What was this story? (100+ degrees edition)

June 25, 2018 6:46 PM

I am trying to identify a story I heard as a child. It was on one of the "anthology," old-time radio programs, Suspense, X Minus 1, etc. It might have been adapted from something by Ray Bradbury or another author of the 40s and 50s.

I remember a woman, possibly a single mother, had a child who was very ill. They had a fever of 100+ degrees, for some reason the number 106 is sticking in my mind a lot. The woman was understandably terrified for her child's life. As she sat there unable to do anything, she experienced… Visions? of her child's possible future. I remember they were very disturbing, possibly the child ends up killing her? I remember the fever broke at the very end, but don't know if there was any resolution beyond that.

If this was an adaptation, I'd love to know what the original source was. Google is proving less than helpful.

posted by Alensin to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

Best answer: 08.19.1948 ( August 19, 1948)
Plot : + "Crisis". Sponsored by: Auto-Lite. A well-written story about a mother's vision of the future. + Mary’s baby Curt was suffering from the epidemic of pneumonia if he could crack the fever tonight he would have a good chance of surviving. His temperature was 106 he was at crisis point. Mary was tired from the anguish and staying awake to tend her poorly baby when she slipped in to sleep and experienced visions of the tragic future in store and the evil her child was to become.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:50 PM on June 25, 2018 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: Wow. :) 4 minutes or so, is this a new record? Thanks! Given the subject matter, I don't know if I want to listen to it again, but it's good to know what it was.
posted by Alensin at 6:53 PM on June 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Looks like you can download it, in case you decide you'd like to listen at some point. (Though the synopsis makes me wonder whether Stephen King heard it when he was a kid!)
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:57 PM on June 25, 2018

MonkeyToes totally has it of course - for posterity/search's sake (and to be honest, as an OTR fan) I also wanted to mention here that the show indeed was "Suspense" and the writers were John Bagni and Gwen Bagni, as noted on the page MonkeyToes found.

This post from the blog "Escape and Suspense!" has an entry about this episode, and mentions at the end:

"Crisis" was written for Suspense by John Bagni and Gwen Bagni, but it is quite different from the kinds of episodes they wrote for Escape in later years. Anton M. Leader produced and directed. Martha Scott starred as Mrs. Norquist. Also appearing were Frank Lovejoy and Wally Maher.

If you're interested in more of their radio work, the Wikipedia page for "Escape" contains a list of episodes with writer credits - at quick glance it looks like they wrote at least nine of those episodes starting in 1949.

There is a cleaned up version of the audio of the episode (and other episodes) from the Old Time Radio Researchers Group:
- "Crisis" - #24 in their Suspense 1948 playlist - YouTube
- also on Internet Archive (#24 in that playlist as well). [Direct archive.org mp3 link.]

Also: high five on your memory, especially for remembering the 106 degrees!
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 11:11 PM on June 25, 2018 [4 favorites]

I love old timey podcasts like this, I go through phases where I download heapsof em and burn through a bunch at once. Haven't heard this one but I'll definitely check it out later.
posted by GoblinHoney at 12:22 PM on June 26, 2018

Response by poster: Yeah, I'm not old enough to have heard these when they were live, but I love the programs just because they're a lot more accessible than movies and TV tend to be, at least until relatively recently. As a weird side-note, I love the Lux Radio Theater, which made a name for itself doing radio adaptations of "Classic," 40s and 50s-era Hollywood. It's awesome.
posted by Alensin at 1:20 PM on June 26, 2018