1962-03-25 Memory of Murder

Phil Sterling stars in a John Roeburt story about a man, Harry Jonas, who strangely confesses to a murder that took place ten years before he was born! Roeburt was a reliable writer whose work was often on Inner Sanctum. This particular script has a strong Inner Sanctum feel, but it cannot be verified that it was used on that series. Details that match this episode’s plotline cannot be found in classic radio logs or other resources, or in newspaper searches. Perhaps more information, or a recording, may be found in the future. Inner Sanctum was on for many years, with many programs surviving, but also many gaps in the series. Only about one-third of the series recordings have been found out of more than 500 broadcasts.

Roeburt also wrote for the Basil Rathbone vehicle, Tales of Fatima, an ABC mystery program that was produced and directed, and sometimes written, by Harry and Gail Ingram. The program with this title was broadcast on 1949-07-23 and was likely the first time that this script was used. (The Ingrams were a power couple of sorts in radio circles, until Harry’s untimely passing at age 40 in 1952). Newspaper clippings are not consistent for describing this particular plotline, however, with some clippings stating “Rathbone tells of a girl with a “Memory of Murder” and others with “Rathbone meets a young man with a “Memory of Murder.” The difference is likely some editorial or typographic error. The ToF series is poorly documented, with very few recordings surviving (only three out of thirty-nine, it seems). A log of its broadcasts, with tantalizing titles, is available but lacks cast details or plot descriptions.

The story does not really fit Suspense, but at this time in 1962, such a script really had no place else to go. If this episode is amusing in an Inner Sanctum kind of way, it is because of Roeburt’s strange magician and ghoulish guillotine act that drives much of the story.

The broadcast begins with Harry Jonas on a park bench and his first person narration moves from a cemetery to seeing a vaudeville magician act, “A Study in Illusion and the Black Arts.” Harry has vivid visions of a murder in a cemetery, a mysterious “Grave Digger” figure, and a unique coin. He takes a job at a local theater and gets involved in the lives of a vaudeville magician and his assistants. The act uses knives and a guillotine, and put his pretty assistant, and wife, Marietta, in danger, at least in the eyes of the audience. Harry soon believes that the magician is a master criminal. He learns from the wardrobe assistant at the theater that Marietta was in danger. A prior assistant to the magician, Nino, was killed by the magician because of his romantic interest in Marietta. It is Harry who is now infatuated with Marietta, so this does not bode well for him. The wardrobe assistant tells Harry that she learned it is the night when the magician will kill Marietta in the guillotine. Harry witnesses the ghastly act of gushing blood and a falling head. Harry murders the magician… but he soon learns it was Marietta who orchestrated this very elaborate scheme… and that Nino is alive in Mexico waiting for her. This might be the end of the story for most scripts, but not this one. Harry goes to the police and confesses to the murder, relating the details of all his experiences. It is there he learns that what he admits to would be impossible, because those events happened forty years ago, before Harry was born!

The program was recorded on Thursday, March 22, 1962. The session began at 1:00pm and concluded at 6:00pm.

James Monks is in this cast, his sole Suspense appearance. He was in theater, radio, and early television, most always as a supporting player. His radio work was mainly in soap operas, but he did star in the radio version of Mr. Moto. His brother was screenwriter John Monks, noted for Brother Rat and 13 Rue Madeleine, and other films.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620325

THE CAST

Philip Sterling (Harry Jonas), Ethel Everett (Anna), James Monks (Constantine), Connie Lembcke (Marietta), Lawson Zerbe (Charley Prince), Ralph Bell (Lt. Bellson)

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1962-03-18 Perchance to Dream

The title of the episode comes from Act 3, Scene 1 of Hamlet. It is “To sleep, perchance to dream,” is part of the same scene as the more famous “To be or not to be.” The phrase refers to the possibility of dreaming during sleep, and that the potential for unpleasant dreams in death might make sleep a less desirable option than the actual living of the daily hardships and challenges of life.

Paul McGrath stars as a hospital psychiatrist in a good script by Bob Corcoran. This is one of the better stories of the Zirato productions.

