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December 14, 2011
Blackstone The Magic Detective
The first time I heard Blackstone The Magic Detective on
Greg Bell's Old time radio channel (#82) on Sirius/XM, I was cracking up. They were doing a magic trick and all the actors were dumbfounded!. Kinda like Charlie McCarthy - does something that you need to see really work on radio? Yeah...funny...but it kinda works.
Blackstone the Magic Detective was a 15 minute weekly program on the Mutual Broadcasting program that ran from October 3, 1948 to 1950. So something that starts on my birthday (though a few years later) cannot be all that bad. It ran Sunday afternoons and was a 15 minute radio show.
From the page on the Internet Archive: "The series, starring Ed Jerome as "the world's greatest living magician," was based on real-life magician Harry Blackstone Sr. Storylines usually opened with Blackstone (Jerome) telling his friends John (Ted Osborne) and Rhoda (Fran Carlon) about an experience from his past, and this mystery story was then dramatized in a flashback. At the end, Blackstone challenged the audience to find a solution to the magical mystery. Each show concluded with Blackstone outlining a trick that listeners could perform for the amusement of their friends."
The mystery stories are nice - and brief (in order to get that and the trick in the short timetable). The first episode I heard was from May 8th, 1949 and called "Footsteps in the Night". Heard this on my drive to the Michigan Library Association meeting up in Traverse City. They will never leave you thinking - wow - that is amazing. But there are far worse ways to spend 15 minutes!
Posted by cseeman at December 14, 2011 09:19 AM