Subscribing in digest mode, I've been having a hard time getting the system to let me respond to Brian's favorite shows, bio and upcoming birthday post... But at least it did let me post this in response to one of his messages.

So happy birthday, from another guy who spent about half his life in Connecticut!...

And I am sure that is part of the reason I remember Johnny Dollar, since we moved to Waterbury from Western Massachusetts in 1961, just as the  show was winding down, and just as I was about to start high school.

Johnny's fictional Hartford insurance firm did help put Connecticut on the map for me. And after high school and college I wound up working in Hartford -- as a reporter for the Hartford Courant for 11 years. Since then I have studied anthropology, music, and computers, and have been a writer and editor for a software company, a boating magazine, and one of the first online newspapers.

I do remember listening to The Lone Ranger and other kids shows when I was a kid... and in the 1980s I enjoyed a Connecticut stations old time radio Revival programming, which was the first time I heard the Green Hornet and brought back the Shadow, which I probably had been a little too young for before television took over my media diet.

But I got into my current obsession with old time radio through my interests in online media -- some early c.2004 podcasts included Night Beat episodes, which gave me the idea of listening carefully to the ways radio drama presented my older medium of daily newspapers.

I was teaching journalism at the time and looking for a media history research project to present at journalism conferences and maybe turn into a series of academic Journal articles or a book. But I decided I would have to do an awful lot of listening to reach any profound academic conclusions, so started using my WordPress website jheroes.com  to sort out my notes, and just let it grow and grow... I reached retirement age with the project still in progress. 

Now I live in Southwestern Virginia, in the town where I had my last teaching job, and play a lot of old-time string band music in jam sessions and open-mic nights -- when not in pandemic isolation!

In addition to the old time radio blog, I have another where I intermittently write about music, and yet another that I used when teaching journalism and now use when I feel a need to say something about journalism, writing, , movies or life in general... Anything that isn't music or old time radio... especially if I want to get the message to friends who are not on Facebook, where I spend way too much time , but enjoy posting photographs from my walks in the woods and sunsets over the mountains.

Nice to meet you all! Stay healthy!