Suspense - The Lost Special, Sept 30, 1943, AFRS Pgm 24

[Steve Kostelecky]

I'm posting this link to rand's esoteric otr podcast--please give a listen and post comments for his time, money and effort to share. There is more information there:

http://randsesotericotr.podbean.com/

Unheard publicly since September 30, 1943, we bring you Orson Welles starring in “The Lost Special” a “tale well calculated to keep in you … Suspense!”. Originally broadcast on the CBS radio network, but now lost, the version heard here was distributed by the Armed Forces Radio Service as program 24 in the “Suspense” series.

If you’re a member of the otr mailing list, you’ve heard about my finding “The Lost Special” in an ebay auction a few days ago. If you’re wondering if I’m going to be selling the disc, I’m not. I collect for the enjoyment of the shows and discovering something new. The disc is a unique find that needs to find its way to an archives someday.

I’m offering “The Lost Special” as part of my podcast in an unrestored medium-quality MP3 that’s optimized for downloading. I’m investigating the best way to offer it to the OTR community on a CD or high quality .WAV file and to get the sound restored with more advanced tools than I have, so stayed tuned for more info.

Hope you enjoy the show. In the mean time, if you know of some old transcriptions scurried away somewhere, send me an email. You never know what might turn up in an old stack of records!

[Store Hadji]

Wow, I hadn't even heard OF that one before, let alone heard it!

Thanks billions!

(That AFRS announcer intones "Suspense" with the most hilarious amount of boredom I've ever heard. That alone would make it worth a listen.)

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you so much, guys!

I would like to make a further, rather off-the-wall suggestion.

Somewhere in these pages, I have described a startling radio experience of mine, during which without a lead-in, a man began to describe an assassination plot targeting an important leader. The production, in my memory, did not have Welles, but it was very much along the lines of "The War of the Worlds" in its development. I have never heard anything like it again, but this production you provide us is similar in format. Only at the end was the series identified. As a boy, I often twirled the dial, and found such programs I could not identify.

This docu-drama may have been one of them, or it may be only a desiccated figment of my imagination.

If not, the lack of the proper lead-in would be explained, and the carefully delayed War Department edition, in the midst of Wartime 1943, would be reinforced.

In this particular case, I would opt for personal delusion on my part, but I can not shake the feeling that a more free-form adaptation of this basic story came over my radio in the years I listened most: 1937 to 1949.

[In the latter year, I remember coming home one evening to find my father, as was his wont, perched before our Philco, reading a detective magazine, a Pall Mall smoldering in one of a succession of blue ashtrays. "BBC Newsreel" beamed from Canadian Radio across Lake Erie was on, describing incidents which became The Korean Emergency. My father said, a bit ruefully, wistfully, that I had missed a good Escape that night. "Oh?" I said. I'm afraid girls had fatally seized my imagination. Radio would never again have the same hold on me.]

Anyway, Thanks for [another] "memory."

[I remember thinking of this program, now lost in my mind, most vividly, on the weekend of November 22, 1963.]

Glenn

[Steve Kostelecky]

Sorry I started a new thread instead of replying to Store Hadji in the original.
Anyway, this story was done on Escape in 1949 and apparently as a Sherlock Holmes story other times. I think Randy has some information at the blog site.
Please thank him there--I am only a happy recipient of his time, money and effort like anybody else.
Steve