The stories reveal little or no religious dogma: they are virtually indistinguishable from other high-quality anthologies on the air. There were 482 dramas broadcast. Father Peyton himself released almost the entire run to collectors. In 1967 he published his autobiography, All for Her, which includes several chapters on his radio work.

These shows have all been in circulation more than 20 years. Since then: almost nothing. Connoisseurs of the Hollywood run generally disdain the New York shows as inferior product. But as William Faulkner once said, “Given a choice between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.

The dates often lasted till early morning. Chaperones guided the winners home, leaving them only when they went their separate ways and the sponsor’s responsibility ended. But Cupid was not denied: at least half a dozen marriages and many “lively correspondences” came out of the show. And the idea worked on television as well. Blind Date ran on early ABC-TV, again with Francis as hostess, from 1949 through 1952.

After a short trial as a weekly show, the serial leaped to a 1932 rating of 25 points, becoming one of the all-time favorites of the air. Berg journeyed into the Lower East Side for her research, browsing among the rat-infested tenements, vegetable stands, and pushcarts. She went incognito, to avoid inhibiting the people with her celebrity. She did take a Radio Mirror reporter on a tour through narrow Orchard Street in 1936, showing him the wellspring of The Goldbergs.

GLENN MILLER, the epitome of big bands, a group that burst on the scene in 1938, reached the heights, and spent its primary career in five years. Miller was a trombonist, unable to match the technical ability of Tommy Dorsey or the creativity of Jack Teagarden. But he was a superb arranger who knew what he wanted and how to find the men who could produce that esteemed sound. Miller disappeared over the English Channel in December 1944.

Some questions were years old, and as the jackpots grew, so did the difficulty of finding people who had now moved elsewhere. Some winners never were found.

Benny’s most famous gag, when a robber demanded, “Your money or your life!” and the hilarity kept building while Benny thought it over.

It Pays to Be Ignorant was radio’s lamebrained answer to such intellectual quizzes as Information, Please and The Quiz Kids. It was a feast of the absurd in which questions were asked but seldom answered. The three nitwits who made up the “board of experts” spent most of the time trying to figure out what the questions were, between rambling monologues, irrelevancies, and rude interruptions.

When the series tackled freedom of religion, it wasn’t simply with another show on Roger Williams: instead it told of Dr. Martin Niemoeller, who defied Hitler’s German Christian Church and was imprisoned for his trouble.

An example of such was the story of three travelers who crash their car and are thrown back into prehistoric times. They encounter a Neanderthal man who doesn’t respond to reason and must be shot. “This is Oboler’s oblique approach to alerting the public that tyranny could only be dealt with by force of arms, not appeasement.