by Barry Marks

Created on: August 12, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

I am a fan of Old Time Radio, usually known simply as OTR. (This is part of the same silly trend of using initials that has turned the venerable old, bourbon-swilling Kentucky Colonel-led, Kentucky Fried Chicken to become simply known as KFC. Pretty soon KFC will just be another acronym no one understands, kind of like LASER or LHS. But I digress.)

Anyway, OTR is easy to find. Go to eBay and do a search and you'll find tons of cheap discs full of hundreds of MP3's for about $1 each, so it isn't what you'd call an expensive hobby. Unless you don't want to listen to hours of scratches, pops, and hiss, in which case you'll go to Radio Spirits and spend $30 for a digitally remastered set, about 10 hours.

A friend once told me that I remind her of her father. I never met her father. If I did I may have a serious question or two. (But I digress again.) This hobby may be a reason why.

I've got a lot of OTR. There's first and foremost Superman, with nearly 1,200 episodes available. Sadly, most of the WWII episodes were wiped so the reels could be reused- wartime rationing was worse than kryptonite, I guess. This is too bad, because the wartime episodes were pretty over the top, propaganda-wise, with Superman managing to find "Jap" spies in the basement of The Daily Planet, dynamiting Metropolis' vital harbors, putting listening devices in Jimmy Olsen's bow tie, and so on and so on. (Maybe it is better that these remain missing, now that I read that back.) And it seems like every twelfth or thirteenth episode featured a dam bursting. Why would anyone live in a city surrounded by so many dams? Sounds like a deathtrap to me. Good thing Superman was always around. Too bad he and Clark were never in the same place in the same time. Some "investigative reporter" Lois Lane was. However, Lois could afford to be thick as a brick. This show aired in the 40's and 50's so the toughest assignment she was given was to find out why the Metropolis Annual Flower Show had no daisies. (It was a Japanese plot.)

There are thousands of episodes of various detectives, tough guys with tough-sounding names, like Richard Diamond, Johnny Dollar, Hollywood Russell, the Saint, and Sam Spade. (One of you will appreciate that. 99% of you will not get that joke. But it is an in-joke and somebody is getting a nice chuckle right now.) They were tough guys, rough guys, and nothing-else-rhymes-with-tough guys. They carried big rods in their pockets (and big guns too). Real man's man types who never seemed

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