Speed Gibson of the International Secret Police
Originally broadcast in syndication, 9 September 1939. Restored from the Old Time Radio archives.
The run
- Network
- NBC / CBS
- Years active
- 1939–1948
- Surviving broadcasts
- 32
- Genre
- talk
Vox Pop began in 1932 as a Houston street-interview programme and ran on NBC and later CBS until 1948, broadcasting each week from a different location — a world's fair, a hospital operating room, a factory floor, a political convention. Its hosts put unrehearsed questions to whoever was standing there, making it one of radio's first sustained experiments in recording the unscripted public voice. The surviving recordings in this collection are public domain and stream from the Internet Archive.
1943 · 11942 · 11941 · 61940 · 31939 · 1
Restoration quality — measured from the surviving files
Rough but complete · 32 of 32
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
Every broadcast below carries its own provenance sheet — transfer quality, file source and rights.Archive record: VoxPop_857
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
11 dated broadcasts across 10 years on the air, with 5 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
JFMAMJJASOND
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
Clean transferListenableRough but complete No surviving recording
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 1939, in original transmission order.
- 1. New York Worlds Fair New York New York · 9 Sep 1939
- 2. Movie Set of Seventeen Hollywood California · 15 Feb 1940
- 3. Republican Convention Philadelphia Pennsylvania clip · 27 Jun 1940
- 01
New York Worlds Fair New York New York
9 Sep 1939 · 29 min
Originally broadcast on NBC, 9 September 1939. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Vox Pop collection (public domain).
- 02
Movie Set of Seventeen Hollywood California
15 Feb 1940 · 29 min
Originally broadcast on CBS, 15 February 1940. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Vox Pop collection (public domain).
- 03
Republican Convention Philadelphia Pennsylvania clip
27 Jun 1940 · 8 min
Originally broadcast on CBS, 27 June 1940. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Vox Pop collection (public domain).
- 04
Buster Crabbe New York Worlds Fair
15 Aug 1940 · 29 min
Originally broadcast on CBS, 15 August 1940. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Vox Pop collection (public domain).
- 05
Brooklyn Dodgers St Louis Cardinals Hotel Bossert Brooklyn New York
25 Aug 1941 · 29 min
Originally broadcast on CBS, 25 August 1941. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Vox Pop collection (public domain).
- 06
Duke University Durham North Carolina
15 Sep 1941 · 29 min
Originally broadcast on CBS, 15 September 1941. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Vox Pop collection (public domain).
- 07
University of Tennessee Knoxville Tennessee
6 Oct 1941 · 29 min
Originally broadcast on CBS, 6 October 1941. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Vox Pop collection (public domain).
- 08
US Naval Academy Annapolis Maryland
20 Oct 1941 · 29 min
Originally broadcast on CBS, 20 October 1941. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Vox Pop collection (public domain).
Same night on the air
9 Sep 1939
Everything else the archive still holds from the night of 9 Sep 1939.
Avalon Time
Originally broadcast on Syndicated, 9 September 1939. Transferred from the Internet Archive's Old Time Radio Researchers collection (public domain).
Also on NBC / CBS
NBC / CBS in 1939–1948
Other series the network carried while Vox Pop was on the air.
Same seasons
talk on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
The roundtable of experts
Put clever people around one microphone, give them a question from a listener, and let the disagreement be the entertainment. Information Please and Town Meeting invented the format.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Vox Pop
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
More to explore
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