OREM — Sitting in the living room in his pajamas, it wasn't difficult for Bruce Seely to imagine that the Lone Ranger was galloping across his driveway and Superman was soaring above the pine trees out back.
While his friends' families watched such adventures on their new black-and-white television sets, Bruce's family made popcorn and sat in front of their old RCA radio.
"We didn't get a television until I was 10," he says, "and looking back, I don't think I missed out. Television can't come close to the 'theater of the mind.' The great thing about radio is that it requires you to use your imagination."
Bruce, 53, is now hoping to convince today's high-tech families to turn off their televisions and computers for one hour a week and venture back to the days of radio theater, when Abbott and Costello ruled the airwaves and creepy mysteries kept young listeners awake after midnight.
As program manager for KBYU-FM radio, Bruce decided last year that listeners needed more than Mozart, Mendelssohn and the BBC News.
"I thought, 'Besides classical music, what elements of the arts can we put on the air?' " he says. "We can't do dance and we sure can't do visual art. But we can do radio theater."
Now families looking for a new way to spend quality time and truck drivers hoping to break up the miles can tune in Mondays at 8 p.m. for everything from "A Tale of Two Cities" to old comedy skits by George Burns and Gracie Allen.
Eager to share the importance of keeping radio theater alive, Bruce met me for a Free Lunch of steak and salad down the street from his station office at Brigham Young University.
The first thing most people notice about Bruce is that his small frame and conservative appearance don't have much in common with his voice. Deep and smooth as a cello, his is a voice that belongs on radio.
Bruce laughs when asked why he now works behind the scenes. "I've sounded like this since I was 15," he says, "but after 27 years in radio news, it was time to try something new."
Growing up in the Canadian town of Lethbridge, population 25,000, Bruce stumbled into the radio business as a teenager, when a friend told him a local station needed somebody to run the board for three hours a night.
A few months later, he was on the air, not only playing Beatles hits for his friends, but also anchoring the evening news at a small television station. After coming to Utah to earn a degree in broadcast journalism from BYU, Bruce spent the next 30 years working at 14 different radio stations, mainly in Canada.
Now that he's back in Orem, Bruce is betting there are plenty of parents who would like to introduce their children to the magic of radio theater. Young listeners have been treated to "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," and this month, the station is airing "The Wizard of Oz."
Some of Bruce's favorite programs come from Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater, one of the few groups in the country producing new radio dramas.
"It's a challenge to keep finding good material," he says, "so we end up running a few repeats now and then. I don't want to be young all the time and I don't want to be old. We want to keep mixing it up."
Bruce has plenty of shows to choose from for October, since tales from the dark side and radio go hand in hand. He hopes to air Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds," and he'd love to track down an old ghost story he heard as a child.
"It scared me so bad, I couldn't sleep for weeks," he says. "That's the power of radio."
Have a story? Let's hear it over lunch. E-mail your name, phone number and what you'd like to talk about to freelunch@desnews.com. You can also write me at the Deseret News, P.O. Box 1257, Salt Lake City, UT 84110.