It’s the late-1970’s and I’m downstairs watching a black and white Admiral TV that my parents had handed down from my Grandparents. It was old even for us by about two decades, but like so many things back then, they were built to last. I crept downstairs as quietly as the century-old wooden staircase would let me, and made myself a plate of premium plus crackers and crunchie peanut butter with a glass of milk (to this day still comfort food for me) and while the wind rattled the windows and creaked the old stone frame I waited for the television to warm up.

That’s right. Back in those days vacuum tubes and capacitors needed to warm up before you’d get a picture. It was 1:30 in the morning and I had set my alarm because Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone was about to start. CKVR, channel three our of Barrie, Ontario would put on the Twilight Zone in those wee hours of the morning for an hour which meant I could usually get two episodes in before I would slide my way back to bed, my mind buzzing with the fantastic stories of the anthology series.

Fast forward to today, and I’m listening to the opening panel of MADCON 2022 and the panel leader Tony- as if in a Twilight Zone- evoked my name saying he would be interested in knowing a little more of the old days of geekdom. Or what I would like to call the days of wild imagination. When I was a kid, geeks tended to not be considered with the same reverence as they have today. Nerds even less so. I was fairly athletic and always involved in a pile of different things as my mother would often say, “If you’re bored, you’re boring” and I never was.

I grew up 10 miles outside of Fergus, Ontario. That’s about 20 minutes by car by those who go by that metric, and I lived on a five-acre hobby farm my parents had bought which came with a pond, a barn with a couple of ponies I rode and hitched to carts and sleighs in the winter, ducks, a mess of chickens, barn cats, and always a dog. My parents had strict rules about animals in the house, so our dogs tended only to be allowed in the back room where the TV was during the winter. The rest of the year, even during storms they had to make themselves comfy in the porch or outside in their own private dog house.

My father was a principal some 10-20 miles away- he moved every few years, and my mother remained at home mostly as she took care of us and the property although sometimes she either would substitute as a teacher or go back to get a Masters degree in Religious Studies years later. I had three sisters. I was second in the bunch, and we were all neatly three years apart with all three sisters born in the month of December, only I remained outside like a burr on the edge of your favourite marble- my birthday being Groundhog’s Day (Imbolc for the Pagan crowd).

As the only male, I made myself very busy in the neighbour’s cornfields, and down by a creek about 2 miles distant my eldest sister had properly named “Piranha Pond” from a Peter Pan storybook she had gotten at Christmas. The hardened inner cover had a broad map of Never-Never Land and below a small stone bridge off the gravel roadway a small river wound through various corners of farmers’ properties and they left it unharangued so that Mermaids and Lost Boys and Pixies could evade pirates in peace. Those were golden days that lasted whole weeks, as you had time to count clouds, cut down invading corn stalks, and sneak into the woods while the cicadas echoed danger through the many wooden trunks that held secret portals to Narnia and Middle Earth, Tatooine and Vulcan.

As mentioned before the Admiral TV had a channel band from 2-13. 2, 4, and 7 were all American stations that looked more like snowfall than film and could have won prizes for white noise machines with the faintest sounds of people talking in the background. Channel 5 was CBC Toronto. Channel 9 CTV Toronto. 6 was Global TV, a brand new station in 1974. 11 was CHCH from Hamilton. Channel 8 was Listowel I believe, but really for much of my young life, I could only get 5, 6, and 13 out of Kitchener with any clarity. It was only after my parents bought a massive aerial tower that we could even get and of the UHF channels (two I think) and better clarity on all the others. With only three channels, it was very difficult to find decent television. Saturday mornings was frustrating to get American cartoons, although Global would put on claymation Pinnochio, Tales of the Wizard of Oz, and the old 60’s Hercules (which had the best intro song along with Rocket Robin Hood).

In these Dark Ages of visual media, I had books which were my favourite present every Christmas and birthday, and albums that Santa brought along with other toys. Several I played over and over again including ones that would shape my writing styles as much as Rod Serling had.

