Pull up a chair. Mind the cassettes.

My name is Walt Pruitt. I was born in 1936, which means I was a boy in the last great years of radio, before the television set came into the living room and the big console radio got moved out to the porch and then to the garage. I remember lying on the rug with my chin on my hands, in the dark except for the dial light, listening to a closet full of junk come crashing down on a man named McGee, and laughing until my father told me to hush so he could hear the next line. I was six, maybe seven. Nothing I have seen on a screen since has ever been as big as what I saw on that rug.

I started collecting the shows on cassette in 1979, when I found out you could. Twenty years on, I have about 1,400 episodes, a den that smells like tape, a wife who is a saint, and this page, which my nephew set up so I could stop mailing photocopied lists to strangers. (I still mail the lists. Some things you don't give up.)

Commercial radio in this country got going in the early 1920s, and by the end of that decade the networks had formed, NBC first and then CBS, with Mutual coming along in the middle '30s. Once you had networks, you could put a show on in New York or Chicago or Hollywood and the whole country heard it at the same time, and that changed everything. Through the Depression, a radio was the one entertainment a family could afford after they'd bought it, and so the whole country sat down together every night: the same comedians, the same detectives, the same soap operas in the afternoon, the same news as the war came on.

The years from roughly 1930 to the early 1950s are what collectors call the golden age. Comedy and variety in the evenings, with the big stars who'd come over from vaudeville. Drama anthologies that did a different play every week with movie stars in them. Mysteries and thrillers. Westerns. Serials for the kids after school. Fifteen-minute soap operas all afternoon for the women at home. Big bands broadcast live from hotel ballrooms late at night. And the announcers, and the sponsors, who were as much a part of the show as the stars: you could not hear certain shows without hearing about a certain floor wax or a certain gelatin dessert, and to this day I can't hear those product names without hearing the jingles.

Television arrived after the war, and by the early 1950s the money and the stars went with it. Most of the big shows moved over to TV or simply ended. Radio drama hung on through the '50s in a smaller way, and the last two network dramas on CBS, a thriller anthology and a detective show, went off the air on the same night at the end of September 1962. Collectors mark that as the end of it. After that, radio was music and news and talk, which is what it's been ever since.

Here's the part that matters for us. Radio was live, and it went out into the air and was gone. Nobody thought of it as something to keep. What survives, survives because of a few accidents: the networks and sponsors and advertising agencies made recordings on big 16-inch discs (called transcriptions) so the show could be played later in other time zones or checked by the sponsor; the Armed Forces Radio Service re-recorded thousands of shows for the troops overseas, with the commercials cut out; and here and there a fan with a home disc recorder cut a show off the air. Those discs sat in warehouses and basements for decades. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, collectors began finding them, transferring them to tape, and trading the tapes. Every episode in my den got here that way, passed hand to hand, and every one of them is a small miracle of survival. There are famous shows where hundreds of episodes are lost forever and only a handful exist. That's why we trade.

You could fill a library. Here are a few that anyone getting started should hear, and that I have plenty of, with a word on why. These are the reputations, not the whole story; find them and hear for yourself.

Also worth your time, when you find them: the big comedians of the era (Fred Allen, Burns and Allen, Bob Hope), the movie-adaptation anthologies, the private eyes of the late '40s, the kids' serials, and the news broadcasts from the war, which are history you can hear happen.

Here's the machinery of the hobby, which hasn't changed much since the '70s, though I understand some of the younger fellows are starting to do it with computers.

The catalog. Every collector keeps a list of what he has: show, date, episode title if known, sound quality, and where he got it. Mine started as a spiral notebook and is now typed on the computer and printed, about 40 pages. That list is your currency.

The SASE. You find another collector, through a club newsletter, a hobby magazine, a convention, or now a page like this one, and you write to him and ask for his list, and you enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope with enough postage for 40 pages, because he's not paying to mail his list to strangers. He sends his list; you send yours. You each mark what you'd like from the other.

The trade. One for one, hour for hour. A standard cassette is 60 minutes, which holds two half-hour shows, one per side. (Most radio shows were a half hour; some were fifteen minutes, some an hour.) You each dub the shows the other wants onto fresh tapes and mail them. Nobody keeps score too closely, and the custom is that if you get a bad tape, the other fellow makes it right. I have been trading with some of the same men for twenty years and never met most of them.

