For much of his adult life, William Jarabeck was an aimless drifter, desperately trying to find a way to fit into society.
Raised by a steelworker father in western Pennsylvania, he started hanging with the wrong crowd in his early teens and was an alcoholic by 15. After spending time in prison and working as a steelworker, he became homeless and ended up in Joliet, where he finally found direction in his life, courtesy of a Christian mission in Aurora.
Recently Jarabeck was standing in front of a microphone, telling his story to a sparse but sympathetic audience of about 20 in a large auditorium at the Pacific Garden Mission, the 138-year-old Christian homeless shelter in Chicago’s South Loop.
“I never let my work interfere with my drinking,” he said. “But then the Bible that I never understood became clearer to me.”
The story rang true to the audience, many of whom probably shared Jarabeck’s problems. But the man speaking to them wasn’t really Jarabeck, who died in 1984 in Aurora at 81.
Instead it was Steve Downes, a gravel-voiced actor best known for his long stint as the morning personality on classic hits WDRV 97.1 The Drive in Chicago and as the voice of Master Chief in the popular “Halo” X-Box video game series.
Downes was playing Jarabeck in the radio docudrama “Unshackled,” which is celebrating an unprecedented 65 years on the air this year. It debuted on WGN-AM in 1950 as “a new series of Skid Row dramas,” according to a Chicago Tribune advertisement, and has been a weekly presentation on radio stations in Chicago and throughout the world ever since.
It is still performed by actors with scripts in hand in front of a live audience on Saturday afternoons at the Pacific Garden Mission — as it was when it debuted at WGN’s radio studios at the Tribune Tower.
The show’s format hasn’t changed either. It’s still a two-act drama about an individual who finds redemption by discovering Jesus Christ, with the stories based on actual testimonies and events provided by listeners.
“The stories are the stories of God and the lives of people,” said Flossie McNeill, whose title is ministry director but could more accurately be described as the show’s executive producer because she oversees every aspect of the program.
“There’s a new program every week — there’s not a Saturday that we miss a broadcast, unless there’s a holiday on a Saturday,” McNeill said. “If that’s the case, we perform during the week.”
Jarabeck’s story was the 3,368th program in the “Unshackled” series, which would make it by far the oldest and longest-running radio drama in broadcast history.
There are radio programs that have been on longer — “Grand Ole Opry,” now on WSM-AM in Nashville, Tenn., is celebrating 90 years, while the daily CBS Network Radio “World News Roundup” dates to 1938.
But no other radio drama comes close to the tenure of “Unshackled.”
Steve Darnall, historian at Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications, said that the African-American themed serial/sitcom “Amos ‘n’ Andy” was probably the second-longest running non-news/variety show on radio. That show, whose title characters were voiced by two white actors, started on WGN-AM in 1926 as “Sam ‘n’ Henry” and lasted in one form or another on network radio until 1960 — a mere 34 years.
“‘Unshackled’ has been around for so long that people run the risk of taking it for granted,” Darnall said. “But it’s a really remarkable show. It’s taken this form of presentation that a lot of people assumed was terribly archaic, and they’ve continued to make it relevant.”
The English-language version of the program is broadcast on more than 2,900 radio outlets in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. It is translated into 14 other languages — including Spanish, Arabic, Farsi and Macedonian — which allows the show to be broadcast in just about every corner of the world.
In the Chicago-area, it is on six stations, including WYLL (1160 AM) in Elk Grove Village and WJCG (88.9 FM) in Monee.
In Houston, KHCB-FM runs reruns of “Unshackled” at 4 a.m. and 8 p.m. every day except Sundays, in addition to running a new program on Saturday evenings.
“It’s always among our top five programs in terms of positive email responses,” said Bruce Munsterman, president of KHCB, which also runs its programming on 37 other stations in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Florida.
“The show always has a message about salvation,” Munsterman said. “It offers encouragement, and we all need encouragement.”
With an annual budget of $700,000, “Unshackled” is not a cheap program to produce. McNeill only hires union actors represented by Chicago’s SAG-AFTRA offices. So the Pacific Garden Mission spends about $15,000 each week to cover the cost of the actors, the writer for the program, administrative and engineering costs and media distribution.
But Pacific Garden Mission offers the program for free to every station that runs it.
“It’s an extension of our ministry,” McNeill said. “The show, like everything that we do, is funded through donations from the private sector.”