The Adventures of Flash Gordon was a record I played over and over again. Buster Crabbe who was an Olympic Athlete swimmer played both Flash, Tarzan and Buck Rogers in several movie serials. Later I received Buck Rogers as well to listen to.

I had begun to assemble a number of comics and one Christmas I got a Power Records release. Spider-man and Friends that looked into the origin of the Manwolf as well as a look back at Captain America’s and the Fantastic Four’s origin stories.

I could draw a straight line from Flash and Buck’s adventures to my own Biff Straker and the Spaceways and my collection of superheroes from my own Consortium Comics including AnyMan, The Blue Defender, Umbra, and Overman.

Channel 5 had classic Star Trek after school which my parents encouraged me to get into when they saw that I was excited to watch Space 1999. They weren’t wrong. Trek was objectively a better show, and I used an old school tape cassette and saved my birthday money to buy 90- minute tapes to record the shows when I could and listened to them over and over while playing in my room or laying on my bed. The 45 minute sides meant you had to be fast to flip sides if you wanted to make sure you got the last 2-4 minutes of the show, and you were always ready to pause between commercials so as not to waste the tape. Sometimes, you’d play the tape so often they would stretch and your machine would eat the tape and you’d be cutting out segments and patching them with cut squares of scotch tape hoping you didn’t lose too much of the show itself.

Replaying the vinyl and the tape was as close as we had to being able to replay our favourite shows. My Mom was an avid CBC-radio listen which is the Canadian answer to America’s NPR or England’s BBC. Back in the eighties there were a number of radio dramas that you could catch if you were on time. My favourite as a kid was “Johnny Chase- Secret Agent of Space” which came on for several weeks at a time on Saturdays and we heard in the car on the way back from gymnastics or swimming lessons in the winter. CBC also had shows like The Mystery Project and Sunday and Monday Mysteries which were a lot more slow parlour mystery-stylings where there was a lot of talking and not a lot of action. Late at night if you were lucky you could hear the horror Nightfall or their more science fiction anthology series Vanishing Point. They were both brilliant series, and I had no idea that three decades later I’d be interviewing writers, producers, and actors of those series. They were probably the most cinema-like shows of the time, using full-sound effects and even breaking some copyright rules to get powerful music.

Little did I know that while I was loving these shows, they were also exported to various places in the US and people like the incredible John Ballentine from Campfire Radio Theater were inspired by them to make their own series like the epic Campfire Radio Theater. But, I was to discover that most people in the Golden Age of the Modern Audio Drama- the revival of the medium in the 20 aughts, considered their biggest influence to be NPR Star Wars. Licensing the rights to create the radio drama for a dollar, George Lucas helped his old alma mater create the original trilogy along with some support from government grants. Mark Hamil and Anthony Daniels reprised their roles, and Perry King, famous for the eighties television show Riptide, who had lost out to Harrison Ford in the movies, got to play iconic Han Solo longer than the celebrated actor in the trilogy’s multi-part series.

Instead, my introduction to a full-cinematic science-fiction audio drama came from the BBC with the unparalleled Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. CBC played each episode daily before I left for school in the morning show of all things.

Meanwhile, my creativity knew no bounds. I had started writing my own stories by grade 2, and already had plans for massive tomes of various heroes- like Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood, and more original knockoffs like The Intergalactic Samarai. Short-lived, but long-remembered series Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century had me spending my time in the hay loft of my barn cobbling bales together to simulate a Viper cockpit, and my father’s workshop had me take two pieces of wood and an old hinge to create a Trek communicator, and a Buck Rogers blaster I had put together from a TV Guide picture I kept. My middle-school shop class had me lathe a piece of wood into a lightsaber hilt and drill a hole down the centre I wedge and glued in an extra broomstick for a blade. There were no inexpensive replicas to buy, any more than we had costumes to purchase for Halloween. The ’80s were always DIY.

My roleplaying began in middle school as well, as an older friend, Andrew Mestern introduced me to both Ogre and Melee. My best friend Martin Agnew and I started playing Dungeons and Dragons together.

