Bernie Grant stars in a David Hill script about a father, named “Les,” whose wife is with him on a combination business and pleasure trip to Puerto Rico. Their young daughter is at a sleepaway camp back home. During their hotel stay, a cat takes a liking to them and visits their room often. The parents are starting to pack to return home while the daughter is at summer camp. As they pack the wife’s belongings, the cat interrupts them and starts playing with one of the souvenirs they had purchased. They try to retrieve it from the cat, it breaks. The cat scurries away. They think nothing of it and the wife heads back home. Les does not hear from her until she sends a message back to the hotel that she arrived home safely.
Soon thereafter, Les looks for the cat which he has not seen lately, and asks the maid to make sure there is milk for it. She sadly reports that the cat died, and may have been poisoned. We eventually learn that the souvenirs were decorated with seeds that were poisonous. Les is very concerned about the souvenirs that his wife brought home because he knows that his daughter has a habit of chewing on pencils and other items that she handles. When he tries to contact her, there is no answer at the house. He realizes that she is probably on the way to the camp to pick their daughter up. Thus begins a frantic effort to find his wife and daughter in time. Amid the panic, he does his best to be systematic and calm, but it is difficult. He does not know the name of the camp, he can’t reach neighbors, but he remembers his wife left the family checkbook with him. Eventually he starts tracking down in which camp the daughter was enrolled. The back and forth of phone calls and wires back and forth between local police and those back home, the piecing together of financial records and letters that were left in the room eventually come together with enough information to direct their efforts. Will he be able to contact them in time?
The script was by David Hill who wrote mainly for 1950s television. The production has a plot elements similar to 1955-10-25 To None a Deadly Drug. It is a good story, predictable as it might be, with details that keep it interesting and engaging. This is one of those stories where modern communications has made key elements of the story obsolete.
It is not known when the program was recorded as there us no available script cover with those details.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP611015
THE CAST
Bernard Grant (Les), Guy Repp (The Photographer), Connie Lembke (Pam), Bob Dryden (Garcia), Barbara Kasarr (The Operator), Ralph Camargo (Lopez), Dellie Sonnenberg (The Maid)
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