Remembering Spooky Nights with CBS Radio Mystery Theater

Pleasant...dreams?

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After writing about the nostalgia of baseball on the radio a couple of weeks ago, my brother said “You should do one on CBS Radio Mystery Theater.” Now there was a fifty year old callback. As eleven and twelve year-olds in the early 1970s, we were dedicated fans. We spent many spooky nights lying on the floor in the dark living room at ten pm, listening to old-timey radio, seeing if we could make it to the end with EG Marshall’s sign off: “Pleasant…Dreams?” He said it like a creepy question mark. That was the scariest part of his radio “adventure into the macabre” and “the world of terrible imagination.” We were hooked and we even tried to create some episodes of our own.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater was not, itself, old-time radio. It was meant to be a throwback to that era. CRMT was made decades after the heyday when my mother and her family would sit around the living room and “watch” the radio. It ran from 1974-1982, long after the audio golden age before television. As kids, my brothers and I were firmly in the tv generation. We watched the first run sitcoms of the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family era and early seventies detective shows like Mannix and Cannon. So, listening to an hour long radio program is not something one would have expected from kids our age. Yet, somehow we bought into the retro vibe that the producers were going for.

Most of the episodes were directed by series creator, Himan Brown (as immature preteens, my brother and I had a lot of fun with that name). Brown won a Peabody Award and went into the Radio Hall of Fame for his retro brainchild. Amazingly, this prolific program aired every night, five days a week! Wikipedia notes that were 1,399 original episodes and nearly 3000 total broadcasts, including repeats. Each episode was hosted by the distinguished actor EG Marshall. He had much television success, but I remember him best as “Juror #4” in the classic movie Twelve Angry Men, which, as a teacher, I showed to my classes dozens of times when studying jury duty. There were several repeat actors in CRMT over its nine year run. Most of them were veterans of the golden age of radio, but there were many recognizable names from the movies and television of the seventies, including Ruby Dee, Richard Crenna, Jerry Stiller, Ann Meara, Sandy Dennis, Casey Kasem, Julie Newmar from Batman, Margaret Hamilton from the Wizard of Oz, Agnes Moorehead from Bewitched, and Frances Sternhagen (Cliff’s mother from Cheers). Fred Gwynn, who played Herman Munster, appeared in 82 episodes of CRMT. Before they were famous, there were appearances by Mandy Patinkin, John Lithgow, Holland Taylor, and Sarah Jessica Parker. We didn’t appreciate that back then, but did take notice of the actor Russell Horton, because he had our last name. It turns out we might have known him as the commercial voice of the Trix rabbit.

The vast majority of the episodes were written directly for CRMT. Writers were paid at scale, which was about $700 per show, and actors $75 per episode. Some of the broadcasts were actually pared down retellings of classic tales like House of the Seven Gables, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I distinctly remember that every Christmas Eve they aired a version of A Christmas Carol, with EG Marshall himself playing Ebenezer Scrooge.

I hadn’t thought about the fun of those creepy nights for quite some time, so I was surprised to find that there is still a significant following for the show and that all episodes are easily available online. There is even a Facebook page that celebrates the birthdays of the regular actors. Then, it was like the floodgates opened and waves of memory poured over when I listened to a few shows in preparing this article.

Each episode began with the loud and distinctive creaking door sound effect. Each scene transition was preceded by ominous music: the foghorn-like blast of three slow double bass strokes (Voo…doo…doo), followed by the distant call of a muted trumpet (What waah). The foley artists’ sound effects throughout the shows came a little louder than necessary, but enhanced that old-timey feel. The mysteries were always tense, and suspense grew until an episode’s big reveal. I vaguely remembered one that I re-listened to called “Sleepy Village,” where a traveling couple were nearly lured into permanent residence in a ghost town. In “The Girl Who Found Things,” the 40-something murderer was revealed early and, in a scene that would not play well today, was later found in a compromising position with a clairvoyant sixteen year old. Most of the acting was innocent, yet expectedly overdramatic, but some of the portrayals of ethnic characters would not stand well against modern scrutiny.

Some of the biggest flashbacks came in the episodes that included 1970s era commercials. There were pantyhose ads for JCPenney and jingles for department stores. One commercial had Susan Anton singing about a Perfect Sleeper mattress and another used the long forgotten slogan of “the sign of the cat,” complete with cougar sounds, to sell Plymouth cars. In one episode without commercials, there was still the interruption of a news bulletin about the conflicts of Southeast Asia: “The Chinese have sent MiGs to bomb Vietnamese atolls in the South China Sea.”

My brothers and I loved the program so much, we spent summer days trying to recreate our own radio shows. Using a tape recorder, we created episodes of our own, mimicking the patterns of CRMT. I think our favorite part was creating our own sound effects, which often involved dropping things to crash on a hard floor. Though we had lots of fun making them, I am not sure our “broadcasts” made much sense. I would love to get my hands on those cassette recordings today (although I don’t know what I would play them on).

There is something extra creepy about listening to those old shows, even now. I don’t like horror movies much, but these nostalgic mysteries really made those eerie broadcasts fun. There is something about the radio that sparks the imagination when you shut all other distractions out. Even as kids, we knew that. Some day, I would like to have future grandkids on a long car ride as a captive audience for a good mystery show. Even better around a dark campfire.