John Lund stars in a Richard-George Pedicini script about problems with teenagers and illegal drugs. A father is so distraught about his daughter’s use of drugs that he turns her into the police in for possession of narcotics, hoping that she will stop.
Lund portrays a detective assigned to break up a high school narcotics ring. The detective gets a phone call from a grief-stricken father who has just found marijuana in his daughter’s room. The girl reveals the name of her source, a high school boy friend. He gets his drug supply from someone else whom the girl does not know. The detective catches up with the young man. He offers to take the detective to the boss of the narcotics ring. As they arrive at the deserted warehouse, said to be the gang’s meeting place, the youth pulls out a gun and declares that this is the spot he picked for the detective to die! Now what?
The opening of the broadcast says the production is “a story from your morning newspaper.” CBS publicity claimed it was a “documentary based on police records.” In a discussion many years ago, Pedicini made it clear to classic radio researcher and international entertainer Keith Scott that it was not. Keith said:
I interviewed him around 1987. I recall him saying that Lewis approached him for another story in the “based on life or fact or headlines” style. He said he wrote Melody in Dreams “purely from my own imagination.” He was laughing about the fact that Elliott “never asked what my source was, and I never told him it was just my own made up story.”
Lewis’ “out” if anyone asked was that newspapers had almost daily stories about drugs and narcotics problems. In a sense, then, how could it not be a story from a newspaper? The topic would have seemed very familiar, and plausible, to Suspense listeners because the topic was in the news so often.
Storylines about drugs in the radio programs of the 1940s and 1950s sound very dated to modern listeners, and may seem somewhat amusing. Though they may be, families had little experience dealing with addiction. They were often baffled about how to understand and deal with the problem and care for their loved ones.
There is a dialogue line that indicates the times in which the script was written and performed. Addiction was considered a serious moral failing. When a coffee can is found with illegal drugs it is described as “the coffee can and its sinful contents.”
Suspense had always been considered a show for adults. It is likely that there was a hope that older kids were listening and that they would take heed, in a “scared straight” kind of way, and be discouraged from using drugs and resist the peer pressure of experimentation.
The sound effect of walking on a concrete sidewalk at 18:00 sounds suspiciously like walking on an indoor floor. It seems that no carpet was ever walked on during the radio drama age, and walking inside or outside usually sounded exactly alike.
At 25:20, the song “Melody in Dreams” is actually Harlem Nocturne. The music is considered a jazz standard. It was written by Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers wrote the lyrics in 1939 for the Ray Noble Orchestra. Hagen and Rogers were in the orchestra at that time. Some will recognize it as the theme song of the CBS television series Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer which starred Stacy Keach. The show ran from 1984 to 1987.
Rehearsals of Melody in Dreams began just after the live broadcast of Arctic Rescue at 7:00pm on Monday, December 22, 1952. The recording of the drama portion of the program commenced at Midnight, December 23, 1952 and concluded at 12:30am. The late night session was in anticipation of cast and crew availability during the holidays. When this episode was broadcast on December 29, the orchestra and announcements were performed live.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP521229
THE CAST
JOHN LUND (Royles), Howard McNear (Crab / Tapaz), Joe Kearns (Shank), Junius Matthews (Graf), Ann Whitfield (Joan), Shep Menken (Uncle Fred), Sam Edwards (Nickey Malone), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: Tom Holland (Hap), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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