What happens
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello host their children's program, with cowboy star Red Ryder as guest. Abbott and Costello perform comic sketches with Ryder and his sidekick Little Beaver, including a gag about a mock desert trek. Contest segments follow, where young audience members answer riddles and win prizes such as bubble gum, a ring, a puppy and a bicycle. The show closes by presenting the Junior Youth Foundation Award to four-year-old Patsy May Cummings, who carried her baby brother out of a burning trailer on a dairy farm in Illinois. The Abbott and Costello Show airs on NBC and ABC on September 11, 1948, featuring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Connie Haines and Elvia Allman.
A children's radio program hosted in Hollywood, with a studio audience of kids, a desert comedy sketch, and a rural Illinois farm for the award story.
Characters: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Red Ryder, Little Beaver, Johnny McGovern, Patsy May Cummings
Listen for: Costello's contest questions to the young contestants and the sketch in which Abbott and Costello find a gold mine with Red Ryder.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.