Back in 1939, The Green Hornet fought crime by tricking crooks into giving themselves away, but his radio series was also giving away snapshots of the lives of newspaper reporters.

The staff of The Daily Sentinel worked for Britt Reid, the newspaper publisher whose secret identity was The Green Hornet, his way to fight underhanded lawyers, officials and other crooks who previously could not be stopped by the law, news exposes or editorial crusades.

The August 1st 1939 episode, Bait for a Burglar, includes conversations between Reid, reporter Ed Lowery, news photographer Clicker Benny and  police contacts. The press-police relationship portrayed may or may not have been typical of newspapers in the 1930s. It might be as out of date as the program’s description of a police officer apprehending a burglar by grabbing him by the collar, enough of a cartoon cliche to have long ago given us “collared” as a slang synonym for “arrested.”

In this story, the police are quite willing to give Lowery information off the record, because they trust The Daily Sentinel not to release it prematurely. Lowery still seems to find the situation very frustrating, but he is a man of his word, only telling his boss, not knowing that he is giving the Green Hornet vital information.

Even less trustworthy, ironically, is a former policeman on The Daily Sentinel staff, the radio show’s comic-relief Irish-accented Mike Axford, who at various times serves as a reporter or Reid’s bodyguard. Axford’s ego and tendency to gossip are used to spring one the Green Hornet’s traps for the crooks.

Links above go to both an Internet Archive copy of the program from its collection of more than 300 episodes, and a YouTube video, which is the same audio file with a picture or two.

Other Hornet episodes are available by searching JHeroes for browsing the Hornet page on the Adventure tab of the main menu.

Note: This post’s first draft was done with the WordPress Jetpack application on my phone, which I have not been using very often. I wanted to see if I could get both the YouTube video and Internet Archive MP3 link working properly, without having to update from my main computer. It took a couple of tries to discover that there are separate “block entry” definitions for YouTube links and uploaded videos. So far so good.