In by-gone days, the old, weird America produced a variety of radio plays featuring protagonists with out-of-the mainstream professions. In this play, the narrator is a free-lance insurance investigator, the story told through entries in his expense account. He is hired to locate the beneficiary of a $1,500 life insurance policy (about $18,000 in 2025). Not much to make a story out of? You might believe so. But you would be wrong. This is well worth your time to listen to, as you live life in these United States as it was 70 years gone by.
The writer and novelist Colin Fleming has written about this play, "At one point, Dollar is so ground down emotionally by what he's learning about this person--and, via her, what he's learning about humanity, that he begs off the case." Don't you.
"The Broderick Matter," a Johnny Dollar radio play first broadcast over CBS radio the week of November 14~18, 1955. All five 15-minute episodes:
Bob Bailey, the actor who portrays Johnny
Dollar, was very much a part of the old, weird America. His Midwestern
parents owned a stock company and he first appeared on stage when he was
10 days old. He began regular acting
at the age of four. He never attended school, picking up what education
he needed along the way. He ran away with a carnival when he was 15,
working as a barker --"Step right this way to see the tattooed lady! (she'd be
out of work today)." "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, one thin dime will
reveal to you the secret arts of seduction of the fabled Orient!"
From there he got into radio with his mother's help; she had switched from stock company acting to the new medium almost as soon as broadcasting became a thing (as we say today). Bailey became a regular on The Chicago Theater of the Air, first broadcast by WGN and later carried nationally over the Mutual Broadcasting System. It was hosted by "Colonel" Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, staunch America Firster, and foe of Franklin Roosevelt. The Theater produced operettas and serious dramas, airing from the Medinah Temple at 600 N. Wabash Ave., performed in front of packed crowds, its 5,000 seats sold out every week for 14 years, 1940 to 1954.
It may seem odd that an unschooled Ohio kid could have a successful career starring in operettas and that operettas were wildly popular among the national radio listening audience. But such he had and such they were.
