1959: Suspense curiosities as the show moves to New York under Paul Roberts

• Actress Ellen McRae makes many appearances on the series, and even writes two scripts. She made her Broadway debut in a play named Fair Game. That play was written by Sam Locke. The director of the play was Paul Roberts. He and McRae met in the production and were married in 1957. The Crisis of Dirk Diamond was written by Sam Locke. So it was Locke who was indirectly responsible for McRae and Roberts meeting and marrying months later. Roberts and McRae divorced in 1961. She married again, and became Ellen Burstyn. Between Tonys, Oscars, and Emmys, she may be the most decorated actor to ever appear on Suspense, and the appearances were all before she became famous.
• Dirk Diamond was actually a re-used script from 1951 and the TV series The Web. No kinescope has been found. It is not the best show but we now have a crisp and clear AFRS copy!
• One of the episodes is Infanticide doesn't really seem to fit the Suspense style, but Paul Roberts produced that ground-breaking show, and one can understand why he would re-use what he considered to be a good script. He used three scripts from that series. The Indictment script is a reminder of how little documentation we have of that series in terms of dates and even newspaper documentation. Lots of the newspaper listings are wrong or nebulous. If anyone knows a downtown Atlanta college student who can be hired to go look at the scripts at U of Georgia, let me know. We do have the original Indictment broadcast for this episode.
• The Last Trip has a plotline with a suitcase bomb that would not go over well, literally, as it would explode during a plane flight. This ranks the episode on the unsavory scale with the 1947 episode The X-Ray Camera which would blow up underground tunnels leading in and out of Manhattan. Last Trip turns into some comedic aspects as the husband cancels the plane trip and arrives back home with the unexploded suitcase, as the other two in the triangle have to dispose of it so they don't suffer the explosive consequences.
• Re-Entry is better once you put it into context of where the Russian and US space programs were at the time. George Bamber combines his inspirations from X Minus One and Twilight Zone in that one.
• The 1959 New York episodes are a bit spotty in terms of their ability to engage. Among the better episodes of these 17 are Room 203, The Easy Victim, Re-Entry, Dynamite Run, and A Korean Christmas Carol. (Room 203 was also a TV script used in the 1953 Philip Morris Playhouse. No kinescope is known to have survived.)
• A Korean Christmas Carol was George Bamber's first radio script. He wrote while he was serving in Korea and was assigned to the Armed Forces Korea Network station as an announcer. When his military commitment was completed, he was working at the CBS mail room in Los Angeles, and submitted the script to William N. Robson. It was rejected. Bamber submitted it to Paul Roberts when he became the show’s producer, and Roberts accepted it. The script was performed on his station sometime between 1955 and 1957 with a cast of co-workers who were also assigned there. They produced their own sound effects, including recording some of the trucks they used, since there were no sound effects records at the station.
• We are lacking 1959 script covers so much of the research process is hampered, unfortunately. Karl Schadow did locate most of the script covers from 1960 to the end of the series in the Hummert Papers at the University of Wyoming. How they ended up with the Hummerts is beyond me, and I have not figured that out.  The covers are fascinating, with lots of cast changes noted before the recording sessions.