In 1956, NBC radio’s “Biographies in Sound” featured veteran radio news commentator H.V. Kaltenborn and radio satirists Bob & Ray in the episode above, paying tribute to the first 30 years of commercial radio — news, music, drama and more. The Internet Archive has a copy stored on its own page: Recollections at Thirty. Broadcast news is only a small part of the history capsule, but I like the coincidence that “-30-” is the old newspaper symbol for the end of a story, a fine time for “Recollections,” and coincidentally that I stumbled on this during a day spent exploring the past of this website of mine.

I found this program today while double-checking my link to another “Biographies in Sound” episode — one that didn’t play correctly on my page — having discovered the error while I was making a guest presentation to a journalism class. Some old code needed updating, causing me to notice in the process that I have an anniversary of my own approaching: In December this site will be nine years old!

Among the editing updates today, fixing code for which software standards have changed over the years and other omissions, were past posts about Soap Operas in general, one specifically about an anti-Roosevelt propaganda soap, American Family Robinson, an overview of a international affairs series aimed at members of the Armed Forces at the height of the Cold War, and a biography of the sportswriter Grantland Rice, which the professor asked about — perhaps thinking that students, some of whom who didn’t even recognize the name “Clark Kent,” might wake up to the word “sports.”

Anyhow, I’m grateful for the chance to talk about this project and the excuse to put in an afternoon of editing. I’m afraid I rambled around as much as this page does. And my editing is a bit random, too. But everything I’ve added or refreshed probably could use proofreading — maybe the students who are reading this, trying to make sense of my class presentation, will hit the “comment” button below let me know if they see any bad links, bad metaphors, or incomplete thoughts. I’ll check the comments tomorrow, hoping they don’t wait until they are on deadline. One of the refreshing things about writing this site as a retirement hobby is the lack of deadlines, or of a regular publication schedule. I forgot to mention that.

There were so many things I didn’t mention in that class presentation, beyond playing a few snippets of Superman, Frontier Gentleman, Rogers of the Gazette, and Night Beat, stumping the professor with a question about Anna Zenger, and explaining the menu structure at the top of the page and the location of the “About the Author” page that explains how and why I started what began as academic research and has since become a retirement hobby.

I figure that list of links should give the journalism students more than enough to supplement their notes on my show-and-tell presentation… at least the ones who stop back at this page before they write a story for the professor’s eyes only. I’m especially glad that I’m not the one who will have to grade them.

The professor asked how many radio shows I’ve written about, and I mumbled a bit about not keeping count. But he said numbers might help his students describe the extent of the project, so I’ve counted a few things for them: There are 198 date-stamped “blog posts” here, like this one, each usually discussing just one or two episodes of a radio series; and there are about 70 longer “pages” listed on the drop-down menus at the top of the screen, most of them compiled from earlier blog posts, including one that lists almost 60 “newspaper movies” that were redone in radio versions (some more than once), and other pages that go into details about radio serials like “The Green Hornet” and “Superman,” which each broadcast hundreds of episodes where newspaper reporters were described doing their jobs, getting in and out of trouble, and — at least sometimes — being heroes… which is how this website got its two names, “Newspaper Heroes on the Air” and “jheroes.com” for short.

(If you are reading this on a full-screen Web browser, not a smartphone, the right margin carries a chronological index going back to the first episode, from December 2010. I don’t suggest that the students start there and read all 198 blog posts and 70 “pages” of essays, listening to hundreds of hours of radio. And I guess I can hold off for a year on doing my own nostalgic read-through, then have a big tenth-year celebration — after I do a lot more editing.)