Bernard Grant stars as police detective Dresser in a Robert Arthur story about a police officer who may have grabbed $60,000 from the perpetrators of robbery and hid it away until an opportunity to retrieve it presents itself. Since arrests were made but the money was never found, suspicions about where it may be taints Dresser’s reputation because he might have kept the money for himself. By the end of the story, after we meet characters with odd names like his fellow officer “Sloppy Peters”, crooks like “Nick the Pick,” “Big Man,” and, of course, “Little Man.” It is an entertaining story in a B-movie kind of way that has a surprise ending as the money is found and reveals an honest side of Dresser and Peters that was not expected.
The story might have been presented on The Mysterious Traveler in the later 1940s or very early 1950s, though detective stories were not always typical of the program. It did appear in the short-lived Mysterious Traveler Magazine edition of March 1952. It was published as “Sixty Grand Missing.” That amount of money would be about $725,000 in US$2025. If it was performed on the radio series, it may have had a different title.
The title published in the 1952 magazine was “Sixty Grand Missing.” The title on the script is “60 Grand Missing.” Newspapers likely followed CBS publicity releases, but there is inconsistency there as newspapers had “Sixty Grand Missing” but also “$60 Grand Missing.”
The program was recorded on Tuesday, June 14, 1960. Rehearsal began at 3:00pm and ended at 6:30pm. Recording was done from 6:30pm to 7:00pm.
There are several network aircheck recordings available, all of them incomplete in some manner. It is believed that the core recording is from WROW. A reconstructed broadcast recording has been created. It has the WROW station ID and the Suspense open from a different but contemporary program. Most recordings do not have the introduction mentioning the episode name and a few words to set the scene, but a recording that had that section intact was found. It is not known if a commercial followed the introduction; some earlier reconstructed recordings used a Pepsi commercial from a different episode. That was excluded from this reconstruction because it is not known if there was a commercial, and if there was, what the commercial might have been. The first few minutes of the story were missing from several recordings, and that was found in listenable sound quality. At 3:25 the reconstructed recording continues to the ending announcements in very good sound. It is hoped that a complete and original aircheck, or an Armed Forces Radio Service recording, can be found in the future to replace this composite recording.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP600619
THE CAST
Bernard Grant (Dresser), Ralph Bell (Sergeant Bronson), Leon Janney (Sloppy Peters), Sam Raskyn (Ace), Joseph Julian (Nick the Pick), Mason Adams (Big Man), Michael Kane (Little Man), Nat Polen (Commissioner)
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