Echoes of ‘Gunsmoke’ and the Golden Age of Radio

Four decades after he was last paid to say them, George Walsh still rattles off thewords in the steady, measured tone once familiar to listeners nationwide: “Around Dodge City and in the territory out West, there’s just one way to handle the killers and the spoilers, and that’s with a U.S. marshal and the smell of ‘Gunsmoke.’ ”

At that point the music swelled, a shot rang out and ricocheted, and the radio show that gained even more fame later on TV was on the air for another week.

“It’s easy to remember, if you said it for 10 years every Saturday,” says Walsh, announcer for the show broadcast from the Hollywood studio of KNX-AM (1070) to CBS stations across the country from 1952 to 1961.

With the station’s 80th anniversary coming on Sunday, Walsh reminisced this week about his work there during the last years of radio’s golden age. Entertainers including Jack Benny, Gene Autry, Bing Crosby, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Rosemary Clooney broadcast from KNX, and listeners nationwide set their schedules by the show times.

Every Saturday at 5 p.m., Walsh, now 82, marveled at the work of the engineers, sound-effects men and the ensemble cast on “Gunsmoke” that starred William Conrad as marshal Matt Dillon. From a studio on Sunset Boulevard they conjured an Old West tableau of galloping horses, gunshots, tough-talking outlaws and an even tougher lawman. “It’s very true, it is the theater of the mind,” he says.

“It was actually thrilling to be in the studio with those guys. It was a hell of a job. It was a great run,” says Walsh, who read the introduction and the commercials on the show, and was also the announcer for “Gunsmoke” when it ran on television until 1980.

“A lot of guys did what I did. I just had the distinction of being the last one,” Walsh says, as “Gunsmoke” was the last dramatic program on the radio network.

Walsh, a Cleveland native, came to Los Angeles in 1952 from Roswell, N.M., where he worked at a couple of radio stations after his discharge from the Army Air Corps following World War II.

“I came out here to go to school and study that new thing called television,” he recalls. Roswell “was a great place to live. But if you’re going to be in the mass media, the masses are not in New Mexico.

“When you work in Roswell, you think you’re lucky if you could get a job in El Paso,” he says. “It was just unbelievable. I was a little-town hick.”

In his 34 years at KNX before retiring in 1986, Walsh worked as an interviewer, sports reporter, newscaster and announcer for various shows, including the mystery drama “Suspense.” The voice he used on that show his three daughters described as “spooky daddy.”

“I remember listening to him before we got married, and I was just thrilled,” says Charlotte Walsh, his wife of 44 years. After they wed, when Walsh worked an overnight shift, “I went to bed and I turned him on when he was working late. So he’d put me to sleep.”

Walsh also lent his voice to Disneyland, for the animatronic Mr. Johnson, host of Tomorrowland’s Flight to the Moon and Mission to Mars rides. But that wasn’t the first time Walsh had to talk about spacecraft. After Orson Welles, Walsh made the second-most famous radio broadcast about a UFO, while working in Roswell in 1947.

“Yes, I was at a radio station in Roswell when the UFO supposedly landed,” recalls Walsh. “I broke the story. I was kind of proud of it.”

Working at station KSWS in the dusty desert town, Walsh said “we used to do two local newscasts a day, which wasn’t that easy--there wasn’t that much going on there.” That is, until June 17, 1947, when he got a call from the press officer at the nearby Air Force base.

“He said, ‘We captured a flying saucer.’ When I picked myself up off the floor, I asked him a few questions,” Walsh says. The officer refused to answer, saying all would be explained in his press release, which it wasn’t. All it said was that a rancher found the wreckage of a saucer on his land and called the sheriff, who called the Air Force, which picked up the debris and shipped it to Washington for analysis. Walsh said it got as far as an air base in Ohio before someone figured out it was a radar target.

But by then Walsh had already made his broadcast, and forwarded the news to the Associated Press bureau in Albuquerque. “I got phone calls for the rest of the day from all over the world.”

He gained even more celebrity from his work at KNX, winning awards that now cover the wall of his den in Monterey Park. Nowadays, he says he listens only to news and classical music on the radio, and doesn’t care for talk radio, or the audio exhibitionism of shock jocks such as Howard Stern.

“They’re making a good living and they’re contributing to the union pension and welfare fund,” says Walsh. “Apart from that I don’t have much use for them.”

As for the talk-radio call-in shows, “I don’t take much stock in an expert of some kind who will solve the world’s problems in 30 seconds. I guess it’s entertainment, it attracts people. But it’s not the full use of the radio media. Radio is at its best when it’s doing information or entertainment, and I don’t think that’s either.”

KNX still broadcasts replays of the old radio shows, including the “Lone Ranger,” “Dragnet” and “Gunsmoke,” on its nightly “Drama Hour” from 9 to 10 p.m. But Walsh doesn’t foresee a revival of the form.

“I think the glory days will never return, the days of the big radio shows and the big radio stars. It was magic that you could sit in your living room around a big console and hear something from around the country or overseas,” he says. “It’s impossible for people today to think of families sitting around the radio, with no picture. I grew up in an era of people who used to shush each other during the programs.”

But the theater of the mind couldn’t compete when television pictures became available. “It was unbelievable people were standing in the rain outside department stores watching television” when it was new, Walsh remembers . “It was bound to happen. But it was sort of like losing a friend.”