Spotlight – Louisa Oakley Green

On the blog this week we spotlight our special guest. Although she has visited the podcast before, not quite like what your going to see this week. Here is a bit about Louisa.

Louisa Oakley Green didn’t believe in psychic phenomena when she met her husband, Stephen. But more than twenty years later, her views have changed. Her first book chronicles her journey from skeptic to believer through more than 100 paranormal stories involving her husband, his family, and friends. Her second book Sightseeing in the Undiscovered Country: Tales Retold by a Psychic Bystander recounts an additional 100+ paranormal stories from everyday people across the country and around the world.

Louisa has been a scribe for several decades, her passion for the written word is evidenced in a career that has spanned from journalist, technical writing and now as a freelance writer. Once we get to safety and open this mail bag. I will introduce you to Louisa Oakley Green.

If you have not read any of Louisa’s books I highly recommend them. You can follow this link directly to her author’s page on Amazon.

This Week’s Podcast:

In addition to having Louisa on the program we have a very special surprise for you this Thrusday. I have a feeling your are going to love it. So, please tune and find out all about it.

You can listen to this podcast this Thursday (10/26) at Ron’s Amazing Stories, download it from iTunes, stream it on TuneIn Radio or listen on your radio Friday night at 8pm Eastern time. Check your local listing or find the station closest to you at this link.

The Calendar:

November 5 – GE Theater presents: The Tokin
November 12 – A western round-up with Frontier Town.
November 19 – We replayed episode 166 with Alan Day!
November 26 – Author Louisa Oakley Green

Transcribed

This show has been transcribed. What does that mean in terms of old time radio? How did OTR work back then? In the the days before magnetic tape, producers of the 30s, 40s and even into the 50s, had to record their programs. This blog is on how the magic was done.
First let’s start with the definition of transcription. It is the process by which genetic information represented by a sequence of DNA nucleotides is copied into newly synthesized molecules of RNA, with the DNA serving as a template. Or, another way to say it, it is a written or recorded representation of something.
So our transcription in terms of radio, actually means, that it was recorded to a disc. “Recorded” was a term that was known, of course, but not used very much in Radio’s Golden Age. During the era, it was also considered very important to distinguish which shows went out live and which weren’t. So, if a show was transcribed it was announced as such. Live shows were considered the Cadillac and transcribed programs the Hyundai. The “transcription taboo” was purely a network thing. Syndication stations had no other method but transcriptions to get their shows. With the development of high-fidelity magnetic tape in the years following World War II recordings became accepted.
Transcription Machine Transcriptions, in the early days, were done using a cutting lathe and acetate discs. Programs were normally recorded at 331⁄3 rpm on 16 inch records. When cutting a disc the vacuum from a water aspirator was used to pick up the waste material and deposit it in a water-filled bottle. In addition to convenience, this served a safety purpose, as the cellulose nitrate thread was highly flammable and a loose accumulation of it combusted violently if ignited.
Most broadcasts were recorded in a studio or a network-owned station. These places might have four or more lathes. Two were required to capture a program longer than 15 minutes. Without at least two lathes, content would be lost while discs were flipped over or changed. When a number of copies of a transcription were required, as for the distribution of a syndicated program, they were produced by the same process used to make ordinary records.
So, there you have the process on how transcription worked. Some of these huge discs remain out there and can be purchased as memorabilia. You probably would find it very difficult finding a player for these monsters. But hey, they do look quite impressive on a wall.

This Week’s Podcast:

On Thursday’s podcast we will present a brand new western series to Ron’s Amazing Stories. It is a classic and you won’t want to miss this debut. It is called Frontier Town and made its run in 1949. The show ran for 47 episodes and was canceled because it was transcribed. It was aired in syndication on different stations on different days and different times. Bottom-line, it was impossible to follow.
You can listen to this podcast this Thursday (11/12) at Ron’s Amazing Stories, download it from iTunes, stream it on TuneIn Radio or listen on your radio Friday night at 8pm Eastern time. Check your local listing or find the station closest to you at this link.

The Calendar:

November 5 – GE Theater presents: The Tokin
November 12 – A western round-up with Frontier Town.
November 19 – We will have a replay for Thanksgiving Break
November 26 – Author Louisa Oakley Green (Horror Express #10?)

Spotlight – Jim Harold

America’s most popular paranormal podcaster is Jim Harold. He has a life long love affair with the strange, the supernatural and the unexplained. His free podcasts The Paranormal Podcast, and Jim Harold’s Campfire are regularly among the top podcasts in their categories on iTunes, often outranking programs from mainstream media publishers.

Jim is an author with four books to his credit. He has collected stories from his years of podcasting and presents them in a fun readable format that everyone can enjoy. Whether you read just one or binge you are sure to have a great time reading his books. Jim has a talent for getting to the heart of a story. They are reported by his callers, who are ordinary people just like you and me. Reading Jim’s books give you that cozy feeling feeling of being around a campfire. Cozy in the sense you are not living the nightmares some of callers have had. Each story is captivating and one-off a kind.

