Happy Independence Day! It's difficult finding great radio specials for July 4th, because all the big shows were on summer break. However, patriotic and historical shows abounded, and this well-written play digs into the backstory of the writing of the Declaration of Independence. It speculates on the wording of the document, and imagines what the nation's learned forefather's might have wrestled with in the composition of the declaration that would plunge the American Colonies into a bloody conflict.

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For the third and final week of our mini-tribute to the early work of Jack Webb, who was most famous for "Dragnet," we are going back to one of his first radio acting performances on the exceptional CBS series "Escape." This is an emotionally dramatic role for Webb, who usually played it cold, as a tightly-wound individual such as Pat Novak or Pete Kelly. This is a "Mummy"-esque fantastical story of ancient Egypt and life-sustaining magic by Arthur Conan Doyle.

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This week's great science fiction story is by Murray Leinster. He is most famous for his story on artificial intelligence "A Logic Named Joe," where he uncannily predicted the Internet. This story is a little more thinky, as it wrestles with heady problems of a "first contact" with an alien intelligence. Earth explorers encounter an alien ship in the midst of space, but both ships find they can not risk trusting the other, or returning home, doomed to an eternal stalemate.

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Moving along from last week's grimy waterfront detective Pat Novak, we look at TV and radio actor Jack Webb in a similar role, Pete Kelly, a musician who travelled amongst the seedy world of jazz musicians and crime lords. Learn on this episode how authentic this show was, and how "Pete Kelly's Blues" really had very little to do with "the blues" at all.

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Today's unusual science fiction story is by Hugo-Award winning writer Mark Clifton, and deals with children who are a step beyond the genius IQ. They are "Brights," and they have figured out how to manipulate the space-time continuum, making the inter-dimensional cosmos their playground. This creates a thorny problem for their parents, the "Tweens" and "Stupids" to figure out.

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We did a Pat Novak last year, and the dialogue writing was so outrageous, we had to go back to hear more. Jack Webb did this series briefly before becoming typecast as 'Joe Friday' on Dragnet. Here he is playing a skeezy private detective on the dirty San Francisco waterfront. Webb's delivery is so earnest and deadpan, it's no wonder this obscure series had listeners calling in to ask, "Who's that guy?"

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This is a compelling story of a family that survived a cataclysmic event, when a passing meteorite pulls the earth out of Axis and away from the sun. It is a story that is at the same time claustrophobic, about a family clinging to life in "the nest," and vast, as they must go to fetch frozen air in the frozen wastes in order to keep breathing. It's from the pen of Fritz Leiber, writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

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It's episode 11 of 15 for the Stan Freberg Show today, the last network comedy show. In this episode, the star sportscaster "Cliff Les Hutley" from the dressing room of Bearcat Panther Tigers, a trombone playing dog, and Bang Gunley, US Marshal. Inventive radio from a time when all eyes were glued to TV.

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