High Adventure
The Joe Hehn Memorial Collection
High Adventure was a dramatic anthology series broadcast by Mutual. The executive in charge for much of its 1947-1954 run was Bob Monroe, who produced, directed, and wrote many of the programs. He was also a top producer of game shows. Mutual did not have the big budgets the other networks had, so Monroe often had to innovate and improvise. He was one of the first users of magnetic tape in radio production. He taped rehearsals and edited them into broadcast-ready programs at a time in the industry when producing in that manner was new. He also was among the first to use “canned” prerecorded bridges throughout programs. Blocked by musician union rules, his biography said that Monroe took his audio equipment to Cuba, hired a local orchestra, and recorded musical pieces for six days. “For much of the time they played to an audience of one – a nephew of Cuba's dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who sat listening to what was going on with a revolver by his side.” Monroe is not well known today as few of his series and limited numbers of their programs survive. For all of the broadcasts of High Adventure , Nightmare , and John Steele, Adventurer there are really just a relative handful that are in collections. Monroe had some intense personal experiences during the 1950s that led him to investigate out-of-body experiences and other aspects of extra-sensory perception and brain activity. He left radio a very wealthy man and devoted the rest of his life to these pursuits, creating The Monroe Institute which still exists today. The Institute has many materials on the Internet Archive . (The biography of Monroe is The Journey of Robert Monroe: From Out-of-Body Explorer to Consciousness Pioneer by Ronald Russell) * * * These recordings are part of the Joe Hehn Memorial Collection. Mr. Hehn (1931-2020) was a pioneering collector of radio recordings when the hobby emerged in the 1960s. Digitizing his collection of reel tapes and discs is the effort of a wide range of North American volunteers, and includes assistance of some international collectors. The groups supporting this effort with their funds, time, technology and skills are the Old Time Radio Researchers and a small group of transcription disc preservationists who refer to themselves as the "The Knights of the Turning Table."
This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.