Jim lives in Northeastern Ohio with his fantastic wife and two daughters.

Jim on FaceBook
Jim’s Free podcasts
Jim’s Paranormal plus club

This Week’s Podcast:

Tune in to the podcast this Thursday to hear Jim Harold tell us several great stories from his new book, True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold’s Campfire 4. Also, learn about the cat that makes no sense and Jim’s views on 1934 witches dialect. It is a show that can’t be missed.

You can listen to this podcast this Thursday (10/29) at Ron’s Amazing Stories, download it from iTunes, stream it on TuneIn Radio or listen on your radio Friday night at 8pm Eastern time. Check your local listing or find the station closest to you at this link.

The Calendar:

October 01: The classic retelling of, “The Thing on the Fourble Board”
October 08: The Mysterious Travels Episode
October 15: The Horror Express #9
October 22: Ghost Stories with Sylvia Shults
October 29: Old Time Horror with Jim Harold

Spotlight – Sylvia Shults

In this blog we turn the spotlight on Sylvia Shultz. Sylvia has been writing for years, and recently made the switch from fiction to nonfiction. Following a lifetime spent in the pursuit of the weird and the strange, she now shares that passion with her readers. Her fiction (both horror and romance) is still floating around out there, but these days she concentrates on living a childhood dream — telling true ghost stories. Her non-fiction works include Ghost of the Illinois River and Fractured Spirits: Hauntings at the Peoria State Hospital. Fractured Spirts was featured on an episode of the SyFy Channel’s hit show Ghost Hunters and it is the first book to examine the famously haunted asylum from both a historical and a supernatural perspective.

Her second book is a much more personal experience. “Hunting Demons” is a terrifying tale of demonic attachment. In the book a paranormal investigator, who has devoted her life to helping those suffering from unwanted spirit activity, runs a foul with three demonic entities. She never knew that her desire to help would lead to her own nightmare.

This book is an eye opener to good and evil, right and wrong, living and dead and the minions of evil’s dominion. Every spiritual, paranormal or non sensitive individual will get something out of this documented work of truth that will change you for a lifetime. It is an excellent read and is brutally honest in the subject of demonic oppression.

Sylvia lives in the Midwest in a ninety-year-old house full of books, animals, plenty of interesting hobbies and a devoted husband. In her spare time, Shults gets more material for her books by going on paranormal investigations. She wanders around cemeteries and sits in haunted morgues so you don’t have to.

Sylvia’s FaceBook page
Sylvia’s Amazon Author’s page
Sylvia’s website and home of her paranormal podcast, Lights Out.

This Week’s Podcast:

On the podcast this week Sylvia Shuts joins us to talk about her new book Hunting Demons and share some fantastic Ghost Stories with us.

You can listen to this podcast this Thursday (10/22) at Ron’s Amazing Stories, download it from iTunes, stream it on TuneIn Radio or listen on your radio Friday night at 8pm Eastern time. Check your local listing or find the station closest to you at this link.

The Calendar:

Spotlight – Frankenstein

Frankenstein, who was he? What was he? He started out as the creation of English author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, but he has become so much more. He is a superstar icon and has maintained a place as the very definition of scary for nearly 200 years. He made his debut in 1818. The novel was published anonymously by a small London publishing house and was titled, The Modern Prometheus. The second edition of the book included Mary’s name in 1827.

How did the story come about? Mary, Percy Shelly (Mary’s Husband), Lord Byron, and John Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for days, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made; her dream later evolved into the novel’s story.

Since the novel’s publication, the name “Frankenstein” has often been overused to refer to the monster itself. However, in the novel he is known as, the creature, the monster, the demon or just plain it. What did the monster think of himself? When he spoke to Victor Frankenstein he calls himself “the Adam of your labors, but is instead is your fallen angel.”

Frankenstien's Monster How was he created? Was the monster a collection body parts grafted together from cadavers and reanimated by the use of electricity? Not in Shelly’s novel, the doctor spends two years painstakingly constructing the creature one body feature at a time. He obtains these parts by dissection and the slaughter-house. He then brings monster to life using his unspecified process.

The movies are what changed everything. They took elements of the story and presented us with the modern day Frankenstein. “He is Alive!” became the battle cry and since that famous decree in 1931 by Collin Clive the visage of Boris Karloff has become the subject of our nightmares.

This Week’s Podcast:

Coming up this Thursday on the podcast we have the ninth episode of the Horror Express. Jason and I take you into the world of ghost stories, answer your emails and have a old time radio treat called, Frankenstein. You won’t want to miss it!

You can listen to this podcast this Thursday (10/08) at Ron’s Amazing Stories, download it from iTunes, stream it on TuneIn Radio or listen on your radio Friday night at 8pm Eastern time. Check your local listing or find the station closest to you at this link.