Five genres, five hosts, one week of 1979 radio drama.
Sears Radio Theater is a 1979 radio drama anthology arranged as a weeknight rotation of westerns, comedy, mystery, tales of love and hate, and adventure. Each genre has its own host, including Cicely Tyson, Vincent Price, Andy Griffith and Richard Widmark, who introduce the stories before the actors take over.
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Sears Radio Theater is a radio drama anthology from 1979, and its organising idea is a weekly wheel of genres, each with its own host at the microphone. An announcement preserved in one recording lays out the week. Monday brought stories of the Golden West and the West of today. Tuesday was comedy with Andy Griffith, Wednesday mystery, suspense and detective stories, Thursday Cicely Tyson with tales of love and hate, and Friday Richard Widmark with adventure in faraway places. Vincent Price is the host on the mystery night heard here. What separates the series from a plain story anthology is how those hosts work. After a teaser scene and a break for the local station, the host takes over and sets the stage in the present tense, narrating like a guide at the edge of the action. In Cajun Death, Price travels a lonely stretch of highway southwest of Baton Rouge, past moss-covered trees, slow rivers and old plantations, lingering on the swamp spirits feu-follet and loup-garou before a stranger's car pauses at a sign for Mercy, Louisiana, population 205. Its teaser warns of a gang of good old boys ready to run someone out of town on a rail, and of a family link to a woman said to be a witch. Griffith's turn in The Terrible Dream of Mister Glitch is lighter. He finds Arnold Glitch, a man in his late 40s who sells exotic birds, fuming at the wheel in Chicago traffic, and the teaser has Glitch trying to withdraw money only to learn that the computer says he is dead. The Flight of the Starbird finds Widmark in a chilly valley near the Sierra Madre Mountains at 5 a.m. on a Saturday, introducing a hot air balloonist named Gloria Travis, and its teaser has a balloon drifting too high and off course toward the mountains. Tyson's First Star Tonight is previewed with a character named Marilyn threatening to jump while another voice tries to calm things down. The Choosing strands the passengers of an overdue cargo transport where no one knows they are, afraid that a man named Ranana will have them killed. Leavin' Cheyenne, from the western side, pairs two men who call themselves out-of-work bums in the middle of nowhere, one of them named Potluck. Its closing credits name the stars, credit the series music to Nelson Riddle, who composed and conducted it, and call the show an Elliott Lewis production. The recordings also hold on to the broadcast around the drama. Local news voices from WNEW and WNDW lead into some episodes, and the breaks carry a WNEW contest offering trips to see Frank Sinatra in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, an Old Milwaukee beer jingle, a charity appeal for children overseas and a Sears pitch for easy-care sportswear. Those breaks make the collection a period document as much as a drama series. A newcomer could start with Cajun Death, where the host narration is thick with place and folklore, or with the Glitch comedy for something lighter.
Made for: Suits a listener who enjoys old-time radio drama and wants variety from one story to the next, moving between westerns, comedy, mystery, emotional drama and adventure, with a host narrating the way into each tale.
What sets it apart: Rather than relying on a single narrator, it gives each genre its own host, and those hosts set the scene in the present tense like guides. Several recordings also keep 1979 local news IDs and commercials around the drama.
Sears Radio Theater was a radio drama anthology series which ran weeknights on CBS Radio in 1979, sponsored by the Sears chain. Often paired with The CBS Radio Mystery Theater during its first season, the program offered a different genre of drama for each evening's
Devil winds on a cliff face, flat feet at an Army physical: choose your radio peril.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Charles Kirby turns a formal Fiske dinner into escalating household chaos, from car trouble to service-call panic.
A dinner at the Fiske home turns into Charles Kirby's chosen arena for disruption, starting with a car mysteriously reparked at the Acapulco restaurant in Long Beach and spreading into ominous notes, security-system trouble, and unwanted service calls around the property.
A lost ranger map leaves climbers weighing Stettner's Ledges against the threat of Devil Winds.
A dangerous alpine route shapes this single-episode review, as climbers study a ranger map on the Diamond Face while daylight and weather tighten the margin for error.
An uneasy drive to Cornwall turns a radio mystery into a close, unsettling standoff.
The road to Cornwall turns tense before Lydia ever reaches the farmhouse. She has met the telephone voice in person, only to be pulled toward a stranger and placed in his car, where he tells her, with unnerving calm, that he came for her and is taking her home.
A missing briefcase and a missing body deepen a murder mystery built around the thirteenth governess.
