FROM THE AIRWAVES
Teacher Returns From Explosion With Heart on Wrong Side, Radio Drama Reports
A vintage CBS Radio Mystery Theater play, rebroadcast in a five-hour Weird Darkness program, tells of a lifeguard physical that revealed a most irregular anatomy.
THE AIRWAVES — A small-town teacher went to his doctor for a lifeguard physical and left with a puzzle, according to the program description published by Weird Darkness. The X-rays, it states, showed his heart beating on the right side of his chest and his liver turned around.
The account is a work of fiction. It is the plot of "Watchers Of The Light," an episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater first aired on March 7, 1979, and now offered again in a #RetroRadio compilation titled "Blown Out of This World: The Teacher Who Came Back Reversed."
The description says the trouble began two weeks before the physical. The teacher and his principal, it states, set a match to a green powder that a student had found in an old lime kiln. The resulting explosion left no trace of either man. The description does not say how the teacher came to be at the doctor's office.
The play is only the first item on the bill. The listing runs to more than five hours and offers nine further programs from the golden age of radio, among them Let George Do It, Black Mass, Mindwebs and Mr. Keen, with air dates from 1944 to 1976. Several have been remastered by Weird Darkness, which cautions that the audio may not be pristine, though it should be an improvement on the original files.
The program is available on Spreaker. Listeners with a mind to test the green powder are advised, by the plain sense of the story, to think better of it.