I mentioned a while ago that I’m a big fan of old time radio and that I was listening to old Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar programs.
After YTJD had been broadcast in its five day a week, 15 minutes per day format for about a year, it returned to its old format of one 30 minute program for a week. It wasn’t quite as good as the serialized format. There’s a real limit to the scope of the story you can tell from beginning to end in a half hour slot.
That continued for the next five years. The program was still good. Not quite as good as in the serialized format but good. Then at the end of 1960 disaster occurred. CBS decided to move the production of the program from Los Angeles to New York. Bob Bailey, whose voicing of Johnny Dollar boosted YTJD head and shoulders over radio’s other hardboiled detective programs, refused to go and he was replaced by Bob Readick.
And it was flat. Lackluster. The stable of New York radio actors just wasn’t up to the standard set by the LA cadre. Athena Lorde, veteran radio actress and the wife of radio actor Jim Boles, stepped in ocasionally but, honestly, Virginia Gregg had set a pretty high standard as a femme fatale. Russell Thorsen, John Dehner, Harry Bartel, Vic Perrin, Parley Baer, the whole YTJD repertory company couldn’t be replaced. Jack Johnstone was still writing the scripts but it was produced and directed by somebody else. Even the musical direction was different.
When YTJD was cancelled in 1962 it marked the end of radio drama. It didn’t just die; it was murdered.
