Finally answering a question.

One thing about being involved with a blog for over ten years (The Table is over ten years old???), especially if you write about things from the past: one of the first pieces of research you have to do is to see if you already wrote about that subject.

That research on the table can take a while. It is not that the search function does not work (although it would be nice if we could search by author), but rather that there has been some good writing on the Table and you spend a great deal of enjoyable time reading things from many years ago.

I have an idea for a post, but in my research to see if I had already written about it I came upon a post I did to mark Jack Webb's ninetieth birthday (he now would be one hundred). In that post I discussed some of Webb's early radio work. One of the shows I mentioned was a program called One Out of Seven.

There was one particular episode that I thought would seem poignant today. While the subject of racism is discussed in other episodes, the first episode really speaks about it. As I said in 2010, this program is reminiscent of Marc Antony's speech at Caesar's funeral. The production sounds dated, but it is a sustaining (non-sponsored) filler program from 1946 --  meaning it was not something that management wanted to use a lot of resources to produce. This episode would have been just before Webb turned twenty-six. As a side note, the writer of the program, James Moser, went to Los Angeles about the time Webb did and became one of the main writers for Dragnet. Moser had just turned twenty-five when One Out of Seven was produced.

If you know Webb's voice and if you listen closely you can tell that all voices, except for the announcer's, are done by Webb.

In the comments of the Jack Webb post, Lady Red asked if old radio shows were available online. At the time I said that there were some sites but that you had to pay for them. That has changed over the years. One site to look at is Archive.org. This site has many things on it besides old radio shows -- you can easily spend a lot of time on it, but you can look up many old radio shows by name. You can also look up OTR but it might be hard to filter through all of the other things that come up.

Some shows from different genres on Archive.org:

Suspense -- Famous dramatic show
The Whistler -- West coast program about comeuppance.
Phillip Marlow -- Private Detective
X Minus One -- Science Fiction
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar -- Insurance Investigator. Fifteen minute episodes from 1956 are the most popular
21st Precint -- New York based police procedural staring Everett Sloan
The Great Gildersleeve -- Comedy spin-off from Fibber McGee and Molly
Calling All Cars -- Early police drama. The dispatcher was Jesse Rosenquist, a real LAPD dispatcher. Back then dispatchers ended their dispatches with their name.
Behind the Mike -- A look behind the scenes of radio hoisted by famous early announcer Graham MacNamee.
Fibber McGee and Molly -- Famous comedy

The links provided may not be complete collections but should give you enough to get started. You can also search for more. Let me know if you need help finding more shows or resources.


UPDATE

I just realize that, of all things, I did not put a link for Dragnet epsiodes, the root of the post. Let's take care of that right now.