A dead young man in a park, thirteen governesses seated nearby, and one elusive thirteenth figure give this Sears Radio Theater mystery a sharp, uneasy opening. Vincent Price sets the tone, while Howard Duff plays the detective hired by Linda Kay Henning's character.
A proposal becomes a vow to face mortality by making the time left matter.
A proposal turns into a harder vow when John learns that the woman he loves has leukemia and may have only months left. The episode frames the diagnosis as more than a medical crisis, pushing their shared life's work toward a last, impossible-sounding hope: to make the remaining…
A wagon-train western turns riderless horses and suspicious gold into a tense trail mystery.
Bristol, an ex-con from Illinois, travels west with his wife, Hope, in a wagon train crossing barren, windswept plains. The western finds its tension when Frisco notices two riderless horses and weighs the profit in their saddles, while a sheriff studies scattered gold nuggets…
Expense accounts, dead ends, bad alibis.
Irish radio plays with intimate theatrical force.
Insurance files with a detective’s pulse.
Restored broadcasts, sharp shadows, bright old voices.
Colonel Fest is hired to remove President André Bokar from Mondunga after Bokar destroys an island economy that once produced $30 million in annual saffron revenue.
Sears Radio Theater's "The Long Night" places Anna Kaufman, Ernie Matrano, and Bonnie Albers in a stalled elevator overnight.
Sears Radio Theater's "Final Fall" follows Anders Fritzen, an aging Ojibway lumberjack living alone in a Minnesota cabin while practicing blindness.
Sears Radio Theater presents Elliot Lewis's mystery The Thirteenth Governess, hosted by Vincent Price and starring Howard Duff as private investigator Harry Holliday.
Sears Radio Theater presents “The Lady and the Outlaw,” a 1873 Colorado Rockies drama about English traveler Isabella Byrd's attempt to climb the 14,700-foot Long's Peak.
Sears Radio Theater presents “Hildy,” a drama about commercial artist Edward Gaskin, whose collision with a steel girder leaves him unable to draw with his right hand.
Sears Radio Theater presents Percy Granger's "Leavin' Cheyenne," a western drama about trail cook Samuel and young wrangler Ross after their cattle outfit disbands.
Sears Radio Theater's "The Tough Guy" follows travel writers Susan and Frank Mallory through the South China Seas as gunrunner Harry Bennett joins their fishing boat.
Sears Radio Theater's comedy "Getting Drafted" follows war correspondent Hanley Finn, who receives a six-week-old draft notice while serving in Finchhaven, New Guinea.
Sears Radio Theater's "Powder River Policy" follows a former Army trooper who finds a wounded preacher on the Wyoming trail and carries him into a saloon.
Sears Radio Theater presents Steve Sheridan’s drama “The Choosing,” hosted by Richard Widmark and starring Dane Clark and Hans Conried as passengers trapped after Captain Hall’s DC-3 makes an emergency landing in Africa.
Sears Radio Theater's "The Troublemaker" follows Charles Kirby, a retired investor whose Extronics holdings drop hard enough to wreck a quiet morning.
Sears Radio Theater's "Climb" strands Jack DeShields and Dan Hunt on Longs Peak's Diamond Face in Colorado after a piton pullout leaves Jack temporarily blind from blood in his eyes.
Sears Radio Theater's "Retribution" follows Bristol Gaston and Hope as they try to turn a barren 160-acre government land grant into a gold windfall.
Sears Radio Theater’s 'Going Home' follows Lydia Stevens after a Lexington Avenue taxi accident in New York City and a return to a Cornwall farmhouse that feels unnervingly unchanged.
Sears Radio Theater’s “The Afro-Westerner” follows Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a visitor from Monrovia, Liberia, who travels through Wyoming Territory in spring 1875 to see the land where his formerly enslaved grandparents lived.
Sears Radio Theater's “The McGuffey Connection” follows American narcotics agent Arnold McGuffey, who poses as the head of a Church of Faith school in Kenya while waiting for an opium shipment from Rangoon.
A preview of a radio drama anthology episode featuring a tense scene with a woman threatening to jump, followed by a contest announcement.
A comedic radio drama about a man named Arnold Glitch who discovers his bank account has been closed and he is declared dead by a computer.
A radio drama anthology episode featuring a mystery story set in Cajun Louisiana, hosted by Vincent Price.
A radio drama anthology episode featuring an adventure story about a hot air balloonist named Gloria Travis.
Sears Radio Theater's "No Greater Dream" centers on Dr.