The Thelma Ibsen Matter: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (January 9, 1953)

“The Thelma Ibsen Matter” is an episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, the old-time radio show, first broadcast January 9, 1953. Listen free on Stupid Potato.

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What happens

Insurance investigator Johnny Dollar is hired to locate the beneficiary of a $1,000 life insurance policy. The policyholder was an elderly newspaper vendor who took out the insurance specifically to benefit a young girl named Thelma Ibsen, whom he met just once when she was ten years old. Dollar traces Thelma's movements through Hartford and discovers she disappeared on Christmas Eve 1950 from a filling station on Long Island while with a man named Floyd Turnbull who claims they were about to be married.

Hartford and New York City, 1953, investigating events from 1950-1951

Characters: Johnny Dollar, DeFranco, Milton de Franco, John Linden, Thelma Ibsen, Mary Sealy, Floyd Turnbull, Edna

Listen for: The mystery of why Thelma abandoned Floyd Turnbull at the filling station on Christmas Eve, and whether Dollar can locate her to deliver the unexpected insurance inheritance.

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.