The Big Broadcast

Tom Riley and John Whittaker wrestle a very heavy desk into a storage room at Whit's End, and Tom announces that the next piece of furniture Whit wants moved had better be a chair or a paperweight. Whit admits he probably should have emptied the drawers first. He plans to give the desk to the church, and the storage room seems like a fine place to keep it until then.

While he catches his breath, Tom notices a row of shapes hidden under tarps. Underneath sits the old radio equipment Whit once hauled up from the basement. Years ago the kids wanted a station of their own, so Whit set everything up and even got the broadcasting license. They called it Kids Radio. The station did not last long, and the gear has been gathering dust ever since. That strikes both men as a terrible waste. Tom suggests they put it back to work with a program of their own, the way radio used to be, full of mysteries and comedies and game shows, the kind of thing that made listeners lean toward the speaker and wait. Whit is not sure modern kids will take to radio at all. Tom is certain they will, if it is done right. With a few old scripts, a little rehearsal, some sound effects, and a lot of nerve, Odyssey is about to get its own big broadcast.

At twelve noon, Kids Radio goes on the air live from Whit's End, sponsored by Rinse-A-Dent toothpaste, whose slogan the announcer mangles so thoroughly that listeners may end up with fresh breath and bright teeth or possibly the other way around. First up is the game show Fact or Fiction, hosted by Tom, with Whit announcing and introducing the contestants: Jimmy Barclay, a regular at Whit's End with a talent for putting dead lizards in girls' lunchboxes, and Lucy, a reporter for the Odyssey Owl with a famously shiny smile. The rules are simple. Tom makes a statement, and the contestants say whether it is fact or fiction. What follows is not simple at all. Lucy wins points for answers to questions that were never asked, her score leaps from fifteen to thirty by arithmetic no one can follow, and Jimmy never gets off zero. A pretend news bulletin interrupts the program, then the program interrupts the bulletin right back. Lucy takes the big spin and the grand prize, and Jimmy signs off insisting the whole game was rigged.

Next comes the Odyssey Sports Roundup, where Eugene Meltsner interviews Coach Fred Zachary about the season ahead. The coach is happy to talk, thoughtful in tone, and says absolutely nothing, explaining that his boys are four times out of five better than half the team they were last year and that the two squads are far too similar to be compared.

Then the Odyssey Theater of the Air presents Sam Maritan, Private Eye, in Mystery on the Road to Jericho. In first-century Jerusalem, a client named Lucy Cutie hires Sam to find her father, who set out for Jericho the night before and never arrived. She offers two silver coins. Sam takes the case, climbs aboard his late-model turbo-injected mule, and starts down a road known for danger, mystery, and excellent hiding places for bandits.

At a roadside cafe he questions a religious leader riding back from a convention in Jericho. The man refuses even to glance at the drawing of the missing father, then blurts out that the fellow was beaten and half dead and could not have been helped anyway before hurrying off and dropping a small jar of oil from the Jericho Inn. Inside the cafe, a young innkeeper named Mr. Small serves Sam a glass of water and points out a Levite by the jukebox. The Levite is even less helpful, until Sam threatens him with an editorial in the Jerusalem Times. Then the truth comes out. He saw the injured man calling from the roadside, got frightened, did not want to get involved, and passed by on the other side.

Sam rides on and finds the man where the others left him, robbed, beaten, stripped, and abandoned. He uses the dropped oil to soothe the cuts, lifts the man onto his mule, and carries him back to the inn, where he hands over both silver coins and promises to cover anything else the man needs. Then he fetches the rest of the Cuties from Jerusalem for a happy reunion and slips away quietly. He never does get his coins back, but he decides he came away with something better: a story, though he admits a fellow he knows tells it far better and calls it the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Back at Whit's End the broadcast ends in congratulations. Lucy worries she may be stuck playing cuties forever. Jimmy bursts in with news that the phone has not stopped ringing, because all of Odyssey has been listening. Tom is delighted to have been right, and Whit is delighted too, until he raises one small problem. The show filled half an hour beautifully. That leaves twenty-three and a half hours a day still to fill. Offers arrive at once: a lecture on the fundamentals of electrical conductivity, some poems, a superhero, and home movies from a trip to Cleveland. Kids Radio, it seems, is going to need a bigger schedule.