New Year's Eve Live!

While Whit visits his daughter and grandchildren in California, Bernard, Connie, Tom, and Eugene host a live Kids Radio celebration from Whit’s End. A cheering audience joins them for music, stories, historical comedy, reports from around Odyssey, and the final countdown to midnight.

Eugene begins with a ukulele song bidding farewell to December and welcoming January. His performance reflects on how quickly the years seem to pass and how the future replaces the past before anyone quite understands where the time has gone.

Connie calls Harlow Doyle for a report on New Year’s Eve celebrations around town. Harlow has mistaken the assignment for a secret investigation and disguised himself in a bunny suit. He cannot remember who called him, where he is supposed to report, or what the letters in VFW mean. Connie finally abandons the interview and tells him simply to enjoy the evening.

Bernard presents a comic visit to ancient Rome in 45 B.C. Emperor Julius Caesar has asked the astronomer and mathematician Sosigenes to design a better calendar. Sosigenes explains the difficulty of dividing solar and lunar years into equal months and proposes months of differing lengths, with an extra day added to February every fourth year.

The arrangement creates a 365-day calendar, periodic leap years, and January 1 as the beginning of each year. Caesar is doubtful until Sosigenes predicts future profits from instruction manuals and calendar-related computer problems. Eugene concludes the lesson with a Latin song wishing everyone a happy new year.

Bernard then tells of Joey, a boy so fascinated by the future that he neglects his present life. A mysterious old man gives him a silver life clock. Its hands can carry Joey forward through time whenever he wishes, but they can never move backward. Joey accepts the warning without concern and immediately uses the clock to skip an ordinary day at school.

Harlow’s second report goes no better than the first. He boards what he thinks is a local bus to the Harlequin Theater, only to discover that it is traveling nonstop to Chicago. When the driver threatens to send him to the moon if he does not sit down, Harlow decides that he has become an astronaut and signs off before Connie can correct him.

Joey uses the life clock whenever something appears difficult, boring, slow, or painful. He skips the rest of school and college, the early stages of his career, a proper courtship, the wait for his child to be born, and countless other stretches of life. What feels like a single easy day ends with an elderly Joey staring at himself in a mirror.

The old man returns and reminds Joey that no one stole his life; Joey used it up. God does not allow people to repeat their years, so every part must be lived fully the first time. Joey begs for another chance, then awakens beneath his daydreaming tree and discovers that the entire journey was a dream.

Grateful to be young, Joey stops longing for time to hurry. He begins receiving each ordinary day as part of the life he has been given. At Whit’s End, the clock reaches midnight, and the hosts and audience count down together before welcoming the new year with joy.