In a recent “Family Circus” cartoon, Dolly gives her little brother a history lesson: “Before TV, people got sound from radio, but they had to think up their own pictures.” Perhaps because of TV, today, almost everything comes with pictures, even if it’s just the text of some routine talk projected on the screen as a PowerPoint.
But I like to think that the omnipresence of pictures you see hasn’t diminished the power of the pictures you think up. I remember my eightyear- old self sitting in bed with my paper dolls, spellbound in the sinister aura of a shadowy garden teeming with deadly plants. Years later, I read Hawthorne’s short story and realized I’d heard a radio dramatization of “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” I still remember the terror those distant voices brought me.
Radio brought a whole range of other experiences in those days, including comedy, detective stories and, of course, westerns. Of those, my favorite was “Bobby Benson and the B Bar B Riders.” The riders were a galloping collection of stereotypes, and the adventures were tame and predictable. But the hero was a kid like me, and that made all the difference.
