Take someone with a hobby they really love, a topic that's relative to 100 per cent of the audience and has that whole audience nodding, smiling and laughing as they are reminded of those more carefree days of childhood...and you have a WINNER of a program.

That's just what some 40 retirees and guests enjoyed at the CIRG September coffee program in the Riverfront Cafe. Our speaker was Gary Yoggy, widely known throughout the area for his many programs and theatrical stagings of “Old Time Radio.”

Yoggy told how he got into his hobby, and how it grew and changed over the years through three published books including the award-winning “Riding the Video Range: the Rise and Fall of the Western on Television,” and then to acting and directing himself.

“Radio,” he said, “was...and still is, with some programs...a theater of the mind.” He said each listener had mental images of their favorite characters and he ticked them off: The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly (they could “see” the stuff come tumbling out of Fibber's notorious closet).

Yoggy, Professor Emeritus of history at Corning Community College, said his hobby got its start pretty much by accident in the early 1960's. He shared an office with Bill Dolan, professor of English, who had received a brochure proclaiming he could enhance his English courses with dramatic readings of the classics of radio theater. The brochure offered a sampler of six hours of classic radio on tape for just $10. Not interested in the offer, Dolan tossed the brochure on Yoggy's desk and Yoggy rose to the bait. He sent in his $10. (Remember that radio call to action? “Just send in....whatever....and receive...some 'treasure.')

What he got was a box of reel-to-reel tapes. The only way he could listen to them was to borrow the college's Wollensak unit and take it home, which he did. And when he did, he found he was transported back in time. And he was hooked. He started collecting radio shows in 1970 and the early collections, like that first one, were all on reel-to-reel tapes...which put a strain on the space at home... among other things.

Over time, changing technology rescued his space problem somewhat thanks to tape cassettes, and then digital CDs. Lots and lots of cassettes and CDs.

Like any dyed-in-the-wool hobbyist, Yoggy found himself drawn to others of the same bent, collectors of radio history and their annual conventions at which he had opportunities to meet the people behind some of those famous radio “voices” and to watch as they re-created their roles for the convention attendees.

As for his own programs at Mandeville Hall in the Clemens Center, a particular highlight was the 50 th anniversary re-creation of the famous Oct. 30 1938 broadcast on the Mercury Theater on the Air in which the H.G.Wells fiction was adapted to the format of a radio show suddenly interrupted by the deep-voiced Orson Welles as a newscaster reporting a series of bulletins in “breaking news” fashion about the Martian invasion taking place in New England. The hardest part of that program, according to Yoggy, as it is to many old-time radio re-creations is getting competent sound effects specialists so important in rounding out the realism those early artists lent to radio.

And any who are interested in re-living that marvelous radio program are invited to attend the dinner show and performance by the Keuka Lake Players at 6:30 p.m. Halowe'en evening in O'Malley Hall at St. Mary's Church in Bath. To be sure, the best way to enjoy that program would be to sit in the audience, keep your eyes closed and lose yourself in the theater of the mind that is old time radio.

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