Dr. Locke meets with Mary Foster, the wife of his patient, Paul Foster, who is recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident. Paul had broken bones and serious skin damage, but his is not right mentally. He is consumed with guilt for the death of a friend’s wife in the crash. The friend has long forgiven him, as all of the analysis of the accident show it was a tire blowout that could not have been foreseen that cause the crash. Paul will not speak with his friend, and spurns his every attempt to offer forgiveness and support. The doctor is concerned that Paul’s guilt is all-consuming and is preventing his return to mental health. Paul has been having a recurring dream that indicates he may be suicidal, and the likelihood of such an act seems to be increasing. Nonetheless, Paul is discharged, and plans a restful train trip to Providence, Rhode Island. The doctor is concerned and warns Mary to look for signs that his recovery still has issues. She should be on the lookout for weapons, especially in his luggage on the trip. While on the trip, Mary peeks into the suitcase and sees a train timetable for Abingdon. That is the town where the fatal accident occurred.

The doctor is very concerned and wants to make a breakthrough. He consults Paul’s friend and mentions the Abingdon timetable that Mary told him about. With the information he gathers, he starts to believe that Paul is not going to commit suicide, he is planning to kill Mary, in a warped sense of balancing the scales of fate, so that each of the friends would have lost a wife, and Paul’s guilt would disappear. The doctor does his best to reach Mary at the hotel where she and Paul are staying. He needs to warn her about what is really happening, which leads to a surprise ending for which Paul’s guilt might become even deeper and darker than it already is.

Providence is the capital of Rhode Island. Abingdon is considered a southern suburb of Boston, nowadays. There may not be a “Brewster Hotel” by that name, but Brewster is a town on the north shore of Cape Cod.

The program was recorded on Thursday, March 8, 1962. The session began at 1:00pm and concluded at 6:00pm.

The surviving recording is a WROW aircheck and has a quick tape defect just before McGrath’s name is mentioned. All of the copies of this broadcast originated with the WROW aircheck by Pat Rispole.

It was previously believed that this script was re-used from the 1949-10-19 production with the same title on the series Starring Boris Karloff. It was not, and appears to be freshly written for Suspense. The Karloff script was about a mad scientist who was drugging his son in a manner that would result in a genius-level intelligence when we grew up. The story was told in first-person format by scientist character, seemingly from a psychiatric hospital. No recording of this broadcast has been found.

The patient’s name is “Paul Foster” and his wife is “Mary Foster.” If that name sounds familiar, there was a radio series Mary Foster, The Editor’s Daughter, but there is no connection with this episode, even as an inside joke.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620318

THE CAST

Paul McGrath (Dr. Locke), Teri Keane (Mary Foster, Operator #2), Bernard Grant (Paul Foster), Bob Dryden (Ernest Masterson), Guy Repp (Train Conductor), Toni Darnay (Nurse Clemens, Operator #1)

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1962-03-11 Heads You Lose

William Redfield stars in a Robert Arthur story that borrows concepts popularized in Donovan’s Brain to create a mildly engaging story if you ignore some of its expected bad sci-fi suppositions. A hard luck detective is thrilled to get into an investigation that will turn his fortunes around. It’s a predictable sci-fi gumshoe hybrid plotline. A financier has been missing for a little over six years and is presumed dead because he was extremely ill when he vanished. (Most listeners would have known that a person can be declared dead by a court after seven years missing). After six years passed, his attorney got a call from the missing man to conduct a stock trade in his portfolio to raise some cash! The man and lawyer always had a secret code, so he was certain it was him. The lawyer wants the story’s two detectives, Steve and Rollo, to find him. (This is one of those stories where in modern times it seems easy to track phone calls and their origination point, but not so back in the time of hardwired land lines). Skipping ahead of some time-filling dialogue and scenes, the missing man did die, but his brain was kept alive in a tank. He was able to communicate thoughts with the wired connections to a speaker. Steve finds him in a hidden laboratory, and he converses with the missing man’s brain. The man is tired of this existence. He offers Steve money to end it all, to let him finally die in peace. The amount was bigger that the reward to prove him alive or prove him dead. Steve will do it, but before he can get away with it, the angry lab professor who kept the brain alive shoots Steve. And in the end, Steve gets his comeuppance, and now it’s his very head that is being kept alive. Oh boy, be careful what you ask for. Sure, sure, sure… that was a missed spoiler alert.There are multiple ways the title is a play on the plotline. The title has no comma, which is a clue in itself that something may happen to a head of a character. It can be actual or figurative, such as when someone loses their temper. “Heads, You Lose” (with a comma) is a common phrase that deals with elements of risk and you chose between two options incorrectly. In this case it could even refer to the lab about its failed experiments and how they have to keep getting new ones to replace those brains.

