In the 1930s and 40s narrative radio — think ‘old time radio shows’ through today’s lens — weren’t just popular, they were the center of American mass media culture. During the so-called "Golden Age of Radio," audio storytelling held the same prestige and mass adoption that television, streaming networks, and social media hold today...combined.
By the early 1940s, about 9 in 10 American households had a radio. That means more people owned a radio than had indoor plumbing. And because shows were live, they created a massive shared national experience with truly massive ratings: the most popular narrative programs easily drew 30 to 40 million listeners. The U.S. population was only about 135-million in the early 40s.
But when television entered the scene a transition happened quickly. In 1946 about 10,000 homes had a TV set. By 1952 more than 15-million did and these ‘old time radio shows’ pretty much fell out of fashion.
Our guest grew up listening to narrative radio shows with his grandmother and is now doing his part to bring them back to the world as podcasts. Michael Troop served as a nurse anesthetist in the U.S. Army until retiring as a Lt. Colonel in 1991. During the Covid pandemic he got into audio production and that led to him pitching an idea to Bryce Alexander, he's the CEO and Executive Artistic Director of the Naples Players. The idea was to recreate from the ground up, with professional and amateur actors, and full sound design and the Naples Players Repertoire Radio Theatre podcast was born and is now off and running.
Guest:
Michael Troop, producer of the Naples Players Repertoire Radio Theatre Podcast
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Transcript created with Copilot. Please forgive any spelling errors or mistranslations.
Mike Kiniry
This is Gulf Coast Life. I'm Mike Kiniry. Thanks for joining us. In the 1930s and 40s, narrative radio, think old-time radio shows through today's lens, weren't just popular. They were the center of American mass media culture. During the so-called golden age of radio, audio storytelling held the same prestige and mass adoption that television, streaming networks, and social media hold today combined. But when television entered the scene, a transition happened quickly. In 1946, about 10,000 homes had a TV set. By 1952, more than 15 million homes did. And these old-time radio shows pretty much fell out of fashion. My guest today grew up listening to narrative radio shows with his grandmother and is now doing his part to bring them back to the world as podcasts. Michael Troop served as a nurse anestheticist in the U.S. Army until retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1991. During the COVID pandemic, he got into audio production, and that led him to pitching an idea to Bryce Alexander. He's the CEO and executive artistic director of the Naples Players. The idea is to create from the ground up with professional and amateur actors and full sound design, some of his favorite old-time radio shows. And the Repertoire Radio Theater podcast was born and is now off and running. Michael Troop, welcome to Gulf Coast Life.
Mike Troop
Thank you, sir. Glad to be. I'm glad to be here.
Mike Kiniry
I'm glad to be talking to you. So for starters, tell us just a bit about yourself. I mentioned a few bullet points there, but tell us about yourself and your background.
Mike Troop
I retired from the military in 1991 and came out here shortly after that, thinking that I would like to buy some property in Cape Coral. But as things turned out, I eventually set roots here in Naples. I lost a sense of purpose after I got out of the military and my wife was reading the papers one day and found out that they needed some people to help build sets at the Naples Players. And the Naples Players back then was a little theater on Goodlett Frank Road that was It appeared in the old Khan Tiki Theater. I don't know if you remember that. But that's where I got my start. And the first thing I ever did there was build a casket for the musical Dracula the Musical. It took me all day to make that box. but I learned from some of the best people there. They were quite instrumental in me getting interested. And then I took off trying to audition. And basically I got some parts, but mostly they were bit parts. And in the years since I joined the Naples Players, I've been with them for over 30 years, I've appeared on stage and behind stage and done everything from acting to doing some of the sound design and lighting for the Naples players.
Mike Kiniry
So two-part question. What year were you born, Michael?
Mike Troop
1946.
Mike Kiniry
1946. So the bio said that you like to listen to these radio shows with your grandmother. Do you have any memories of particular shows that you guys listen to?
Mike Troop
Yeah. We had, I don't remember the old, the name of the radio. It was a brown radio that sat on her, middle of her table, dining room table, small dining room table. It had two knobs on it. And we listened to Dragnet, the Lone Ranger, the Whistler, the Shadow, Those are the ones that come to mind right now.
Mike Kiniry
I tried to summarize in that intro just how popular these kinds of shows were back then. Can you just, I know you were just a kid, but you know, TV really wasn't a thing yet. So this was kind of the only game in town when it came to storytelling that came out of a device for people to consume, right?
Mike Troop
That's correct. Consider that, at least in Chicago, where I was born and raised, they They very rarely had great television stations. We had three basic television stations and later on we got the, I think it was the VRL or I can't remember now, but it was the education station in which Sesame Street appeared. And most of the time you had to use rabbit ears. to watch television and most of the time you got snow. So rather than watching television, we would just turn on the radio, which was a lot more fun for me.
Mike Kiniry
So the press release said that you got started doing some audio narration or something like that during COVID. Like give us the origin story for you doing the kinds of stuff that has led to this repertoire radio theater that we're going to be explaining.
