Thursday Night - Old Time Radio

As I continue my stroll down Memory Lane, I will continue to visit a couple more
of Old Time Radio’s Mounties. First we will pay a visit to one of the earliest, if
not the first Mountie on radio, Blair of the Mounties. Blair was written by Colonel
Rhys Davies and he was featured in the lead role as well. Blair is set in the pre
World War I era. Unlike most Mounties, Blair was not limited to working in Canada.
The two episodes I will be featuring have Inspector Blair on three months leave visiting
his Sister and Brother-in-law in England. His brother-in-law recruits him to help
solve a murder case. This series was aired as a 15 minute weekly serial, and usually
took two episodes to complete a story. Continuing with a more recent series, we will
hear an episode of The Queen’s Men. The Queen’s Men ran for only 21 episodes in 1954
and was a more modern story of how the RCMP worked to always get their man. The story
we will hear, The Duncan Underhill case, is about a murder which had been committed
several months earlier and the severed head of the dead man turns up on the Underhill
farm. Having been bored to the brink of insanity by a lack of action, a new Mountie,
Constable Henry, eagerly accepts the case. With only the few articles of clothing
found on the body for clues, Constable Henry proceeds to work on this apparently
hopeless case.

Fred Bertelsen plays The Silver Eagle from July 20, 1954 starring Jim Ameche as Sgt
Jim West of the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police which was sponsored by Wheaties.
The episode is titled Decoy for Death. Fred Bertelsen then played King of the Royal
Mounted from 1943. The episode is titled Constable Reardon’s First Case and stars
Richard Dix as Sgt. Dave King. King of the Royal Mounted is a fictional character
created by Stephen Slesinger in 1936. Slesinger licensed popular Western writer Zane
Grey’s byline, and marketed the character as Zane Grey’s King of the Royal Mounted.
Corporal, and later Sergeant, Dave King is a Canadian Mountie who always gets his
man. King has appeared in newspaper strips, comics, Big Little Books, Motion Pictures
and other ancillary items.