Welcome, Tomato Pie Fans! I’m taking a hiatus from blogging to finish the sequel to DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME. Meanwhile, I have a series of guest bloggers taking care of the place. Let’s hear from today’s guest, John Paul Wohlschied.

Nostalgia for the Good Old Days  

Most of the time, when people say they feel nostalgic about a certain time period, it means that they lived during that period and miss it. Well, I’m a little different. I am very nostalgic for the period between the 30s and 50s. For a guy born in the middle 80s, this might seem strange to you. Before you call for the butterfly net and straitjacket, let me explain.

In the 30s to 50s, life was much simpler. (Except for World War II, of course.) You didn’t have to worry about keeping up-to-date with your friends’ updates on social media. You weren’t inundated with noise and entertainment everywhere you went. Phones were only capable of receiving calls. Anyone could open the hood of their car to fix or tinker with it. You were content to have four channels on your TV with real content, instead of 25 channels dedicated to the intricacies of basket weaving.

I write detective stories, and my main inspiration for those stories are the detective radio and TV shows of that era. Radio shows (such as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Let George Do It, Barry Craig Investigator, Your Truly Johnny Dollar, Mr. Keen Tracer of Lost Persons, Nero Wolfe, and others) were fun to listen to and told great stories. Dragnet was another favorite detective show, both on radio and TV, and was responsible for the creation of realistic police procedural shows (such as CSI and Law and Order).

(Everyone from a certain age knows what this sounds means.)

If detective shows aren’t your thing, you can listen to cowboy shows (Frontier Gentleman, Lone Ranger, Have Gun Will Travel, Hopalong Cassidy, Gunsmoke, and others), or comedy (Our Miss Brooks, Amos and Andy, My Favorite Husband, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello and more).

If radio programs are not your cup of tea and you are more visual, the 30s to 50s produced some great films and TV shows, most are cleaner than today’s films thanks to the Motion Picture Production Code or Hays Code. This Code prohibited the use of profanity, drug use, sex, and willful offense to any nation, race or creed. In other words, think of Going My Way versus Kill Bill.

So, let me know if I inspired you to join me in my nostalgia or to reach for the butterfly net.

P.S. I would like to thank Erin for allowing me to write for her blog and I apologize in advance of any drop in readership I might cause.

John Paul was born and raised in West Michigan. He attends daily Mass with his parents and brother, Michael. John Paul and his brother have served English, Latin and Polish Masses for over 17 years. John Paul has always loved to read about the saints and about the Roman Catholic Faith in general. He hopes someday to become a priest. He discovered detective stories at an early age through the magic of Old Time Radio. Since then he has devoured hundreds of hours of radio shows (such as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Boston Blackie, Richard Diamond and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar) and mystery stories. With all this knowledge, he decided to take a crack at recreating those hard-boiled stories of yesteryear. Someday he plans to expand into scifi and westerns.