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Puritan-era adolescents shriek accusations of witchcraft. Ruby the futuristic detective sniffs out clues. Grandfatherly John Avery Whittaker teaches his young employee a few things about friendship. The Lone Ranger gallops off into the sunset.
Scenarios from books? Television series?
No. It's part of the renaissance of radio drama and comedy, old and new, available for the hearing in Southern California and beyond.
"I think there's a resurgence of interest in radio drama," said Robert Sims, news and program director for KNX-AM (1070), which has broadcast an hour of golden drama oldies each day, seven days a week, since 1983.
"It's a remarkable hour. Sometimes I'm just shocked at the audience it gets," Sims said. "From 9 to 10 p.m., KNX-AM does remarkably well. We are usually the No. 1 or No. 2 station in Southern California in that hour."
No Los Angeles broadcaster-including Sims-foresees radio drama re-emerging as the dominant force that it was in the "golden days" of the 1940s. Advertisers put their money in TV drama these days, not radio.
"In the old days, there was a tremendous need for radio programming . . . but (now) there's no national sponsorship," said Sims. "The money isn't there to make from the shows as it was 40 years ago."
Still, the grass-roots interest in radio's dramatic possibilities is taking many forms.
Los Angeles Classic Theatre Works, for example, is one professional repertory group dedicated to presenting plays and novels via radio through a company boasting some of the best-known acting names in the country. Ed Asner, JoBeth Williams, Michael York and Harry Hamlin are among the three dozen professionals who make up the troupe.
At the other extreme is Tom Lopez, a one-man radio drama factory in Upstate New York. He stretches the barriers of sound and imagination with stories that are aired on stations across the nation and as far away as Australia.
There's even a weekly radio program for children. Produced in Pomona by the Focus on the Family organization, "Adventures in Odyssey" is a half-hour, Christian-oriented alternative to Saturday-morning TV.
In the old days, CBS produced many of the all-time radio classics. But, more recently, CBS affiliate KNX-AM had been getting additional mileage out of the old "CBS Mystery Theatre,"...