Santos Ortega is cast as Rollo Collins, a three-hundred-pound detective. Is this an inside joke? Ortega briefly starred as the rotund Nero Wolfe character in the 1940s radio series. (Hat tip: emruf7 of the Cobalt Club classic radio enthusiast forum).

Keeping brains alive in tanks worked in sci-fi stories, but not in real life. You hear stories, usually of celebrities, about people who contract with cryogenic firms to “freeze” them upon their demise. Thawing will occur when cures are found for whatever they died from. Usually, the process is done only on brains or heads because it is considered that the brain holds the key to a person's identity and consciousness. At some time in the distant future, it can be preserved and potentially transferred into a new body or some kind of robotic device. Sounds like a job for the 2000+ series. Or, perhaps like in Woody Allen’s movie, Sleeper, we will find out that humans should have been eating hot fudge sundaes every day to ensure health.

This is a strange show for Suspense, there are creative aspects to, but it does seem so very out of place. Was it the popularity of Twilight Zone that made producer Zirato pursue a path of more sci-fi than the series usually had? Or was Zirato just working with the flow of what was coming across his desk as writers submitted scripts for consideration? Or did he pick it to thank Robert Arthur for the support for the series in its final months?

The program was recorded on Thursday, March 1, 1962. The session began at 1:00pm and concluded at 6:00pm.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620311

THE CAST

William Redfield (Steve Kimberly), Jimsey Sommers (Secretary), Raymond Edward Johnson (Joshua Franklin), Melville Ruick (Professor Green), Kermit Murdock (Harrison Ward), Santos Ortega (Rollo Collins)

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1962-03-04 Doom Machine

Leon Janney stars in a script by Edgar Marvin that was originally presented on the science fiction series 2000+on 1950-08-02 and starred Luis Van Rooten. The story is set in the year 2500, and some of it sounds strange because many of the technological capabilities that were 500 years away seem to already be here, such as artificial intelligence and self-regulating systems. There are other aspects of the story that have the typical characteristics of 1950s sci-fi, such as robots needing to have some kind of human-like construction. Setting all that aside, however clunky the story is to modern ears, it attempts to address serious philosophical and ethical issues about the hubris of creating something perfect and what would happen if an artificial being had no constraining moral aspects that played a role in the calculus of its “decisions.”

The story is not that good. The question is whether it is simple or simplistic, and ignorant because important knowledge was not discovered by its scripting in 1950, or it was ignorant because many of the concepts were too complex or subtle to be presented in 20 minutes of drama. That broadcast duration limitation makes for some production difficult trade-offs. Considering how the desire of the public for basic scientific knowledge was growing because of the nuclear age and the space race, it is surprising that this story “made the cut” and was considered acceptable and fitting for Suspense. The audience could have handled a better and more suspenseful story.

Janney plays Dr. Atley Ferris who is so frustrated with human limitations and frailties that he wants to create a “pure brain” that is free of such weaknesses. He does so, and his creation, “Max,” who has such a brain that has “maximum electronic mentality.” If things did not go wrong, there would be no story. Things go wrong, Max turns out to be very inflexible in the objective decision-making, and that causes serious issues that can’t seem to be stopped. The story does stop, and is mostly unsatisfying in the end.

The program was recorded on Monday, February 19, 1962. It may have been moved to this date because the Washington’s Birthday holiday was on the usual day for recording, Thursday. The session began at 1:00pm and concluded at 6:00pm.

Scriptwriter Edgar Marvin wrote for various radio series and specials. He became involved in 1950s TV, including a script on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

When some early classic radio collectors were attempting to find and restore as many 2000+ episodes as possible, some took this Suspense episode and clipped its opening and closing, and put the 2000+ series name on it, and the date, and did not add a notation that it was a Suspense episode. This recording was intended to be a “placeholder” until the time, if and when, the actual 2000+ broadcast recording ever surfaced. It was not a nefarious act of deceit, it was what they believed was a good idea at the time. This unfortunately befuddled many collectors of 2000+ and casual radio fans who were not aware of the Suspense production.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620304

