Joe Queenan, writing “In Praise of Libraries” in the March, 2015, issue of The Rotarian, described public libraries as places of adventure and serendipity, where through books someone can discover new people, places, and things.  Some libraries, though, also take one into unexpected areas by means of old movies, and sometimes even through old-time radio shows.

In several rooms adjoining the public library in Indiana, Pennsylvania, is the Jimmy Stewart Museum, preserving the memory of that small town’s most famous son.  One can get to the museum either from the library or from the street, and the museum brims with Stewart’s movie posters and memorabilia, as well as family photographs and artifacts.  Also on display are his uniforms from his twenty-seven years as an officer, ultimately a general, in the United States Air Force.

Stewart (1908-1997) seems to be best remembered for playing Everyman roles on film, but he performed on radio as well.  He stands out today as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and that wholesome image suited the dark purposes of Alfred Hitchcock, who cast Stewart in four of his films.  Stewart’s many other film roles ranged from an idealistic young United States Senator (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) to an elderly janitor (Mr. Krueger’s Christmas, 1980), from a Big Band leader (The Glenn Miller Story, 1954) to a pioneering aviator (The Spirit of St. Louis, 1957).  Also noteworthy are roles that seem unlikely for him, such as a circus clown (The Greatest Show on Earth, 1952) and a cowboy who inherits a brothel (The Cheyenne Social Club, 1970).

Less well-known nowadays are Stewart’s appearances on various radio programs in the 1940s and 1950s.  As John Dunning wrote in On the Air (1998), “Stewart was a superb radio actor, overcoming the drift of some scripts into folksy platitude.”  Fortunately for Stewart’s fans, just as many of his movies are available on DVD or on YouTube, some of his radio broadcasts are available commercially on compact disc and also on-line.

Stewart was a big name in Hollywood when he was asked to narrate an hour-long patriotic radio broadcast, “We Hold These Truths.”  It was commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights (15 December, 1791), and so it aired a week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  In March of that year, Stewart had enlisted in the U. S. Army Air Corps; when war broke out, he was already a corporal.  Norman Corwin, a New Dealer noted for his eloquent (and often melodramatic) radio scripts, wrote the show, and by special arrangement, it was broadcast simultaneously on all four national radio networks (CBS, NBC-Red, NBC-Blue, and Mutual) and was heard, in Corwin’s words, by “the people of the federated states” and across “all zones of continental time.”

After the war, Stewart’s time in radio occurred primarily on weekly anthology shows.  Along with most movie stars of the day, he appeared on the series Suspense, which tended to cast against type, so that comedians like Bob Hope and Milton Berle took on serious roles, and Boris Karloff, usually associated with horror films, played a Scotland Yard detective.  Stewart joined this line-up of half-hour stories, beginning 21 February, 1946, in “Consequence,” playing a medical doctor who feels trapped in an unhappy marriage, and he reprised the role on 19 May, 1949.  In “Mission Completed,” aired on 1 December, 1949, he played an embittered disabled war veteran obsessed with revenge against his Japanese torturer.

In the years before television, movies were adapted for radio.  Thus, the stars famous for their faces also had to distinguish themselves by their voices.  Lux Radio Theatre, described by Dunning as “the most important dramatic show in radio,” led the way with hour-long abridgements.  On 10 March, 1947, Stewart was behind the Lux radio microphone as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life; he also revisited for the Lux Radio Theatre his roles in Destry Rides Again, The Philadelphia Story, and Winchester ’73

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Another series that brought the silver screen to radio audiences was Screen Directors’ Playhouse.  As its name implies, the director introduced the radio version of his film, and after the radio production, he and the actors talked about the show and the challenges of making the hearers see the story.  On 8 May, 1949, Stewart appeared on the program and once again became George Bailey of Bedford Falls, and on 9 December, 1949, Stewart recreated for the Playhouse his role as reporter P. J. McNeal in Call Northside 777.

For about nine months Stewart starred in his own weekly half-hour series, The Six Shooter.  For thirty-nine episodes, from 20 September, 1953, to 24 June, 1954, Stewart portrayed Britt Ponset, a genial loner who, according to the opening words of each show, “is angular and long-legged, his skin is sun-dyed brown.”  Whereas by the early 1950s children had long enjoyed a popular Western radio series, The Lone Ranger, The Six Shooter provided grown-ups with more realistic entertainment about life in the old West.  Radio, however, was then in decline as more people could afford televisions.

When television became readily accessible, it was advertised as bringing families together by connecting them with their ancestors who had gathered around the flickering tribal fire whilst a bard regaled them with heroic tales and ballads.  Radio shows like Suspense, Screen Directors’ Playhouse, and The Six Shooter, though, have a stronger claim on that connection with the storyteller captivating folks around the ancestral hearth.  Radio requires the listener’s mind to supply the visual scene; as the Chorus enjoins the audience at the beginning of William Shakespeare’s Henry V, “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:/ . . . Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them/Printing their proud hoofs in the receiving earth.”

As Joe Queenan said, in a library someone can find a book and thus discover a new world.  The same holds true for a classic film or radio show.  Although it can be easy to doze off during a movie or over a book, disengaging from a radio drama tends to be more difficult.  Whether in a library or elsewhere, new frontiers beckon when one encounters James Stewart’s old radio programs.  If on screen he could almost make people see a tall white rabbit, imagine how well he could conjure illusions on the radio.

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.