Category: default || By jt3y

Last week I popped for the new book about Homestead and Mifflin Township, titled, interestingly enough, Homestead and Mifflin Township.

Ivan Shreve Jr. over at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear has highlighted yet another project that will cause me to part with two double sawbucks before the month is out. A company called First Generation Radio Archives has collected 20 episodes of the earliest work by offbeat radio comedians Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding.

Recorded on electrical transcription discs in the late 1940s, they are episodes of Bob and Ray's first series, "Matinee With Bob and Ray" (Elliott commented years later that if the word was called "Matinob" they'd have gone their entire careers being billed as "Ray and Bob"). Mostly improvised, they originally aired over WHDH radio in Boston as a time-filler before Red Sox baseball games.

Longtime staples in New York radio over WOR, WINS and WHN, Bob and Ray also had a daily 15-minute segment on CBS Radio, made regular appearances on the original "Today" show with Dave Garroway and on NBC's "Monitor," and hosted an NPR weekly show in the 1980s. Goulding, in poor health, died in 1990, and Elliott is retired in New England.

Bob and Ray are an acquired taste --- they didn't go for punchlines and jokes, you either get their absurd take on life, or you think they're idiotic --- but those of us who've acquired it can't get enough. (Of all people, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has one of the largest private collections of Bob and Ray recordings, and others who counted Bob and Ray among their big inspirations include the original cast of "Saturday Night Live," Stan Freberg, David Letterman, Kurt Vonnegut and Garrison Keillor. How's that for an eclectic group of fans?)

Incidentally, over the years, Bob Elliott has collaborated with public radio producer Larry Josephson on a series of "best of" Bob and Ray collections. You can order those at www.bobandray.com. I've got a bunch of them, and they're very well done.

While Larry has released a couple of the WHDH "Matinee" shows on his collections, the ones being released by First Generation don't appear to include those. That's good news and bad news ... the good news is that I won't be buying duplicates of things I already have. The bad news is that I'm almost compelled now to purchase the damned things!

And the even worse news: First Generation is claiming that this is only "volume one," meaning, presumably, that there are many more volumes to go.

Egad. Anyone have a winning Powerball ticket they'd like to share?