Tuned to Yesterday
10 p.m. to midnight - Nightly
- Hosted by Mark Lavonier
Tuned to Yesterday Broadcast Schedule
Decades ago, WRVO began broadcasting old time radio with a small collection comprising twenty reel to reel tapes. Programs like The Whistler, The Jack Benny Show, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and Gunsmoke. Today the collection includes nearly 5,000 reels and well over 16,000 broadcasts.
In 1970, Ellen Robinson, an old time radio enthusiast, joined several clubs that circulated classic radio shows on reel to reel. At that time, she offered to allow WRVO to make copies, and our collection grew. By the 1990s WRVO possessed approximately 7,500 programs.
This bolstering of our audio archive reached an unprecedented level when WRVO listener Ted Nettleton donated his collection of over 1,000 tapes – everything from comedy and mystery classics to operas and old movie sound tracks (and we mean the entire tracks!). Within these two collections are thousands of well known programs and hundreds of rarities including broadcasts of Kate Smith, RCA’s Magic Key, and a detective show unearthed for the first time in 50 years, The Affairs of Peter Salem. In 2008 Ron Zolweg donated another 900 tapes that helped to fill gaps in the WRVO library. Old time radio fans Ed Clute and Art Pierce helped develop our collection as well.
The Zolweg collection, and those donated by Ellen Robinson and Ted Nettleton, are meticulously catalogued. Those catalogs provide the comprehensive information heard during the on air introduction of each program. The entire collection has been named in memory of Ellen Robinson. Without her early assistance and the eventual donation to WRVO of her entire, extraordinary collection, Tuned to Yesterday would not be possible.
Tuned to Yesterday now airs at the same time, 10 p.m. to midnight, seven days a week. WRVO also presents two hours on WRVO-Remix. Learn how to listen to WRVO-Remix here...
Broadcast Disclaimer: According to our research of the programs in our collection, most of the shows we air are in the public domain, or we have agreements with certain copyright holders. In presenting these programs on our air with historical integrity, it is not our intention to broadcast unauthorized copyrighted material. Additionally, we do not sell the programs. If you are a copyright holder of any of these, ‘golden age of radio’ shows, please contact us at mark@wrvo.org.
PODCAST NOTE: If you're keeping track of the show numbers themselves, you will soon start to notice them with a lower number and in a descending order. These are shows that have either yet to be posted or have been with the audio lost following a website change a few years ago. - Mark Lavonier / June 2016
