July 13, 2004
Fibber McGee and Molly
I was born in 1960, and TV was dealing the last deathblows to radio as the number one form of entertainment in the American household. In just the few years it took for me to develop enough to fully enjoy the magic of television, radio shows had all but disappeared. In fact, it didn’t dawn on me until the early 70’s that Bob Hope, Jack Benny, George Burns, and many of the other top television and movie performers of the day got their start in radio. It was then that my father hipped me to the old time radio shows.
My dad had a record album of the “Fibber McGee and Molly” show. The shows ran approximately twenty minutes, and so two shows fit just fine on the standard 33 1/3 worth of vinyl. I listened to those two tracks perhaps fifty times never tiring of the corny jokes and ridiculous situations. I remember quietly listening to the shows on my father’s stereo in our living room enthralled by the characters and places that came to life in my mind. Sadly, even though I wished to listen to more of the shows, for years those two episodes were all I knew of Fibber and Molly.
Then along came the Internet.
In 1993 I got my very own Internet account and started “surfing” the web. All three websites of it. One of the first things I looked for more information about my old friends on the radio. The first site I ever found, Al Girard’s Unofficial Fibber McGee and Molly Home Page still exists, and has three different shows available for downloading almost every week.
By 1995 all the forces of nature had combined to make the trade and sharing of these shows possible. The ancient realm of the Internet known as Usenet, which had once been the backbone of the Internet until the WWW was born, was the perfect place to post these shows, but the files needed to be small enough to allow fairly quick downloading over 14400bps lines. Fortunately, it was about this time that mp3 files started to become a popular means of sharing audio over the Internet, and it turned out that this was a perfect format for these old radio shows. Soon I was downloading Fibber McGee and Molly to my heart’s delight, and I now have over 700 of the shows.
As well as being entertaining, these shows hold historical value. Historical events such as the second world war were the current events of the day, and you get a feel for how people of the period felt about their times. Fibber McGee and Molly, for instance, was a very patriotic show, and often such subjects as gas rationing, scrap drives, and restricted traveling were topics for the show. They would always end such shows by stressing the importance of everyone doing their part in support of the war.
The Internet has brought so much information to the finger tips of so many, and now it also helps preserve treasures such as the old radio shows. For years many of these shows existed only on the original acetates to which they were recorded, or on reel-to-reel tapes of a handful of collectors. Now they are accessible to anyone with a computer, and an Internet connection ready to be discovered by a whole new audience.