Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-04-03 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

If you listen carefully, you can hear the last vague traces of a whole wide world of imagination slipping from memory.

“Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. The Lone Ranger rides again ...”

Gene Leitner remembers.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows …”

In his mind’s eye, Gene’s still sitting in that little tailor shop in Dundalk, in the days before television, with the radio blaring and a neighborhood pal listening with him and the pictures vivid inside their heads.

“Mr. District Attorney: Champion of the people, defender of truth …”

The voices fade, but they’ve stayed in Leitner’s memory long past their defining hours. Radio was king for about 20 years, long before the advent of political talk, or canned rock ‘n’ roll, or billion-dollar satellite deals. The family gathered in the living room to hear comedy (Jack Benny, Fred Allen) and adventure (Boston Blackie, Superman) and soap operas (Stella Dallas) deep into the evening.

But now the sound dims. And it will not help to adjust your dial.

Back in 1972, when radio’s most glorious years already had yielded to the drumbeat of rock ‘n’ roll, Leitner and Owens Pomeroy did their best to hold onto the past. They formed the Golden Radio Buffs of Maryland.

Over the years, they had members across the whole country. Maybe 250 at their peak, says Leitner. He’s retired after 40 years at Sparrows Point’s Bethlehem Steel plant. Pomeroy, also retired, was an engraver for Stieff Silver.

Every year, the group brought some of radio’s great voices here, and honored them with their Golden Mike awards. One year it was Bob Hope, who was in town for a performance at the old Painter’s Mill Music Theater. One year it was Anne Elstner Mathews, who played Stella Dallas. One year it was Fred Floyd, who was the original Lone Ranger announcer (“a fiery horse”), and then it was Jackson Beck, who was “the big, booming voice for Superman,” Leitner says.

There’s a whole generation that’s held onto the names, and the networks, and the sponsors. Heck, they can even tell you what time, and what night of the week, the shows came on.

And the club honored local folks, too. Such as Galen Fromme, the great newscaster at WBAL for so many years. And disc jockey Joe Knight (“Your Knight of the Spinning Round Table,”) who worked at WFBR and WCBM. And Brent Gunts, who worked at WFBR and broadcast the news about Pearl Harbor, and later headed the news at WMAR-TV.

The club also did re-creations. Over the years, says Leitner, they’ve put together an archive of thousands of radio programs — tapes, written transcripts — and club members would perform the shows at local church halls.

“I’d pull out an old show,” says Leitner, “and we’d put the whole thing on, with the original commercials, the musical bridges and sound effects, just as it was aired, word for word, years ago. Great fun, great fun.”

Inevitably, though, time has taken its toll. The club’s original members, the generation that grew up when radio was king “and remembered how radio used to be,” began to fade. Membership slipped. Newsletters, once circulated four or five times a year, became sporadic.

Now, says Leitner, “We’re pretty near the end of the road.”

There are plans for a tribute to Molly Goldberg and other Jewish performers, set for May 4 at the Jewish Museum on Baltimore’s Lloyd Street. But that’s about it.

“I’m afraid the mystique of radio is gone,” says Leitner. “It’s finished. Right now, you have computers, you have iPods, whatever the heck they are, you have cable TV. People want to see things, instead of use their imaginations. They want to be entertained 24 hours a day.

“The adults put on the radio to listen to political talk. It’s more anger than mystique. They vent their frustrations. Me, I think of radio, and I think of growing up. We lived out in Dundalk, and my best friend’s parents had a tailor shop, and they had a radio in the shop.

“For me, it’s all about being in the tailor shop and listening to ‘The Lone Ranger’ with my friend. And using my imagination.”

It’s still there, vivid as ever in his mind. It’s just the sound that’s fading. The fiery hoofbeats of a horse named Silver. The laughter when Jack Benny and Fred Allen went after each other. And a kid’s cry: “Look, up in the sky …”

Up in the sky, that’s where it’s all gone.