Reporters weren’t a regular feature of Theater Five … but a project aimed updating the archived copies of this 1964-1965 ABC Radio series has me listening for newspapers and newsies.

I also listen for references to the “newspaper habit” — delivering, buying, daily reading… Those are all here.

This one is melodramatic… Mr. Sherman, the old man having a heart attack at the beginning, is a retired printer.

There’s another episode I’ve found, looking at the plot summaries… “Around the Corner from Nowhere,”  with a sexist male photographer calling a woman reporter a “sob sister” at the start … I’ll get to it next.

He’s a bit heartbroken too, if that’s an excuse. The reporter returns at the end of the story,  before the cameraman develops his film… sounds like it might be a single exposure from a film pack Speed Graphic. ‘Fast film, slow exposure,” he says.

So far from my cruising through the updated Theater Five collection, it’s clear that it was a well produced attempt to keep alive radio drama after most Network series had given up to the forces of rock and roll and top 40 radio format… and it also kept alive some stereotypes about newspaper reporters, cynical, sentimental, frequently found at the corner bar.

But it also reminds me that in the 1960s, daily newspapers were still quite alive, something that even the characters in the radio dramas picked up and read every day. In fact, in 1965, the year is to program broadcast, I got my start as a reporter on the college newspaper, and before the 1960s were over, I was going to have my first job at one of the papers in America, The Hartford Courant.