” in which ordinary earthworms grown to enormous proportions after a scientist carelessly tosses his growth formula into the backyard; and of course, “Chicken Heart,” a fondly remembered tale (made immortal in a comedy routine by Bill Cosby) of a little organ that grew and grew and grew until (thump-THUMP…thump-THUMP…thump-THUMP) it consumed the world.

Oddly enough, Oboler never really cared that much for the horror genre; his dramas often consisted of “message plays,” like “Profits Unlimited,” a stinging rebuke of the evils of capitalism. In an interview with Leonard Maltin, he once commented: “I didn’t write about little green men, monsters with dripping talons and grotesque faces from the special effects department…I wrote about the terrors and monsters within each of us.” By 1938, Oboler had discovered the monster—Adolf Hitler—and he quit the program to concentrate on writing more patriotic plays, leaving Lights Out in the hands of NBC staffers until it departed the airwaves August 16, 1939. Three years later, Oboler resurrected the series beginning October 6, 1942 on CBS for Ironized Yeast. Many of Oboler’s old Chicago scripts were dusted off and presented in new versions for the listening audience, favorites like “State Executioner” and “Oxychloride X.” The show lasted but one season, but it’s probably the version best-remembered by OTR fans, as the bulk of the programs that have survived today originate from this series.

Lights Out would make only three more appearances on the radio networks—twice on NBC in the summers of 1945 (Fantasies from Lights Out) and 1946, and another summer run on ABC in 1947. These episodes consisted of new versions of old Wyllis Cooper scripts, with Cooper contributing a few originals to the 1947 series. Having returned to radio, Cooper created yet another memorable series in Quiet, Please, which showcased a sort of subtler, psychological horror and which has acquired quite a cult following among OTR fans today. Cooper later dabbled in live television, including the TV transplant of Lights Out, which ran on NBC-TV from 1949-52. (Reruns of this early horror series were at one time featured in a late night Friday timeslot on cable’s The Sci-Fi Channel.)

As for Oboler, he eked out a semi-successful movie career, writing and directing films like Strange Holiday (1945), Five (1951), and Bwana Devil (1952)—the movie that kicked off the 1950s 3-D craze. He would not return to Lights Out until the 1970s nostalgia boom, when a reedited syndicated radio version of the old 1942-43 broadcasts debuted, entitled The Devil and Mr. O (1970-73).

Last night, I listened to a couple of Lights Out programs—the CD I took with me to work has Oboler’s picture on the cover, but the two shows were taken from the 1945 and 1946 NBC summer runs. First, “Man in the Middle,” an AFRS rebroadcast of a show that originally aired over NBC August 25, 1945: businessman John Phillips is involved in a ménage a trois with his wife Lucille and secretary Patricia. He’s in way over his head and even after taking the easy way out (committing suicide) his problem still hasn’t changed. I thought at first that this episode was just being unintentionally funny (the ending sort of dispels that notion), but overall it’s pretty so-so—there’s a lot of surface noise during the last third of the show that makes it somewhat of a chore to listen to. I did like the stream-of-consciousness monologue employed to illuminate Phillips’ inner thoughts; a technique often used in many of Oboler’s scripts for the series.

The second episode, “Haunted Cell” (broadcast July 20, 1946), is a definite improvement—small-time hood Max Young (Norman Gottschalk) is pinched by a cop named Miller (Roy Engle) for a filling station holdup, but as it turns out Maxie’s also the prime suspect for the murder of Miller’s partner. After his attempt to get the hood to talk via the rubber hose treatment fails, the cop locks Maxie up in a special cell—one haunted by the ghost of cop killer Skeeter Dempsey (Stanley Schull). This eerie ghost story is quite entertaining, and while listening to it I could easily imagine it being retooled and used on Cooper’s Quiet, Please.