Jim Stenhouse still believes in the magic of radio.
When he was a boy growing up in Burbank, he and his parents gathered around the radio, listening to Jack Benny, Superman and The Cinnamon Bear.
“The radio was always on in my home,” said Stenhouse. Now, as an adult, he re-creates some of the old shows he listened to as a child, conjuring up their ageless magic for new audiences.
Even at the age of 48, Stenhouse finds himself gripped by the radio shows of the past. He listens to them religiously and owns hundreds of tapes of old programs.
“Around 20 years ago, I started listening to Chuck Schaden’s program (`Those Were the Days’) on WNIB on Saturdays,” said Stenhouse. “He’s like the godfather of the radio nostalgia movement in the Chicago area. He’s got an immense collection of old radio shows. It’s just a regular treasure chest of material. So, largely because of his efforts, I got into this and have collected radio shows for years now.
“I guess I just wanted to share it with other people. Rather than go on the radio, theater is more my natural means of expression, so I thought of doing (readings of old radio scripts) as a live performance.”
So, in the spring of 1992, Stenhouse began Radio Bolingbrook, an amateur theater group that performs public readings of radio dramas and comedies. Stenhouse recruited about half a dozen of his friends (who also are involved in local acting in the Valley View Theatre Guild, which performs at Romeoville High School) and the grassroots group was born.
“I had done some of these shows for the Theatre Guild,” says Stenhouse, “and I guess I just thought it’d be fun to do. It’s one of those things that if you are sufficiently involved in the material, and have somewhat of a theatrical bent, you end up wanting to participate in some way. Sort of lamenting the fact that there’s no real radio to be in anymore, so you make your own.”
Stenhouse received his bachelor’s degree in speech and theater from the University of Iowa, but he’s a businessman by day, with his own rubber stamp manufacturing business in Evergreen Park. Evenings and weekends, he lives for the stage. And during each day’s commute to and from his Bolingbrook home, he generally listens to tapes of old radio shows in his car.
“I’d say I’m as much an enthusiast as Jim is,” said his wife, Jean. “I really enjoy radio drama. I listen to old radio a lot. I think (the group) is a nice idea. I was even in one of his shows once. I go all the time, and whenever they need an extra person I fill in.”
Stanhouse named the group Radio Bolingbrook to emphasize the local flavor.
“I was just looking for something that would tie me to the community and still sound like a radio station I suppose, with sort of a suggestion of Radio Free Europe,” he says.
The group practices its scripts in a classroom at Romeoville High School. Appropriately, drawings of famous authors such as Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut and Edgar Allan Poe line the wall above the blackboard. This one read-through before performances gives the troupe an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the script and get comfortable with their parts. Each actor plays multiple roles, reading both major characters and bit parts.
“We’re really, as much as anything, trying to build up a repertoire now that we can pick and choose things from,” Stenhouse says. “(Then in the future) we could see what an audience is like and be able to mix and match shows according to the needs of the occasion. . . . One of the areas that we thought it’d be cool is that we might want to go to senior centers in time, or to a nursing home. We might want to try doing some of the stuff there. . . .
“Basically I get scripts from books I had. Some I found in the library. If there’s something you really want to do that isn’t available in print, you have to sit and listen to the tape and copy it line by line. It’s sort of like ancient monks.”
So far, the actors have performed regularly at Chronicles Bookshop in Bolingbrook.
“They do a pretty good job,” says co-owner Linda Long, who runs the shop with her husband, Mike. “We enjoy them. We’ve had pretty big turnouts when they’ve performed, about 35, 40 people.”
Radio Bolingbrook has performed at the bookstore four times since its inception. It seems a perfect marriage.
“Jim came in and did some shopping,” Long recalls. “He just casually mentioned, `You know, we do this radio stuff. And we always wanted to do something with `The Shadow.’ Would you be interested?’ And I said, well, it fits perfectly. And they gave a performance, and we had a nice turnout. In fact, some of our customers wanted to audition to be part of their group. . . . It just went from there.
“Jim’s tastes are real similar to what we sell, being a specialty shop with science fiction, mysteries and thrillers,” said Long. “Some of the scripts they wanted to use were just perfect. And our customers were certainly interested in hearing them. They were also doing some of the comedies, and some of the customers brought in their grandmothers who remember listening to that as their only form of entertainment.”
The group first performed on a Sunday afternoon in April, doing episodes from Vic and Sade, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Bob and Ray.
“Vic and Sade is really one of my favorite things,” says Stenhouse. “It was done locally, in the Chicago area. It’s about a family in a small little Illinois town. Very day-to-day stuff. It mixed the extreme flat day-to-day details with almost surreal aspects, especially if they’re talking about the people they know. Very odd combination. It was written by a man named Paul Rhymer. In American humor it’s almost unique in its qualities. The show went on for years and years. It started in the ’30s and went up through the ’40s.
