Most of the programming during the Golden Age of Radio was live. Recording technology was expensive and unreliable, and the recordings that took up a lot of room.

Big radio studios could and did wind up with closets as cluttered as Fibber McGee's (not that Fibber McGee and Molly episodes are rare; the sponsor insisted on recording each episode).

Time was not always kind to the recorded disks tucked in the closet, nor were the studio staff members who were occasionally assigned to clean out the closet. Fortunately there would sometimes be someone who recognized the importance of preservation between the closet and the dumpster. Sadly, when you are saving treasures from the garbage collector, the treasures are not always well organized.

In Random Rarities 6 there are rarities from the closets of WLW Cincinnati among others. There are a number of news clips from the War years, beginning with America's entry into WWII, to one of the first mass draft board inductions in the Cincinnati area (with enthusiastic draftees), coverage of the Ohio River overflowing its banks in 1945, and other incidents.

Other treasures include an audition from Doris Day at the WLW studio. Some musical treasures (not definitely from WLW) a pair of songs from Rosemary and Betty Clooney recorded nine years apart. The popular A & P Gypsies also appear in a Depression era recording, and WLW gets back in the act with the "Victory Polka".

WLW was owned by industrialist and radio manufacturer Powell Crosley Jr., and one of his was to build a series of high-powered shortwave transmitters in support of Voice of America.

Also in the collection from KVOO Tulsa is a sample of utter silliness called "Eggs at Eight", featuring a fun parody of Dragnet. The Tex and Jinx Show was a popular morning talk show from New York; the episode celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Mickey Mouse will delight aviation buffs with an eyewitness report of Howard Hughes' flight of the "Spruce Goose". Ray Knight on The Cuckoo Show, one of radio's earliest comedies, tries to outsmart the Internal Revenue Service. Cliche Club is a fun quiz show with a panel from the literary community who, along with the audience, tries to guess the common phrase from which the stories are based.

Of course, this is just a sample of the great episodes in Random Rarities 6!

See also Random Rarities 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 , 9, 10, and 11.