I started listening to rebroadcasts of old radio programs in the mid-1960s on an Los Angeles AM radio station. I think that it was KHJ. Every Sunday afternoon I would hear "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," "The Green Hornet," and "The Shadow." I was hooked immediately.

A few years later I discovered that the same episodes could be listened to over and over again without tiring of them, unlike television programs. At that point I started recording the shows. My two sources were KRLA in Los Angeles and KPPC-FM in Pasedena. I also picked up a few shows when I found that our city library had a small collection LP's with the old shows on them.

I spent a few years in the employ of our government and was out of touch with OTR until I heard some of the shows on AFRN in Europe. Upon returning to Southern California it wasn't long before I found the shows being played on several of our NPR affiliates: KCSN in Northridge, KCRW in Santa Monica, and KPCC in Pasedena. I rigged up a rotating FM antenna on my roof so that I could clean up the signals from these stations down where I lived in Long Beach.

Prior to leaving the LA area in 1991 I filled quite a few reels of tape and boxes of cassettes with the OTR programs. Somewhere along the line I found a need to catalog this growing collection. The index cards just did not handle the job and I had recently become proficient in BASIC programming on my new Apple ][. I wrote a database application that handled my collection pretty well. I later migrated to the PC world and moved my collection over to Dbase III, where it currently resides, much in need of updating.

My collection is small by the standards set by the very serious collectors. It totals about 3,000 shows with about 280 different programs being represented. It is housed on a mix of 7" reels (mostly 3600') and C-90 cassettes. Some of the reels are recorded 4-track mono, a practice that I gave up long ago because of the crosstalk issue. The whole collection takes about 130 reels of tape and 375 cassettes.

I have several reel to reel machines: 3 Akai's, a Sony, and a Tandberg. All of them work reasonbly well. I generally like the reels better than cassettes because I can slap on a reel and it will play for many hours without any attention from me. Cassette tape, though, is easy to find and convenient to use.

Some of my favorite programs are the classic comedies (Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Amos and Andy, The Great Gildersleeve, Burns and Allen, Charlie McCarthy, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Our Miss Brooks), the anthologies (Suspense, The Whistler, and The Mysterious Traveler), and the detectives (Pat Novak, Sam Spade, Richard Diamond, Johnny Dollar, and Sherlock Holmes). My overall favorite is The Shadow.

I also enjoy new radio drama, especially the mystery and science fiction programs produced by the BBC. I have a small collection of these shows with my favorites being The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Philip Marlowe series, and any of the dramatizations of the John Wyndham stories.

My most recent activity has been to restore a few old radios that I have acquired over the years. I am not interested in collecting radios for profit so if I like the looks of a radio, whether it actually works is of little issue to me. I have included some photographs of a few of my radios here.