What happens
At a Middle West county fair, card sharp Dick Caswell, known as the Deacon, is run out of Truxton by the local chief of police. He travels to the nearby town of Shelton, where an oil boom has brought new money and new tensions. Bob Burns stars as the Deacon, with Helen Wood as Phyllis, in this 1940 Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the Universal film, broadcast on July 1, 1940. The Deacon soon meets Sheriff Yates, Mrs. Elsie Clark, who runs the Clark Hotel, and the local power broker Jim Cunningham. Mrs. Clark's bridge game draws him in, and the Deacon's luck begins to change the town's situation. Meanwhile Phyllis takes work at the hotel and spends her evenings with Johnny Sloane, a truck driver dreaming of a junk business.
A Middle West county fair, then the small oil-boom town of Shelton, 1940s America
Characters: Dick Caswell (the Deacon), Phyllis, Johnny Sloane, Sheriff Yates, Elsie Clark, Jim Cunningham, Mrs. Gregory, Mildred
Listen for: The Deacon's rapid-fire card patter and folksy references to his uncle Confucius, which become a running joke
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.