Suspense: Two Platinum Capsules (AFRS

Suspense: 01/10/56, episode 631
Brought to you by the Old Time Radio Researchers, courtesy of The Suspense Project
This Charles B. Smith story is claimed to be based on fact, and it may very well be on a particular incident in Ohio, but only a few facts of that story. The plotline is of its time in the early years of post-WW2 atomic science which had heightened the fears of radioactivity. Stacy Harris narrates, Harry Bartell plays a local man with a Geiger Counter, and Richard Beals plays his son, Johnny.
This particular story is set in a hospital where there are small capsules of radium stored away in a safe. When a nurse goes to retrieve two of them, she realizes that two of them are missing. Where are they? We soon learn that an eleven-year-old boy has them, with 100 milligrams (mg) of radium in each capsule.
The nurse tells the head of the hospital, Dr. Hutter, that the capsules may have been taken by a doctor who is starting his own practice. He considers her suggestion to be cynical. The fact is that the capsules may be lost because an error she made. At one point in the story, the doctor actually starts to reconsider her suggestion as possibly true.
Luckily, there is a person in town who has a Geiger Counter. (Oh, it is such an amazing coincidence that he’s the father of Johnny, the boy who found the capsules in the local dump!) He is a “uranium hunter” seeking to find deposits out in the desert that might be mined. As he and the doctor walk through the building, they get a strong reading near the room where the radium was stored, to be expected, but nowhere else in or near the hospital. A little detective work leads them to a dump, where the hospital’s garbage is dropped. After some prodding, the attendant remembers two boys playing, Johnny and his friend Peter, and having something like the capsules. The father heads home, and sits down for dinner, hoping that someone finds those boys. It just so happens that Johnny is fascinated with the new Geiger Counter and wants to turn it on. The father tells him it’s not a toy, but he finally turns it on. The Counter gets very loud, registering the presence of the capsules. He’ll be okay. And that nurse? She’s the evil one in the story, hoping that the missing capsules would be blamed on an employee she did not like.
The young boy whistles The Ballad of Davy Crockett from the 1955 5-part ABC TV series Davy Crockett. Episodes were combined to make a theatrical release in the Summer of 1956. Walt Disney used the fees from ABC and the movie to help finance the construction of Disneyland.
It is considered that 100mg of radium as described in the story, the amount in each capsule, should be in a lead container with 2-inch walls. So when they are in the young boy’s pocket, it is considered very dangerous exposure. They explain the potentially dangerous outcome away in that the capsules were moving about in his pocket and he did not have them for a long period of time.
Geiger counters were available in 1955 for $50, about $600 in US$2025. www.orau.org/h...
The title was changed from the original “Two Platinum Needles,” to “Two Platinum Capsules.” Note that the description the boy uses in the story says “two little pieces of metal.” Both phrases can be accurate. Newspaper readers and radio listeners seeing or hearing the “needles” title may have mistakenly assumed the story might be about drug addiction. Hypodermic needles were often made of platinum. Drug addiction was in the news a few weeks before broadcast with the release of the film The Man with the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra. Because needles could be associated with drug use, it seems reasonable that they decided to change the episode title since they did not want a story about radiation casually confused with that topic. The “needles” title was announced at the end of The Eavesdropper. Not a single newspaper timetable had the new title in its listings.
The cast: Stacy Harris (Narrator), Harry Bartell (George Murphy), Richard Beals (Johnny Murphy), Edgar Barrier (Dr. Karl Hutter), Peter J. Votrian (Peter), Virginia Gregg (May Murphy), Jeanne Bates (Helen Webster), Junius Matthews (Henry the Watchman / Mailman), Helen Kleeb (Nurse Burton), Tom Hanley, Bill James (Ad-Libs), George Walsh (Suspense Narrator / Mailman)
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