And we brought out some Tupperware containers to hold the “chits” where we had numbered paper to pick our random attacks. The day the bookstore in the mall in Guelph carried actual multi-sided dice was like we had discovered someone who had invented the wheel. We couldn’t believe it. We kept our original set of dice like sacred objects for years as they were so precious.

We quickly moved into more games as they were sold infrequently in the bookstore. We “graduated” into Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, with the highly required trifecta of Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual. We eventually included the Fiend Folio, Monster Manual 2, and then into the 2nd edition which remains my favourite version to this day with all the various kits. I have played all the other editions, but I find that imagination operates better through constraints than the wide openness of some of the later editions. But, D&D wasn’t my only passion, while I had played other games like DC Heroes, Paranoia, Toon, GURPS, Battletech, Star Trek, Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Frontiers, I really dug Car Wars, Traveller, and Space 1889. Martin and I shared a membership to Dragon Magazine (I took six issues, and he took six issues) and got an invite to come to Dungeon Master in Wisconsin at GenCon. Since both of us were barely 14 it was an impossibility, but I wish to this day I still had the letter. I had also subscribed to both Autoduel Quarterly and The Traveller Journal for a year or so. A couple of years later some comic stores started to pop up in nearby cities and all our gaming needs could be found there. I found it a dangerous place because I could easily spend all my savings in such a place.

By the time I was in University, I was running a regular campaign of D&D of my own world of Tehra, frequently creating my own monsters, and operating on my own stories and modules. I enjoyed playing store-bought modules on my own, but always preferred something original when I played with others. I always ended up being the Dungeon Master as no one else wanted to take it on. While I took the bus to the university of Guelph, I had cassettes of Old Time Radio shows to listen to. A lifetime of CBC listening had hardened me against listening to commercial radio and music. I needed to feed my imagination whenever I was on my own, walking or driving. I worked summers in campgrounds and at provincial parks, filled with episodes of The Shadow and The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, sprinkled with The Adventures of Superman (another record I had at home as a youth) and other anthologies series like Suspense, Light’s Out, Gunsmoke and Escape. What I couldn’t get from the library, my university buddy and writer extraordinaire himself Scott Leslie provided. He subscribed to an Old Time Radio group that mailed him dozens of cassettes of the classics before the Internet ever existed.

I had three different radio shows, all spoken word at the Guelph University CFRU, and although they were only tape-driven, I already had the core of my first audio dramas. Biff Straker and the Spaceways, and Graves’ Shift- Starring Phillipa Graves my Private Jane detective both had their first pilots written in the late hours at the station.

Some years later, when I moved to Halifax, my friend, Andrew Dorfman asked me to write a radio drama for an Internet radio station at the time called the Dv8 Network. I got excited and pulled both Biff and Phillipa out of the drawer and started to work on them. Sadly, the radio station fell apart and now I was revved up with no place to go. Or was I?

I went back to Andrew and asked if he was interested in running a series. We called it “Shadowlands Theatre” and had a weekly slot on the Dalhousie campus CKDU and played for a year before we decided to expand to other campus and city radio stations across Canada and the United States. A name change later and we were playing only new radio drama, now called “audio drama” by most people and The Sonic Society was born as was my own company Sonic Cinema Productions.

A few years later and new listeners of podcasts had heard what the original groups were doing and started creating their own shows inspired by the things we did. Thus the Silver Age of Modern Audio Drama was created, and finally, with such shows like Welcome to Nightvale and The Black Tapes Podcast, we had a third, a Bronze Age of Modern Audio Drama in which an entire generation of audio drama now also called audio fiction creators were creating stories never listening to the Golden, Silver Ages of Modern Audio Drama, nor even, in many cases the Golden Age of Radio Drama itself from the ’40s to ’50s.

As I think back upon everything that has come since those early early mornings in the dark hours of the night, looking upon the flickering images of the Admiral TV, I wonder if I would have as many stories in me now if I didn’t have to spend so much of my time in my head. So much of my time creating with only dim pictures, faded sound, and difficult-to-find stories to draw inspiration from.