THE CAST

Leon Janney (Dr. Ferris), Elaine Rost (Sally Ferris / Hostess), Bernard Grant, Eugene Francis, Cliff Carpenter (roles: Jack, Phillip, Max)

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1962-02-25 Date Night

This William N. Robson script about a father who is concerned about his 16-year-old daughter’s first date stands on its own as a well-told story. Sam Gray plays the father, and Rosemary Rice plays the daughter. As Kathy goes to her dance, her father descends into a night of escalating worry, imagining the worst, and starting to drink in the process. He starts having paranoid fantasies about every possible thing that can go wrong, and the evil intent of her date for the night. He even tries to contact police stations, hospitals, and even the morgue, only to find that he kept the phone so busy all night with his frantic calls that Kathy couldn’t get through and tell him how things were going! The story ends well.

That’s the story. And then there’s the allegory. Robson got caught up in the Red Scare of the 1950s, needlessly so, which turned into trouble working at CBS, and then being forced out. He could not submit scripts until mid-1955 and did not resume producing until 1956. His experiences were the basis of the episode Nobody Ever Quits (that was re-titled Night on Red Mountain in future productions; and yes, “Red” as in Red Channels and Red Scare) and broadcast multiple times on the series. That script has numerous references to his personal CBS Blacklist experience, especially with executive Daniel O’Shea. This script, Date Night, seems to refer to the whole historical period.

If one posits that the father in the story is a parallel to Senator Joe McCarthy, and his supposed alcoholism, and the paranoia of the times, the script has a much different meaning. The fever pitch of the father’s investigation of where his daughter was, and his drinking in the process, meant that he had no trust of his daughter, and how he raised her with his wife, and surely no trust of her date for the evening.

Much of the McCarthy era’s problems were self-inflicted, just like the father’s incessant phone calls would not allow her to reach him by phone. There were Communists in many government positions, as documented by the 1990s de-classification of the Venona Project from the decryption of communication cables and other forms of communication with Russian and other operatives. The Red Scare was so hot, that it became more difficult to determine what the real threats were.

Kathy, the daughter, was a good-natured innocent, like much of the general public in the Red Scare period, confused by all of the goings-on, and just wanting to go about their lives. The boyfriend had accusations and suspicions hurled in his direction that were actually baseless. It’s like he was never given a chance to prove himself as a good and reliable person who might actually be a good companion for the daughter. Thankfully, the mother is the voice of reason in the story, a sense of moderation, that the father needs so desperately. The story ends well, and perhaps there were some lessons learned.

Robson returned to CBS and through a variety of events, ended up at Voice of America, producing programs to reach people behind the Iron Curtain and other totalitarian geographies. He won multiple Peabody awards for his work.

There is a possibility that it wasn’t just Joe McCarthy as the inspiration for the script, but also former CBS executive Daniel O’Shea. He was in charge of the CBS Blacklist and vetting of talent. O’Shea lost a lot of power in 1955 at the network when CEO Bill Paley got sick of it all, especially after Ed Murrow’s reporting on the McCarthy hearings. O’Shea went back to RKO Pictures as president and retired in 1958. McCarthy died in 1957. Robson obviously still had some hard feelings, but his expression of them resulted in some very good radio productions. He would later say he was pleased with his career and really held no grudges. Perhaps that was the case because he worked them all out in his creativity.

No script cover is available for this episode. Therefore, the date and time of recording is not known. 

This program was originally scheduled for 1962-02-18.

The program was recorded on Thursday, February 15, 1962. The session began at 1:00pm and concluded at 6:00pm.

Two recordings have survived, both are listenable, but have somewhat narrow range. The network aircheck is the better of the two. The Armed Forces Radio Service recording (AFRS#914) is has narrow range and some additional noise. It is hope that better recordings will be found in the future for this compelling script and production.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620225

THE CAST

Rosemary Rice (Kathy), Sam Gray (Father), Richard Holland (Jerry), Toni Darnay (Mother), Fredi [Fredericka] Chandler (neighbor, telephone operator), Jack Grimes (Midnight Expresso employee), Lawson Zerbe (Black Kitten manager), Bill Lipton (hospital employee), William Mason (Highway Patrolman), Guy Repp (Sergeant Shea, Morgue Attendant)

Some newspaper publicity mentioned Ian Martin in the cast. He was likely originally cast as the father and replaced by Sam Gray.