“There was an edge to it. It wasn’t all sweetness and light. There was an undercurrent of irony. Maybe darkness is a better word. . . . The uncle, Uncle Fletcher, was always rambling about all the people he knew. And they always had these incredible names, like Richigan Fichigan from Sichigan, Michigan. And he’d go on and on about them, and then at the end he’d always say, `Later died.’
“And there was this whole sense of this old man sort of just reciting his whole history but feeling that he was sort of alone in the world, that his world had all died away. He’d tell some little anecdote about (some strange character) and then: `Later died.’ “
Although the show is one of Stenhouse’s favorites, he never heard it when he was a kid.
“Certain shows, like Vic and Sade, are discoveries I’ve only made as an adult,” he says. “My parents didn’t listen to them. And even Fibber McGee and Molly, they didn’t listen to. There’s certain things I remember: Jack Benny on Sunday night, Phil Harris and Alice Faye, but other things maybe I enjoy so much now because I discovered them later. There’s things that you treasure because you remember, and there’s other things that you discover, and they’re special for that reason.”
A month after their premiere performance, Radio Bolingbrook performed the first episode of “The Shadow,” some more Vic and Sade, and the first episode of the radio version of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” a humorous sci-fi fantasy. Their third performance in July included episode 2 of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” as well as a thriller titled “House in Cypress Canyon,” and comedy from Fibber McGee and Molly.
Their most recent performance was on Halloween Eve. They re-enacted “War of the Worlds,” the famous Orson Welles radio drama based on the H.G. Wells novel about a Martian invasion of Earth. Their presentation coincided with the 54th anniversary of the original broadcast, when hundreds, maybe thousands, of listeners believed Martians had landed.
The half-dozen actors stood around a fake microphone while reading their various parts.
“We try to give a little bit of the flavor of what it would be like to be in a studio,” says Stenhouse. “The microphone we use is just a fake prop we use as a central point. You gain something by doing it live . . . though the kinds of shows we do probably didn’t have a studio audience at the time they were done. A lot of your dramatic shows didn’t want to worry about audience reaction. Typically the quiz shows, the music shows, and the comedies had the live audiences.”
Stenhouse usually sits behind a table, creating the sound effects.
“The only thing that we couldn’t do, that we all wished we could, was the sound they created in the original `War of the Worlds,’ the sound of the saucer opening up, that scraping sound,” says Rae Williams of Bolingbrook, one of the actors. “What they had done (in the original broadcast) was someone took a microphone into the men’s room, and somebody held a jar in the toilet and unscrewed the lid, and it gave Orson Welles the right echo effect he wanted for that. Obviously, we couldn’t re-create that here. We thought about doing it with a trash can or something.”
The actors disagree among themselves about whether listeners should have realized the first broadcast of the show was pure fiction.
“I could see where it would panic someone,” says Williams. “If you tuned in the middle of the program and heard the secretary of the interior saying that Martians had landed over the East Coast and you live in California, yeah. It’s a scary idea. I think John Houseman and Orson Welles and all of them were amazed at how well it worked, how realistic they had made it.”
Stenhouse disagrees. “If you listen to it, you would never fall for it,” he says. “The first part has a documentary quality which is very real, very convincing, but they did break in in the middle, and say that this is the New Mercury Theatre, presenting `The War of the Worlds.’ Then the last third of it is pretty straight monologue, and it’s a radio drama, it’s not at all the documentary thing that had panicked people. By then the people who had panicked had run out into the street or were ringing up their neighbors.”
“Radio at that time was a very authoritative voice,” says troupe member Martin Wallach of Bolingbrook. “It was a major part of life, and a new part. (But stunts like that) still work. Every April Fool’s (Day), I listen to WBEZ, because in their standard newscast, somewhere, they have an incredibly sophisticated (hoax). A couple of years ago, they had Jimmy Carter on, and he was doing this joke, but as straight as hell: `We have just sold the state of Georgia to Canada,’ and they’re going to turn it into something or other. And I got 15 minutes into this thing, and it was Carter talking. They got me. I finally realized-it’s April 1st.”
Although the crowd for “War of the Worlds” wasn’t as large as previous audiences, those attending seemed to enjoy themselves. According to bookstore co-owner Long, one 10-year-old boy had brought a small group of his friends to the reading as part of his birthday party.
“He had seen `The War of the Worlds’ on TV on a rerun several months ago,” says Long, “and had been infatuated since then. His mom got him `War of the Worlds’ in book form as a birthday present. And when he saw in our newsletter about the performance, he asked if he could come. So they had a birthday party this evening, then brought this troop of boys over.”
