Monday, December 19, 2016

25 More Days of Old Time Radio Christmas - Day 19: Finding Santa (This is Your FBI)

Well...it seems that the FBI was making all sorts of news this years.  So much news in fact that just about everyone raised their fists to them at one point or another during the course of the last 12 months....so lets go back a few years...and see what we think then.  Well, there was J. Edgar Hoover....but that is for another time.  We have more important things to do - like find Santa Claus for a settlement house!  And thanks to This is Your FBI, we will have more than a Merry Christmas for the kids at the house.   Here is a link to all the previous OTR Christmas entries.  If you have Sirius/XM, you can listen to Greg Bell's Old time radio channel (#148).  He does a great job of showcasing great holiday themed episodes, especially as we get close to Christmas.

Holland-Fawcett Family Christmas Party (2014)

Santa Paying a Visit - December 2014

This is Your FBI was a long running radio show on the ABC Radio Network (also known as the Blue Network before it spun off from NBC) that spanned from 1945 to 1953. The show was endorsed by the FBI and they shared case files with the show's producers - making the stories all "from the files of the FBI." The stories are really well done and provide scenes showing not only the execution of the crime, but also the way that the FBI solved it. Each story opened the same way -

"The official broadcast from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The incidents used in
tonight’s Equitable Life Assurance Society broadcast are adapted from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, all names used are fictitious, and any similarity to names of persons living or dead is accidental." 
- From Derral Cheatwood Images of Crime and Justice in Early Commercial Radio—1932 to 1958 Criminal Justice Review March 2010 35: 32-51,

Their first Christmas episode was first broadcast on December 24, 1948 when they first aired the Return of St. Nick.  They would reuse this script the next two years on this program before opting for a new story that I featured last year, The Innocent Santa Claus (This is Your FBI).  In the Return of St. Nick, Special Agent Jim Taylor finds himself, for the first time in many years, able to head home for Christmas.  But as he leaves his field office, he is met by a boy who came to the FBI for help - they lost Santa Claus and need help finding him.  Agent Taylor (played by Stacy Harris) discovers that this 10 year old boy lives in the Murray Street Settlement House and they have a older gentlemen there who does odd jobs for his room and board.  These jobs include playing Santa.  In trying to track down the missing resident, he discovers that he is an avid reader and often visits the library.  He also discovers that a visitor to the settlement house scared him away.  While not an official case, if Agent Taylor can figure out what the connection is to the visitor, maybe he can find St. Nick in time for Christmas.

In the end, as is often the case with these programs, there is a happy ending.  This one comes with an unexpected twist.  If you want to learn more about settlement houses, check out this great article from the Encyclopedia of Chicago.  I hope you enjoy this episode from This is Your FBI.


Another 25 Days of Old Time Radio Christmas (from 2016) & Other Links

25 Days of Old Time Radio Christmas (from 2015) & Other Links

25 Days of Old Time Radio Christmas (from 2014)
Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)