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1962-02-18 The Old Boyfriend

Elspeth Eric and Joe Julian start in a rather pedestrian Peter Fernandez script. A recently released convict turns to an old girlfriend for help after leaving prison. He’s trying to avoid the police, but kidnaps her daughter to use as a bargaining chip to avoid capture. The old girlfriend was recently widowed, and remembers the old boyfriend, but once her daughter is taken hostage, she does whatever she can to get her released. The woman is thankfully able to change places with the daughter. Then she starts to talk him down, and lowers the temperature of the crisis: “I'm giving you my life. You'll either have to kill me, or you'll have to use me as a shield, and one of their bullets might kill me.” The standoff diffuses, and she explains to the police “If he'd been a stranger, I wouldn't have had a chance. But he wasn't a stranger… he was an old boyfriend.”

Is this another case where the Suspense music could have communicated more tension in the story? It is very predictable, with little personal tension beyond what is stated. What if he was wrong about their past friendship? What if she was a victim of assault, and she had to surrender some even deeper feeling of hate for him? What if her job was to make room for a sharpshooter to get him? Even in a twenty minute story, there was likely room for that.

The program was recorded Friday, July 28, 1961, almost seven months prior to broadcast. The recording session ran from 10:30am to 2:30pm. The episode was originally scheduled to air Sunday, August 13, 1961. It was pre-empted for a sports special about the Mantle-Maris home run chase of Babe Ruth’s record.

The surviving recording is a WROW aircheck. Once again, the station engineer misses the network cue because the weather report ran a few seconds longer than it should have. This is a much better recording than has been available to classic radio enthusiasts for decades.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620218

THE CAST

Elspeth Eric (Maggie), Joseph Julian (Judson), Lawson Zerbe (Police Lieutenant), Francie Myers (Babette), Peter Fernandez (Officer)

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1962-02-11 The Man Who Went Back to Save Lincoln

Ian Martin and Court Benson star in a Robert Arthur script that was originally broadcast on The Mysterious Traveler of 1950-02-07. Benson plays an expert on Lincolniana, Tom Morrison, who is convinced the course of history would have been different if Lincoln's assassination had been prevented. He consents to submit to scientific time travel experiment concocted by a Professor Hodges, played by Martin. But it’s not time travel, but it is consciousness travels and inhabits the mind of someone living in that desired time. They run a test involving Tom to complete a simple task that his father had left undone back in 1912. It works! They ran another where Tom hears the Gettysburg Address with the mind of a local farmer. Professor Hughes is confident now, and they move the equipment to the Ford Theatre in Washington. Tom walks through the events of that day and the exact movements of people involved on the fateful night of April 14, 1865, when Lincoln was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth. They are targeting John Buckingham, the doorkeeper at Ford’s that night, and Tom has to keep repeating the phrases “Save Lincoln. Kill Booth” to keep that in the mind of Buckingham in whom his consciousness is residing. Unfortunately, the time travel did not work… and he is not in the mind of Buckingham, but in the mind of the assassin John Wilkes Booth! The possibility was planted at the beginning of the story when Tom and the Professor were talking about the strength of the will of the host might not be able to be changed by the traveler. Wilkes’ determination was obviously too much for Tom to overcome.

Robert Arthur’s approach to time travel in this story is rather novel, which keeps the story more interesting than it might otherwise be. It’s usually the case that such time travel gimmicks have entire persons transported back in time. Another interesting approach is in the episode Time on My Hands by Walter Black of 1960-09-25. https://archive.org/details/TSP600925 Time travel stories always have significant plot holes or require major leaps of faith about plausibility. That doesn’t mean they can’t be fun or entertaining.

The program was recorded on Thursday, February 8, 1962. The session began at 1:00pm and ended at 6:00pm.

In 1962, Lincoln’s Birthday was not a national holiday, but was observed in about half of the US states at that time.

After many weeks without advertising, Alpine cigarettes is the sponsor of this episode.

The surviving recording is a network feed and has the close of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and a promo for CBS News before Suspense begins.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP620211

THE CAST

Ian Martin (Professor Hodges), Ralph Bell (Man), Margaret Draper (Mary Andrews), Cliff Carpenter (Buckingham), Court Benson (Tom Morrison), Jim Boles (Voice of Abe Lincoln)

Ralph Bell also appeared in the original Mysterious Traveler production of this script.

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