Suspense: 09/28/58 (planned, never broadcast) Brought to you by the Old Time Radio Researchers, courtesy of The Suspense Project

This is a curious drama-only recording that has an interesting backstory. The recording has been in circulation for many years, and it seems like a broadcast. Decades ago, a collector patched the opening of the 1957-10-06 recording onto it, editing out the mention of that episode’s guest, Jack Carson. That patch led into a marvelous production with William Conrad as narrator. It’s not that Jack Carson did a bad job, it’s that William Conrad was an exceptional talent, whether it be acting or narration.

Collectors were confused about the recording. The “patch” was an innocuous attempt at restoration that seemed to be appropriate in its time. We have much more information today that allows richer historical context. We know that the Robson era was using separate recordings of drama as its main practice, and recording other broadcast elements separately. Only the drama portion of this episode was finished, but the recording never had the other components, such as the George Walsh introductions and the William N. Robson monologue, were likely never done.

Because it was never broadcast, it still appropriate that it has a date. It is a good assumption that the episode was actually planned for 1958-09-28. It is believed that this broadcast was to be a “victory lap” and offer of congratulations for sound effects artist Tom Hanley, author of the script. It was his first, and won an award from the Writer’s Guild. Fellow practitioners Gus Bayz and Ross Murray wrote many scripts, but Hanley’s rookie outing earned a recognition they did not have.

For more details about the 1957 broadcast, resources are available at https://archive.org/details/TSP571006, which is where recordings can be downloaded or streamed.

Collectors did not know what to do with this recording in their Suspense collections. No hard copy script has been found. There is no script in the KNX Collection or at the Pacific Pioneers records at University of California at Santa Barbara. Because there was little reliable documentation available to collectors in the 1970s and 1980s, the recording “fell” or “backed into” the date because not much was known about the CBS schedule change. In fact, many of the shows that we now know as Saturday broadcasts were assigned Sunday dates by those collectors. These relatively innocent errors have been corrected over the years as scripts and other resources have become available and accessed more easily.

The surviving recording is in excellent sound. The patch of the 1957 broadcast has been removed as the recording is not contemporary to the drama recording or its originally intended broadcast date.

The cast: WILLIAM CONRAD (Narrator), John Dehner (Leigh Thurston), Barney Phillips (John Grant), Sam Pierce (Pierce, the reporter), others