Mike Troop
Way back, there was a woman by the name of Dallas Dunnigan, who was the CEO and executive artistic director of the Naples Players, and she introduced something called Etc., which is now called the Reader's Theater. And basically, it was a group of people that would sit on stools with a music stand in front of them with the script on the music stand and they would read scripts. And for the most part, they were pretty good because they used some really seasoned actors, but they opened it up to a lot of other people. And sometimes the performances were good and sometimes they were bad. But I thought, this is kind of neat. Why don't we just record some of the sounds or the recordings? COVID then hit and no one was doing anything like the Reader's Theater. And I got interested, I was trying to occupy my time and I got interested in reading books for Audible. And so I signed, I established an account with ACX instead of reading books with Audible. And then I started downloading some scripts, some old Agatha, not Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe scripts. And I did the Raven and the Telltale Heart. And then I decided, well, let me see if I can go ahead and try to put some music and sound effects on that. Then I remembered downloading a script called The Fabulous Dr. Tweety. And I thought it was an amazing script. It was very, very funny. And so I did all the parts on that script and I mixed them all together. Bryce came on board. That's Bryce Alexander. And I let him listen to one of my fabulous Dr. Tweedy scripts. That's a, he was a professor. Dr. Tweedy was a professor at a school and he always got into some type of trouble, some type of situation that led to a lot of double entendre and misdirections and all this other stuff that went on to the storyline. And he was a soft-spoken guy, and he talked something like this: Hello, I'm Doctor Twiggy, and so I did that voice and he found a a bum, which became his chauffeur. And the bum had this type of deep voice that I thought would be the perfect character for him. He sounded like something like this, you know. And he said, I'm going to work for Dr. Tweedy. And then he worked for this young, this elderly female principal or dean of the school. And she talked like this because that's the way this higher dean would talk in my imagination. So I put all these voices together and put a music track on it, some sound effects, and I let Bryce listen to it. And she said, he said, that is great. Can you do it full time? And I said, yeah, I can. If you let me to, let me allow me to do it. And he says, go for it. And he gave me the green light. And that was maybe four years ago. And ever since I've been doing it.
Mike Kiniry
Had you any experience doing recording or editing or sound design prior to sort of stumbling into that world because of COVID?
Mike Troop
No, that's where Dr. Google came in to play. I went down, I wanted to know how you guys do the work that you do. And so I got on to Dr. Google. I also tried to take some courses from lynda.com, which is now under a different rubric. I think it's, it'll come to me tomorrow, so stay right there. So But anyhow, I started taking some courses online. I many times got down these rabbit holes because I had no idea about what you guys were talking about. The terminology was way over my head. But that and a couple of books, and again, as Dr. Google would lead me to certain things. And then I found a website called the Generic Radio Theater website. And you can download from them a lot of these scripts that I use today. There's hundreds of them, from Dragnet to Sherlock Holmes. to the fabulous Dr. Tweedy, to my favorite husband, which was the precursor to the I Love Lucy show. So I started recording individually myself, the different parts, and then I branched out. I had a whole, there was a whole array of actors, a whole cachet of actors, at the Naples Players. And so I put out some casting calls to see if anybody was interested. And sure enough, they were. And for many of the actors that I got, it helped them to be on stage better because they learned how to read a script and find the intent in the written words. And for many people, it was not when you're an early actor on stage, you tend to just read the lines and hopefully people will like your reading. But I teach people when they're in front of this microphone how to do what I call non-verbal phonation. For example, if I were to say, hello, Mike, there's several ways to say hello, Mike. You just don't say hello, Mike. You may have some anxiety about saying hello, Mike. So you may go, hello, Mike. Those other sounds are what I call non-verbal phonation. It demonstrates a certain feeling. And when you're on a microphone and you're doing nothing but using your sound, you have to convey that type of feeling, that type of motion. And because people don't see you gesticulating, that's all they hear is your voice.
Mike Kiniry
I love it. This is Gulf Coast Life. Our guest today is Michael Troop. He's a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel. He served as a nurse anesthetist. He and his family moved to North Naples in 1991 after he retired. We're talking with him today about the new Repertoire Radio Theater podcast. It is recreations of classic radio shows from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. that he and professional and amateur actors create, sound effects and all. He does the recording, editing, and sound design himself. Since retiring, Troupe volunteered at the Naples Players, and he did have some small roles, but he mostly helped backstage and built sets and scenes. He pitched this radio show podcast concept to the Naples Players and got the go-ahead from CEO and Executive Artistic Director Bryce Alexander, and they're off and running and releasing episodes bi-weekly now. They're available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Substack. So tell us about the actors who are involved. Is it all just kind of volunteer sweat equity? Is it everybody just pitching in and doing it? Do you get them all together to record? Do they record their parts separately? I just, I'm trying to picture how you do it. How does it get collected before it gets assembled?
