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Old Time Radio Detective — Johnny Dollar: "The Star of Capetown Matter Part 2" (1956) | Full Episode Aug 21, 2026

Show notes

Bob Bailey stars as Johnny Dollar, the freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account. A nervous underwriter sends him to Cape Town to babysit a fabulous diamond belonging to an eccentric playboy who treats a priceless stone like loose change. In this second chapter of the five-part case, the assignment falls apart: Johnny is knocked cold, the Star of Capetown vanishes, and the trail runs out over open water. He takes a helicopter out to a cruise ship steaming away from the continent with the stolen stone aboard. Originally broadcast on CBS, July 17, 1956, with Virginia Gregg, Harry Bartell, Marvin Miller and Jeanne Tatum. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Western — The Six Shooter: "The Capture of Stacy Gault" (1953) | Full Episode Aug 20, 2026

Show notes

James Stewart stars as Britt Ponset, the drifting Texas cowboy at the heart of NBC's folksy 1953 Western The Six Shooter. Word tears into the town of Elk Point that Stacy Gault — bank robber, outlaw, killer — is riding their way, and panic does the rest. Britt sees the rumor for what it is and finds himself the only cool head in town, trying to talk Elk Point down before a jumpy posse guns down a man who may well be innocent. The real danger here isn't the outlaw on the road; it's the fear boiling up inside the townspeople. Written by Frank Burt, with Eleanor Audley, Barney Phillips, Forrest Lewis and Parley Baer. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "The Adventure of the Gray Pasha" (1949) | Full Episode Aug 19, 2026

Show notes

Every week the announcer calls on a retired Dr. Watson, who pours a glass, opens the old tin dispatch box, and unwraps one more case from the Baker Street years. In "The Adventure of the Gray Pasha," first broadcast May 16, 1949, John Stanley's Holmes takes on an original radio mystery with a whisper of the Empire's far corners about it — a client with more to hide than to tell, and a small detail that Watson walks straight past while Holmes reads a whole history in it. One of the last cases from Stanley's run as the great detective. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — X Minus One: "Mars Is Heaven" (1955) | Full Episode Aug 18, 2026

Show notes

X Minus One is the finest science fiction ever produced for radio — NBC's half hour of adult SF, drawn from the pages of Astounding and Galaxy and adapted by staff writers Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts. "Mars Is Heaven" is its most famous half hour. The first rocket to Mars lands in 1987 and the crew comes down the ladder braced for a hostile world. What they find is Green Bluff, Illinois, 1928 — white frame houses, a bandstand, lilacs, a piano playing down the street, and the people they buried years ago. Lustig's grandparents. Captain Black's brother Edward, on the porch of the house Black grew up in. One by one the crew scatters into the arms of family and the mission simply dissolves. Only Dr. Horst, the ship's psychologist, finds nobody waiting for him, and he is the one who says it out loud: the Martians are telepaths, the town is being read out of the crew's own memories, and every man who walks into a house tonight walks in alone. Adapted by Ernest Kinoy from Ray Bradbury's 1948 story, later folded into The Martian Chronicles. Broadcast May 8, 1955. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Horror — Lights Out: "Poltergeist" (1942) | Full Episode Aug 17, 2026

Show notes

Lights Out is the program that taught radio how to frighten people — Arch Oboler writing for the ear alone, half an hour at a time, with a warning up front to send the children out of the room. In "Poltergeist," three young women from the city are walking a snowbound country road when they come across an old burying ground, and one of them dances on a grave as a joke. The nervous one tells them what the country people say about that: it wakes the noisy spirit, the one that throws stones. Minutes later a stone comes out of nowhere. Broadcast on CBS October 20, 1942, the third week of Oboler's fifty-two week revival, and later rerun under the title "Gravestone." Oboler closes by stepping out of the story to read from what he calls authenticated records — a London house in 1872 where stones flew and nobody ever explained it. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Western — Gunsmoke: "Jud's Woman" (1957) | Full Episode Aug 16, 2026

Show notes

Gunsmoke is the show that invented the adult western on radio: Matt Dillon is the U.S. Marshal of Dodge City in the 1870s, and William Conrad plays him tired, blunt, and often too late to help. "Jud's Woman" comes from the sixth season, a Marian Clark script built around a marriage the whole town can see going wrong and a marshal with no legal standing to stop it. Clark had joined the writing staff that year and would go on to write more Gunsmoke than anyone but John Meston. Produced and directed by Norman Macdonnell, with Parley Baer as Chester, Georgia Ellis as Kitty, and Howard McNear as Doc. Broadcast on CBS, December 1, 1957. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "The Elusive Agent Part 1" (1949) | Full Episode Aug 15, 2026

Show notes

John Stanley's Sherlock Holmes carried Baker Street through radio's late golden age, each half-hour framed as a case Dr. Watson recalls over a glass of sherry. "The Adventure of the Elusive Agent" opens a rare three-part serial, broadcast in the spring of 1949 and set not in the gaslit 1890s but in 1913, with Europe drifting toward war. Mycroft Holmes calls his brother down from retirement and his bees in Sussex: the plans for an experimental armored fighting vehicle have been stolen, the naval officer entrusted with them has been murdered on his honeymoon, and the agent who took them has left almost nothing behind. Part one of three. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Mystery — Box 13: "Short Assignment" (1948) | Full Episode Aug 14, 2026

Show notes

Dan Holiday, mystery novelist and former newspaperman, keeps a standing ad running in the Star-Times: "Adventure wanted, will go anywhere, do anything — write Box 13." In "Short Assignment," the letter comes from Walter Flit, a private detective who is short on height and shorter on nerve, and who wants Holiday to stand in for him at a party where a suicide may have been nothing of the kind. What starts as an easy favor turns into a murder Holiday has to untangle among a room full of polite, well-dressed liars. Alan Ladd, then one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws, both produced this syndicated 1948-49 series and starred as Holiday, with Sylvia Picker as his scatterbrained secretary Suzy and Edmund MacDonald as Lieutenant Kling. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Thriller — Suspense: "Twas the Night Before Christmas" (1953) | Full Episode Aug 13, 2026

Show notes

For twenty years Suspense was radio's outstanding theater of thrills, and its favorite trick was to take a warm, ordinary room and put something terrible just outside it. Here the room is a house on Christmas Eve, the tree lit and the stocking hung, and the terrible thing is a wire from an airline. Greer Garson stars as the housekeeper raising a little girl named Kathy, who wants exactly one present this year: her mother and father, home from Paris. Their plane has gone missing in a storm — and now someone has to decide whether a child should be told the truth on the one night of the year she is certain that wishes come true. Written by Morton Fine and David Friedkin, with Ann Whitfield as Kathy and Howard McNear as Mr. Anderson. Stay to the last minute; Suspense saved one more turn. Originally broadcast December 21, 1953. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

Old Time Radio Detective — 21st Precinct: "The Platform" (1954) | Full Episode Aug 12, 2026

Show notes

The 21st Precinct: 160 patrolmen, 11 sergeants, and four lieutenants — and Captain Frank Kennelly is the boss of all of them. CBS built this series from adaptations of true New York criminal records, told from the policeman's point of view, with the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association looking over its shoulder. In "The Platform," a tour of duty on Manhattan's Upper East Side turns on one of the most anonymous places in the city: a crowded subway platform, where everybody saw something and nobody saw the same thing. Everett Sloane stars as Kennelly, with Ken Lynch as Lt. Matt King and Harold Stone as Sgt. Waters. Originally broadcast January 13, 1954. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

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