From the era of "Old Time Radio" came the Wyliis Cooper created series
Quiet, Please. which ran from 1947 to 1949. Cooper had previously created the long-running, network jumping radio horror anthology series
Lights Out, which proved to be very popular - at one point there were like hundreds of local fan clubs. Eventually Cooper quit in 1936 due to the demands of a heavy workload, and Arch Obler took over as head writer.
During Cooper's run, Lights Out was known for it's grisly stories complete with graphic sound effects depicting everything from a man being absorbed by a giant amoeba, to people being buried alive, or caught in deathtraps, to being torn apart by monsters or robots.
Quiet, Please, which opened up with a funereal, dirge-like version of the second movement of Franck's
Symphony in D Minor, played on organ and piano, was a lot more understated. The narrator and main actor, Ernest Chappell, had previously mostly worked in radio as an announcer and newsreader but proved to be adept at acting. Of the 106 episodes that were produced, about 88 survive, and others which are lost at least have scripts available.
The 60th episode, "The Thing on the Fourble Board" is considered to be a classic, and rightly so I think. A fourble board is a narrow catwalk high up on an oil rig. An oil-rig worker, or "roughneck" tells about the time his crew was drilling for oil at around at a very great depth...and found something other than rock and oil and gas.
A roughneck is an oil field worker, specifically, a guy on a drilling crew. Call 'em roughnecks like ya call a section hand on the railroad a gandy dancer or a garage hand a grease monkey.... The derrick floor or a fourble board's no place for a guy with a bow tie 'cause when you have to fool around with drillin' holes that go farther down in the ground than it is from the top of Pike's Peak down to sea level... Yeah, sure they do. Time I was a roughneck, we got this one well down to seventy-three hundred and thirteen feet. That was a record. But last May, Pure Oil brought one in out in the Natrona Valley in Wyoming at fourteen thousand three hundred and nine feet. That, friend, is almost three miles. Quite a hole that, huh?
Other episodes I recommend are
"Summer, Goodbye": A husband and wife are on the run with a stolen fortune. They head off into the hills of Southern California, race through the San Fernando Valley, Calabasas., Las Virgenes to elude the police, but they can't seem to shake a strange hitch-hiker that keeps appearing...
"Northern Lights": Two scientists experimenting with transporting objects through time and back again discover that one of their tests has brought back a mysterious caterpillar-like creature that 'sings' and has sinister plans for our world.
"Whence Came You?": An archaeologist on assignment in Egypt meets an old war-buddy-turned-newspaperman and learns that a mysterious woman has been asking about him in the bar, a woman with beautiful black eyes and beautiful black hair, with a particular smell about her, the scent of cinnamon and burr, spices used in ancient Egyptian funerals...
