Saving Johnny Dollar
Updated: 3 days ago
The intriguing story about how Old Time Radio Collectors across generations saved the adventures of the "Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account"
Saving the Johnny Dollar episodes of 1957 through 1962 is one of our hobby’s greatest success stories. Collectors saved this part of the beloved series. Such preservation needs to be better recognized. Now there is a new, more complete, and better quality collection of these programs.
Over many decades, classic radio enthusiasts rescued episodes from 1957 through 1962 from oblivion and preserved the rich legacy of the beloved “man with the action-packed expense account.” In 2026, Old Time Radio Researchers (OTRR) and other groups, especially the Cobalt Club online forum, have been assembling a freshly upgraded set of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (YTJD) episodes broadcast after the 5-part serials concluded. Collectors saved these last years of the series by sharing recordings for decades, ensuring that fans of today would have access to them. That effort now culminates in a much improved set in lossless FLAC audio, with MP3 files, now available for streaming or downloading.
The recordings of the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) played a key role in preserving the series, especially the Bob Bailey years of 1957 and 1958. The New York episodes with Bob Readick and Mandel Kramer actually have very few AFRS recordings, particularly compared to Gunsmoke and Suspense. There are many AFRS recordings for those series to the very end of their broadcast years, but not YTJD. Those two series seemed to have a higher priority for AFRS distribution than YTJD did.
The recordings of the Readick and Kramer years survived almost entirely because of collectors’ own home aircheck recordings, even those made by military personnel and families listening on Armed Forces Radio! Hooray for us today... and for our pioneer collectors of sixty years ago.
The background of how the series even survived is important to understand and appreciate. It is a wonder that any of these episodes survived in such great numbers at all. It should never have happened, but it thankfully did.
Now, the story of how pioneer collectors and a court clerk from upstate New York played key roles in "saving Johnny Dollar" is at The Internet Archive. Go to this link and read the 32-page document online or download it:
Saving Johnny Dollar includes new logs for the Readick (page 19) and Kramer (pages 23-24) episodes. There have been MANY changes to the chronological sequence of episodes based on the latest research of series expert John C. Abbot whose forensic investigation would make Johnny proud. There are also many notes about particular episodes, surviving and not. A list of all of the half hour format episodes in the new set is provided for Bailey, Readick, and Kramer series (pages 27-32).
There's also shocking news: the true title of the YTJD theme is something you'd never expect (page 25!)
That Archive page has a list of links to access the new, upgraded and expanded, set of YTJD episodes.
This special page has also been created for the convenience of having all the Internet Archive links in one handy place.
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