What makes this recording special

• The recording is an aircheck from KNX Los Angeles from the day of broadcast.

• Airchecks, or recordings from the broadcast signal, were made for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, stations wanted to check their signal quality in their broadcast area in different geographies. KNX was a very good station, a CBS-owned station in Los Angeles, and the broadcast center where the production of Gunsmoke originated. It's not likely that they needed an aircheck recording to judge the quality or reach of their signal.

• Airchecks were often made privately by contracting with a recording studio to do so. Anyone could have a reason to do so. Performers, their agents, advertising agencies, sponsors and potential sponsors, writers, musicians, and others all could have reasons to document their performances or use the recordings to audition their talents. At this time, it is likely that the recording was on transcription disc as a permanent archive of the broadcast and not on recording tape. Some of the background noise indicates some disc noise and static or scratchiness, while a recording tape would not have such characteristics.

• Most of the Gunsmoke performances were recorded on transcription discs (or recording tape starting the mid-1950s) and not broadcast live. The discs were played over the network feeds to the affiliates for the public broadcasts. The archived discs of the series were primarily intact with only a few early episodes missing. Those few copies could have been removed for any variety of reasons or were damaged. For whatever reason, "#10" was not in the Gunsmoke archive discs that collectors transferred to tape in the 1970s.

  • Collector Keith Scott offers more specific details: "Gunsmoke was pre-recorded only nine times in 1952, then the shows were aired live continuously from show #25 until show #106. From show #107 (1954-05-08) until the end of the series in June 1961 the episodes were pre-recorded on tape. Interestingly, eight 1952 shows were 'pre-cut' [pre-recorded] several days or even weeks before they were broadcast. The Ride Back, however, was recorded exactly one day before its air date."

• The fact that The Ride Back recording is an aircheck that was only recently found and identified probably indicates that this particular recording was never in the main Gunsmoke archive. Classic radio collectors are lucky that someone, for an unknown reason, arranged for private recording of the actual broadcast. Because it is an aircheck, its sound quality is representative of the way people heard it in their homes or their vehicles. It does not have the crisp sound or "snap" that in-studio transcriptions have (some of the surviving Gunsmoke episodes sound almost magical, with a rich full sound, capturing the subtle background sound effects that made the series so famous and beloved). Nonetheless, it is a very good recording, which implies it was done on professional equipment and not on a home recorder such as an office dictation machine that was prone to low fidelity and higher background noise.

• Airchecks would end up playing a critical role in the preservation of Gunsmoke, Suspense, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. CBS moved their full production and archiving to recording tape in 1956. Recording tape was being used in various ways for production for about seven years prior, but many programs used transcriptions as their final recording format. Unlike the one-time only use that transcription discs had, recording tape could be re-used if someone judged that the production and/or archive recording was no longer needed. Home tape recorders were starting to become popular, and some radio fans started to record their local stations so they could listen to their favorite programs at a more convenient time. Others wanted to keep the recordings and listen to them again and again. A critical figure in this late-1950s era was Mr. Pat Rispole (pronounced "riss-pohl-ee") of the Albany, NY area. He recorded hundreds of episodes of these series from the local station WROW. Rispole recorded many sports broadcasts, and the importance of his recording obsession was recognized as such many years later. Rispole was an active trader of his recordings with other early classic radio collectors, ensuring that his recordings would survive and entertain radio fans for decades. He died in 1979 at age 53. Radio historian Elizabeth McLeod recently posted on the Old Time Radio Researchers Facebook page "Rispole may be the single most important figure in the preservation of sports broadcasting in America. Nobody else, in the 1950s and 60s, was doing what he did, with the single-mindedness that he did -- but because no sports franchise or radio station was preserving local broadcasts, in their entirety, the way he did, his tapes are literally the only large-scale audio record we have of mid-century regular-season baseball broadcasting." In a letter to another classic radio program collector of his time, Rispole noted that he was responsible for over 200 episodes of Gunsmoke, Suspense, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar being preserved.

• The other important source of Gunsmoke recordings from 1957 to the end of the series is the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. AFRTS was still supplying 16" and 12" records of radio drama programs to their radio stations around the world for broadcast to service personnel and their families. The early years of Gunsmoke were well-preserved with network transcriptions and the final years with combinations of surviving network tape recordings, professional airchecks, home recordings, and AFRTS. With the addition of this recording of The Ride Back, only four Gunsmoke broadcasts remain to be found. It is curious and somewhat ironic that the only period of the series that has missing recordings is at the time when the network was using discs... and the late years of the series, which relies on home recordings, airchecks, AFRTS, and luck(!), is complete. Great thanks are owed to the anonymous recordists and collectors of those early hobby years for their relentless pursuit of Gunsmoke recordings from 1957 to the end of the series.

• This is the first recording of a missing Gunsmoke broadcast to be found since 2014. Homely Girl, broadcast on CBS on 1960-06-19, and written by Kathleen Hite, was found as an AFRTS disc by collector and radio historian Ian Grieve in Australia. It is AFRTS #399 of Gunsmoke. The Ride Back was found in reels of late Los Angeles area classic radio program collector Jim Fox. The recordings came to the attention of the Old Time Radio Researchers group through the efforts of Jim Stephenson in the hopes that The Ride Back and others would be shared and enjoyed with old time radio fans and collectors.

The Still-Missing Gunsmoke Episodes

The four missing Gunsmoke broadcasts are from early in the series:

• 1952-05-03 Ben Thompson (a fragment exists)
• 1952-05-17 Dodge City Killer
• 1952-06-14 Jailbait Janet
• 1952-06-21 Heat Spell

A complete broadcast of 1952-09-27 The Railroad is still being sought; the unedited drama portion exists without musical bridges and announcements.