This episode was a missing episode until it was found in a cache of AFRS discs that a group of collectors purchased in 2023. It is now available for the very first time with this blogpost.
Eric Snowden stars as Eldon Bottle in an entertaining Richard Chandlee script about a man who loves caring for his garden and will do most anything to protect it. Gardening keeps his mind off the loss of his wife from years ago, and he expects it will keep him busy when he retires from his bookkeeping job. His daughter, however, believes he will be better off if he marries once more, if he finds someone to do so. He is walking one day when he is nearly hit by a car if not for the shouted warning by Ethel Magwitch. It turns out that she’s been widowed, too. He narrates “I’ve never been sure which hit me that day, the car or Mrs. Magwitch...she was like an express train bearing down on me.” They soon marry. She moves into his house but she likes nothing about it, considering it small, and the old and sentimental furniture must go. Most of all, she considers the garden a waste of time and space, and she has plans for that and changing many other things. He manages to keep the garden while she changes everything else. He comes home one day and finds her son, Charlie, visiting, after his “release from the Navy.” (Ahem… yeah, right, “the Navy”). Clearly, something is up, and Charlie implies more changes are coming. The garden finally becomes the target of change. He warns her not to try it, and tells her to agree to a divorce, which she refuses. He describes her as “a monstrous female beetle perched on a chromium chair; it was only a matter of extermination.” That can mean only one thing, on Suspense. He plans a ruse to stay in the city overnight for the long hours of the annual audit at work. He packs his garden shears, too. He will go to work, work late, check into the hotel at a late hour, all in the development of an alibi and witnesses. Then he will sneak out, go back home, murder Ethel, then return to the hotel, undetected with the alibi in place. Things go in a different direction, however.
He does get home but Ethel puts up quite a fight, and he can’t accomplish the task. He decides to head back to London, leaving Ethel at home, very much alive. When he gets to the office that morning, police are outside. He decides not to go in but to call the police station back home, and tells them he will return immediately to the station. Why? Has Ethel reported his attack and does he have to confess to it? The police tell him that his wife is okay, but suffering from paranoia. She claims Eldon tried to attack her at night. They knew he was staying in the city so there was no way he could not have done so. Her erratic behavior with the police is a different matter. She’s being kept in a police cell and making quite a racket. She’s screaming and claiming that Eldon is Jack the Ripper. They give him papers to sign, committing her to a sanitarium. They also tell him that they were notified that Ethel was wanted by the authorities. She’s been running a scam of marrying widowers and fleecing them of their property. In the end, Eldon, and the garden, are safe. The alibi worked in his favor in an unexpected way.
This broadcast was missing for decades. No network recording has been found. This Armed Forces Radio Service recording, AFRS#547, is an extremely welcome find. The script was used again on Suspense after the series moved back to New York on 1959-09-20. That production starred John Gibson and has been in circulation for most of the classic radio hobby’s years.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP550823
THE CAST
Eric Snowdon (Eldon Bottle), Paula Winslowe (Ethel Magwitch), Ellen Morgan (Diana), Raymond Lawrence (Constable), Ben Wright (Charlie Magwitch / Doctor Fenrose), Larry Thor (Narrator)
###