“Unshackled” began as the brainchild of former Pacific Garden Mission Superintendent Harry Saulnier, who had hosted a 15-minute program called “Doorway to Heaven” on WAIT-AM in 1945. On this program, Saulnier would comment on the real-life stories of the homeless who became converted Christians at Pacific Garden Mission.
Radio dramas were in their heyday at this time. So Saulnier thought a drama based on the real-life testimonies of Pacific Garden Mission patrons would reach a wider audience.
Saulnier was able to sell the idea to WGN-AM, and the first show — a dramatization of the life of “saved” evangelist Billy Sunday — ran live at 11 p.m. Sept. 23, 1950. Sunday’s widow was present for the initial broadcast.
“Radio drama then was the most recognized form of mass media storytelling, so ‘Unshackled’ probably drew from a lot of sources,” said Darnall, who cited “Dragnet,” “True Detective Mysteries” and “Famous Jury Trials” as radio docudramas based on real-life stories that were on at the time “Unshackled” started.
“People love good stories, and testimonies are especially wonderful,” said Kennetha Gaebler, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based writer who has been with the show since 1995.
“We all love someone who has come from a really difficult situation, and we’ve definitely had those on the show, from prostitutes to drug dealers,” Gaebler said. “But we also have ordinary people who just can’t forgive or are bitter or fearful, before Jesus sets them free. Whatever you can think of that’s part of the human condition, we cover that.”
Gaebler is one of only three main writers for the show in its 65-year history. The first writer, Eugenia Price, had been a radio serial writer for years and helped set the template for the show before leaving in 1955. Former WCFL-AM announcer Jack Odell followed Price and kept writing for the show until 1995, when Gaebler took over.
They have one commonality, according to McNeill. “All three writers were lost for years,” she said. “They weren’t saved as children, they started as sinners. They all did things that were wrong. And that’s a good thing for a writer for this program. They’ve lived and experienced being lost and being saved and living in salvation.”
Price was an atheist. Odell was a recovering alcoholic. And Gaebler, who worked in Hollywood as an animator and producer for Filmation Studios in the 1970s, where she contributed to shows like “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” had her own issues.
“I was smoking pot like everyone else out there — they think it makes them more creative,” Gaebler recalled. “But I got saved, and I knew what the Lord wanted me to do.”
Gaebler now gets her weekly marching orders from McNeill, who has also been with the show since 1995.
McNeill is responsible for picking, from hundreds of emails, the real-life story that Gaebler will adapt each week. McNeill will also supervise the vetting of each story.
“We need to know if the (story subject) has really experienced a transformation,” McNeill said. “So we get references from individuals who’ve known them for years, from pastors to people on their jobs. We need to know that the stories are absolutely true.”
Gaebler then works to boil all the information — “Sometimes I’ll send her 300 pages of information,” McNeill said — down to a 30-minute drama.
“It’s a lot like playwriting, except you do it for the ear only,” Gaebler said. “The challenge for a radio drama is doing internal conflict. You can only do internal conflict through narration, and that’s one reason a narrator is consistently part of the show’s format.”
The show’s director, Chicago theater veteran Timothy Gregory, also takes on the role of narrator. He’ll lead the five or six actors, who differ each week, in a brief reading of the script about two hours before the program starts. A timekeeper attends to make sure the show ends in 30 minutes.
“Obviously, there’s nothing you can see, so the performance has to sound natural and organic,” Gregory said. “It can’t sound like you’re reading; it has to sound like you’re behaving.”
While the show was aired live for the first few years of its existence, it has been “live on tape” for decades. Gregory will often stop a show during its taping and have a performer do a line over to make sure the reading rings true.
“The challenge is to make it all work through your voice alone,” said Rick Plastina, an “Unshackled” regular who was one of the actors on the Jarabeck show.
“And unless you’re the lead, you’re often playing more than one character,” he said. “So you have to change your voice depending on the character you’re playing, and the challenge is to make it real and believable while you are doing it. I’ve played everything from Ku Klux Klan bigots to the preachers and ministers at different missions. So it’s quite a realm, and there are quite a lot of accents and nationalities, too, from Southern and New York to the English and Irish.”
McNeill maintains that “God is the star of every program” and the ultimate program director who’ll decide how long the show will stay on the air.
“The program belongs to God, and as long as we leave God in charge of it, then it will continue,” McNeill said.
Listen to past “Unshackled” shows and find a program schedule for current “Unshackled” airings on radio stations throughout the world at www.unshackled.org.
Twitter john_p_owens