What is the appeal of old-time radio?
“I’ve been playing old radio shows in Chicago for over 20 years,” said Schaden, whose show is on WNIB. “(People like them because) first of all the material is good, the comedies are funny and the mysteries are mysterious. And they hold up very well after 40 or 50 years. I know a lot of people are starting to get into reading these scripts or re-creations of some of the scripts simply because it’s an extension of their interest in listening to the old-time radio shows. . . . the more the merrier. What (a group like Radio Bolingbrook) does is exposes people to the lore of the radio days and it exposes people who never had a chance to see how a radio broadcast was produced to see how one was done.”
The actors in Radio Bolingbrook range in age from 21 to 50. And each one, when asked why they chose to participate in the group used the word “fun.”
“I’ve always been a big fan of radio,” says Wayne Ceranek of Joliet. “I have tapes and records of old radio shows. I got some tapes of radio reruns when I was a kid. I’ve always been the type of person who uses their imagination, so it appealed to me. We’re doing it exactly how they did in the radio theater, basically. . . . I like doing this simply because I have always liked radio productions. This gives me a chance to get involved and keeping in the vein of how it was originally done, staying true to the concept.”
“Even the read-throughs are fun,” says Daniel Jagodzinski of Naperville. “It’s exciting to do. I didn’t listen to the old radio shows when I was growing up, just your basic music and stuff. But I’ve heard a lot of the old radio shows as an adult.”
Mike Manolakes is very enthusiastic about old-time radio. “I’ve always been a fan of the old radio shows, same as Jim,” he says. “So it’s been great to be a part of it. I was born a little too late (to listen to them as a kid), but I got more interested in them as an adult. In radio, you have to visualize the whole thing in your head. So you’re not dependent upon somebody’s special effects budget to show you what you need to see. Your imagination does all that. It’s the challenge of reading the story entirely with voices and sound effects. It makes us focus more on the voice. It’s a good exercise for an actor to concentrate on the voice.”
His wife, Rae Williams, agrees.
“It’s a neat way to play a lot of characters all at once, and you don’t have to change your makeup and costume and everything else, you just have to change your voice,” she says. “A lot of times, when I change my voice, I wind up changing my body, too, where I’ll sag my shoulders a little more, or whatever. It’s neat to play a lot of characters like that all at once and use your voice in different ways.
“I’m attracted by the history of radio shows. I really love listening to them. I was born after that era, but my parents used to talk about that time period. And my Dad was involved in radio. He was a DJ in South Carolina for many years . . . then he had a show on Radio Free Europe during the Korean War. He was stationed over in Europe. My mom used to be on the radio once in a while, to talk-a friendly female voice on the airwaves for all the GIs who were stationed over in Germany. That was a whole background there. They’d talk about it. It always sounded interesting. And then I heard the Jack Benny shows, and all the mystery theaters, and things like that years later, and they’re just incredible.”
“I’m not a terribly big fan,” says Martin Wallach. “I do listen (to old radio shows) on Saturdays sometimes. I’m not that much of a nostalgia buff, when you think about it. I don’t listen to any television today, because the writing’s so deteriorated. Some of the writing of old radio is quite good. Some of the script writers did a heck of a job. Very melodramatic stuff.
“But there was better stuff then than there is now. Radio was the only game in town then. It was like the big leagues, and it attracted some good people. People like (John) Houseman and (Orson) Welles really did some exciting stuff. I think it was the big leagues of its time.”
“The writing still stands up, because it’s so good,” agrees Stenhouse. “There are two things about radio. One is that the imagination of a listener is actively involved. And with an audience, you have this communal thing, where everybody’s hearing the same thing, but they’re building their half of the show in their own minds, so you have a different show for each member of the audience. Another thing is that radio, unlike television, allows you to work while you’re participating in it. The vampiric thing about television is that there’s a picture, and it tends to make you want to sit down and watch it. It zaps the life out of people. . . . with radio, you can iron or wash or do dishes and it didn’t detract from the experience. You didn’t feel like you were missing it. You could be as easily involved.”
Stenhouse hopes that by performing the old radio shows new audiences will fall under its spell and perhaps help create another golden age of radio.
“My feeling is that this particular kind of looking backward tends to inspire people to new creativity,” he says. “They gain an appreciation of the form, what could be done in radio.”
Meanwhile, Stenhouse and company will continue to spread the magic of old time radio drama and comedy.
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For more information on performances by Radio Bolingbrook, contact Chronicles Booskhop at 708-739-3358. Chuck Schaden’s show, “Those Were the Days,” is on WNIB-FM 97.1 every Saturday from 1-5 p.m. His show “Old-Time Radio Classics” is on WBBM-AM 780 Monday through Friday from midnight-1 a.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 8-10 p.m.