Mike Troop
And this is kudos to the actors, because each one of them sits in front of this microphone. That's all they have is a script, which I display on a computer monitor, and they just read their parts. That is more difficult than you really think, because you're not just reading the words, you're reading an intent. You're reading an emotional, there's emotional content within the words, and you have to express it a certain way. And these actors are just marvelous, in my opinion. They're the ones that do all the work. They're the ones that have to prepare the script mentally. I send them out the script along with my casting call. They get a chance to look it over. We set up a date and a time. They come over to my little home studio. They sit in front of this microphone and they read just their parts. I record their parts. And then I mix the parts. I use something called Logic Pro to mix their parts. I record all their parts using Twisted Wave, which is another DAW, a digital audio workstation. And then I import all their vocal narratives into Logic Pro. And there I do all the mixing. I add a little bit of compression, a little bit of equalization. And then I add a soundtrack underneath certain portions of it and also the sound effects. So that's what it is. That's what it entails. But again, it is the actor that's really important here.
Mike Kiniry
I pulled a bit of an episode called The Dead Laugh that originally aired in September of 1946. It was originally part of what was called the Inner Sanctum Mysteries. Let's listen to that, Matt.
Speaker 3
Hello? Doctor Fletcher? Yes? This is Church Thornton. Please come quickly, Doctor. My wife has had a heart attack. It happened during an argument, It was nothing important, Doctor, just a domestic quarrel, and suddenly she had the attack. I gave her the pills, but by that time it was too late. That's too bad. If I'd only known that her condition had become so dangerous. Oh, Georgia, you've nothing to reproach yourself for. These things happen. Will you take care of the formalities, doctor? Oh, yes, of course. The death certificate. I'll list the cause as failure of the heart. There was no need to act the part of the stricken husband after Dr. Fletcher left. I stood looking down at Laura's body.
Mike Kiniry
There's a little sample so listeners get a sense of what we're talking about. What can you tell us about that clip and who those people are? Were you either of those voices?
Mike Troop
The judge was Vic Carolli. Vic and I are friends, but Vic and I have also appeared together in different plays. while we were there. Vic is a seasoned, a very seasoned actor, and he's done Broadway, off-Broadway. He's been an announcer for the Transformers. He has a long history of being on stage. The Dr. was played by me. I did the doctor's voice.
Mike Kiniry
Do you do the scripts verbatim or do you ever massage them a little bit because something they say may seem like out of time or out of step with the times?
Mike Troop
Yes, I recently did Dracula and it was an Orson Welles version of Dracula. And the version I got didn't make a lot of sense, at least to me. So I rewrote many paragraphs within that script, or many lines of narrative lines. There are some plays in which the lines seem to be written for a certain race of people which would not look favorable upon. So I would change the tempo or the wording of those lines. So it could be read by anybody of any race. And so that's basically what I do with scripts.
Mike Kiniry
How do you pick which ones to do? Is it just based on which ones you can find or do you ever go looking for certain kinds?
Mike Troop
I try to use things that are open source. It doesn't mean they're copyright free, but for the most part, you can use them without running into copyright problems. And as I said, one of the main sources is a generic radio theater. And if anybody wants to look at those plays, it's online, just Google it. I try to stay with those types of plays, because if I were to get a play that's current, I would have to pay royalties on it. And I'm sort of cheap. So I stay away from them.
Mike Kiniry
Well, you know, those shows back then were just so well written that they would tell like that dead laugh one. I mean, it's like 26 minutes long and it just tells a great story. It's almost like a little episode of The Twilight Zone or something where it's just self-contained.
Mike Troop
Right.
Mike Kiniry
And it must just be such a treat to make. Have you ever considered, and we have only got about a minute left, so I'm wrapping up here. Have you ever considered trying to do this as a stage show with sound effects? I'm imagining, like you were describing before with the actors sitting around, but kind of like if you ever listened to Prairie Home Companion back when it was on the radio. Kind of like that. Like do an episode on stage where you're over there with your DAW playing sound effects and people are talking.
Mike Troop
Yeah, I thought about doing that and I I suggested it to Bryce, but they, the Naples Players puts on some great shows. And there's no guaranteeing that what I would do would make any money for the Naples Players. And it would consume a whole bunch of people to do something. Someone from the lighting to the sound to everything else that goes in between. And it wouldn't just be me doing it. would be their company. And I thought about it, but I don't think it's going to go anywhere.
Mike Kiniry
Maybe a couple of years down the road once this gets super popular.
Mike Troop
That'd be great. That'd be great.
Mike Kiniry
Well, last question. Are you working on one now? Do you have one like up on your computer that's in the middle of production?
Mike Troop
I am. I'm working on the man who would be Edward G. Robinson.
Mike Kiniry
Well, I look forward to it. I'm going to I'm going to keep listening to these. Michael Troop is the producer, creator, and an actor in the new Repertoire Radio Theater podcast. They launched back in April and are releasing about two episodes a month. They're available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack. Thank you so much for your time, Michael, and keep up the good work. It's really fun listening to them.
Mike Troop
Thank you, sir. Have a great day.
