Ad-Free Listening, at a Savings of 25%!

A banner advertising a bargain price on VIP memberships

Do you ever wish you could listen to the toe-tapping tunes of Cladrite Radio without the commercials? We don’t mean the vintage ads that we share with you every hour or so, but the other ones—the commercials our streaming provider, Live365, adds to the mix.

By becoming a VIP member at Live365, you get to avoid hearing those ads, leaving more time to enjoy the great music of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. And right now, Live365 is offering a special deal that we think is worth telling you about.

Sign up now for a year of VIP membership, and you’ll receive an extra four months for free, a 25% savings! Usually, a year’s membership comes to right around $5 a month, but with this special offer, you’ll pay just $3.75 per. And best of all (from our point of view, anyway), you’ll be showing your support for Cladrite Radio. That’s right, we’ll receive a percentage of your VIP membership fee, which helps us to keep the music streaming.

To participate, all you have to do is sign up for the 12-month VIP membership by July 4th! That’s just around the corner, so don’t delay!

Spooky Tunes for a Swinging Halloween

As of now, we’re all spooks all the time here at Cladrite Radio. We’re playing nothing but songs about murder and mayhem, ghosts and goblins, but the ghoulish fun ends soon, so listen while you can.

Speaking of Halloween on the radio, OTRCat.com, purveyors of old-time radio programs, are offering an assortment of spooky shows free of charge (they offer many more collections of shows that you can pay for, if you’re so inclined). The free shows run the gamut from adventure to mystery, horror—even comedy.

Here’s a sample program, an episode of Inner Sanctum starring none other than Boris Karloff.

Inner Sanctum: “Wailing Wall” (first aired November 6, 1945; 27 min, 7 sec.)

Tempted by a “Kept Girl”

You know how when you’re in the middle of one book that you’re enjoying well enough, but then you buy another book dirt cheap for the Kindle, and you read one chapter of it, just to get a taste of it, and it makes you want to put aside the book you’re reading, but you’ve already done that once with this book and there’s no way you want to have to start all over with it again?

That happened to us.

The Kept Girl by Kim Cooper, an L.A. historian and author, is a mystery novel set in 1929, the protagonist of which is the mystery author Raymond Chandler, back before he was an author, when he was a young(ish) executive for an oil company. The book involves other historical figures and actual events and the first chapter was engaging enough to make us want to keep reading. But we’ll stick it out with the entertaining-in-its-own-right-but-still… Carter Beats the Devil, dang it, as much as we’re tempted to switch.

Have an OTR Christmas!

The hours till Christmas are dwindling down, and the way we figure it, odds are pretty good that you’re looking to kill a little time right about now.

You’re either stuck at the office on Christmas Eve, but with precious little to actually do. Or you’ve already headed home for the holidays but found the first wave of small talk has subsided and you’re left with not too much to say to your various and sundry relatives.

Or heaven forbid, you’re stuck in a flight delay at the airport, in which case you could surely use a pleasing distraction.

As we’ve stated in this space before, we have nothing whatsoever to do with OTRCat.com, purveyors of audio collections of old-time radio programs. We don’t benefit in any way from offering plugs for them.

But we enjoy listening to old radio programs and we like it that, when major holidays roll around, the good folks at OTRCat make it a practice to offer a round-up of timely broadcasts for the streaming (or, if you prefer, the downloading), absolutely free.

This week, as you might guess, they’ve got a line-up of a dozen shows with a Christmas theme, and the range of genres and decades is impressive. You can catch everything from comedies (Burns and Allen, Jack Benny) to mystery-horror (Lights Out, The Weird Circle), musical variety programs (Kraft Music Hall featuring Bing Crosby), and even cop shows (Dragnet).

Speaking of Dragnet, we’re sharing that one below, just to whet your appetite—but we strongly recommend you head over to OTRCat.com to see the entire line-up. And why not consider making a purchase of one of their entertaining collections of OTR programs while you’re at it? They couldn’t be more affordable, and they make great holiday gifts for those vintage-minded individuals on your gift list.

Dragnet: “Twenty-two Rifle for Christmas” (12/21/1950; 28:44)