Dubbing. You need a dual-cassette deck, or two decks with a patch cord. Dub at normal speed, not the high-speed setting; high-speed dubbing throws away a little of the sound every time, and these recordings have already been through a lot. Use decent tape, the normal-bias kind is fine, and label the cassette before you put it in the mailer, not after, because you will forget. Write the show, the date, and the episode on the label. A tape with no label is a tape that doesn't exist.

Generations. Every time a tape is copied, a little is lost: more hiss, less top end. A show that's been through ten collectors sounds like it was recorded in a coal mine. So collectors care about "generation," how many copies away from the original disc a tape is, and a "low-generation" copy of a common show is worth more in trade than a tenth-generation copy of a rare one. Sound quality gets graded, roughly excellent, very good, good, fair and poor, and honest grading is the whole basis of a collector's reputation. Overgrade once and word gets around.

The rules of the road. Don't trade what you don't have. Don't sell what you were given in trade. Send what you promised when you promised it. Say thank you. Return the favor when a beginner writes you for a list, because somebody did it for you.

Buying. There are dealers who sell cassettes of old shows through the mail, a few dollars a tape, and there's nothing wrong with starting that way. Many of these shows are in the public domain and have been for years. But the trade is the heart of it. It's how the rare things move, and it's how you meet people.

As of this month: 1,412 episodes on 706 cassettes (I say 1,400 because it's easier and because I'm sure I've counted something twice). About a third comedy, a third drama and mystery, a quarter westerns, adventure and kids' shows, and the rest news, big bands and odds and ends. About 100 different series. The cassettes live in three oak card-file cabinets I bought when the library threw them out, which is the most appropriate furniture I have ever owned, filed by series and then by date.

Strong points: comedy of the late '30s and '40s, where I have long runs of the big shows. The thriller anthologies. Most of the radio Gunsmoke. A good stack of war news, including a fair amount from December 1941 and from June 1944. Weak points: the soap operas, which I never got interested in and which many collectors ignore, so they're hard to find, and the very early '30s, where not much survives for anybody.

The one I'd save in a fire: a wartime episode of a comedy show, transcribed by the Armed Forces service, in beautiful sound, that a fellow in Ohio traded me in 1983 for a whole box of things because he knew what it would mean to me. The date on it is the same week my father shipped out. I don't play it often.

Trading list available. You know the drill: SASE with postage for 40 pages, or e-mail and I'll send the list as a text file, which is what the nephew keeps telling me to do.

Friday. Dinner's done, dishes are done, phone's off the hook. The den has a big chair for me and the good chair for Peg, who brings her knitting, and a lamp we keep turned low because it ought to be a little dark. The player is a cassette deck run through the speakers of an old wooden console radio I gutted and rebuilt for the purpose, so the sound comes out of the right kind of box. That's not necessary. It's just right.

I pick a night's worth, the way the networks would have: a comedy at 8, a drama at 8:30, something scary at 9, a band remote to wind down. Last Friday it was a Benny from the fall of 1946, a Suspense with a movie actress doing something she never got to do in pictures, an Inner Sanctum for the door, and half an hour of a dance band from a hotel in Chicago, with the announcer describing the ballroom. Two hours. We don't talk during the shows. We do talk during the commercials, which are half the fun, and Peg has a theory about which sponsors' products she'd still buy.

The grandkids have sat in a few times. The younger one lasted ten minutes the first time. The second time he asked for the Shadow. The third time he brought a flashlight and made a tent out of the blanket and listened from inside it, which is exactly correct.

People ask me, usually kindly, what I get out of it. Nostalgia, sure. I was there. But it's more than that, because I've watched people who weren't there get pulled in, and here's what I think it is.

Radio makes you do half the work. The writer gives you the words, the actor gives you the voice, the sound man gives you a door and footsteps and rain, and your own head builds everything else: the room, the face, the fog, the size of the closet. Nothing on a screen can be as big as what you build yourself, because you build it to fit exactly. That's the old line about the theater of the mind and it is not just a line. It's why the scary shows are scarier and the funny shows are warmer. You're in them.

The writing had to be good, because there was nothing to look at. The acting had to be good, because there was nothing to hide behind. And it was live, once, in front of an audience, and you can hear that: the laughs are real, the flubs are in there, and when it works, it's a room full of people in 1944 and you, together.

And the country was listening together. Everybody heard the same thing on the same night, the mill hand and the banker and the kid on the rug, and talked about it the next day. I don't know that we've had anything like that since, and I don't know that we will again.

Anyway. That's the corner. The door's open, the coffee's on, and I have a Benny from 1946 cued up if you'd like to stay.

Walt Pruitt