Have Gun—Will Travel 1958-1960 (Digitally Restored) - Old Time Radio

Category: Full Cast, Radio Productions, Westerns
Language: English
Keywords: Celebrity Narrated Have Gun Will Travel John Dehner Old Time Radio Western

Written by Old Time Radio
Read by Various, Celebrity Narrated
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Dramatization

John Dehner starred as Paladin in the CBS radio adaptation of Have Gun—Will Travel from 1958 to 1960. Known for his rich baritone voice, Dehner portrayed the sophisticated, chess-playing gunfighter operating from San Francisco’s Carlton Hotel. The series was a popular “adult Western” that ran for over 100 episodes, focusing on character-driven stories.

Dehner worked extensively as a radio actor during the latter half of that medium’s “golden age,” accumulating hundreds of additional credits on nationally broadcast series. His most notable starring role was as Paladin on the radio version of the television Western Have Gun – Will Travel, which aired for 106 episodes on CBS from 1958 to 1960.

He continued to work as a voice actor in film, such as narrating the film The Hallelujah Trail. Earlier in his career, Dehner also worked briefly for Walt Disney Studios, serving as an assistant animator from 1940 to March 1941 at the company’s facilities in Burbank, California. He appeared in Columbo episodes “Swan Song” (1974) with Johnny Cash, and as Commodore Otis Swanson in “Last Salute to the Commodore” (1976).

Dehner in the early 1940s also began performing as an actor on radio, and he continued to do so throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Among his earliest radio-based acting jobs was while he was employed at station KMPC, where from late 1942 to 1944 he voiced the title character and narrated the syndicated horror anthology The Hermit’s Cave, which was produced by William Conrad. For the rest of the 1940s and for the remaining years of the “Golden Age of Radio”, into the early 1960s, Dehner served as a guest star, a recurring character, or lead on some of the greatest nationally broadcast series of that period, all while working as well in films and on television. A few of those major radio productions are Escape, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Let George Do It, California Caravan, The Count of Monte Cristo; Crime Classics; Lassie, NBC University Theater, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, Rogers of the Gazette, Suspense, The Man Called X, The Silent Men, Smilin’ Ed’s Buster Brown Gang, Voyage of the Scarlet Queen, The Whistler, Family Skeleton, The Black Book, and The Adventures of Sam Spade.

Articulate and possessing a rich baritone voice, Dehner during the 1950s was recognized by Radio Life Magazine for having the entertainment industry’s “best radio voice”, an asset that continued to provide him many more opportunities in broadcasting.[41] Much of his work in that period was performing as an array of characters in radio Westerns such as The Cisco Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Gunsmoke, and Fort Laramie. He also starred in two Western series on CBS Radio in 1958. In February that year, he began voicing the title character for Frontier Gentleman, a weekly series that followed the “action-filled” exploits of J. B. Kendall, a British Army veteran who as a newspaper reporter traveled throughout the Old West gathering stories for The London Times.