Radio on the Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone "Static" Season 2, Episode 20.The original air date of this episode was March 10th, 1961. In this script, an old man, Ed Lindsay, obtains an old radio, which he listens to and hears old shows and music from his younger days. But other people only hear static. The radio reunites him with his lost love but 20 years into his own past, where he can relive his life and set things right.

In the episode he clearly refers to the calls and city for the radio station. These are: WPDA-AM Cedarburg, New Jersey. Currently there is a 106.1 WPDA (simulcast WPDH) in Jeffersonville, NY to the west of Poughkeepsie. In 1930 the Pasadena, CA police department used those calls on 1712 kHz. However, a 1936 issue of Radiotron puts the calls in Tulare, CA; some 170 miles north. A 1934 issue of Shortwave Craft puts the same callsign in Framingham, MA on 1666 kc concurrently with the other Tulare listings. Something is amiss there.

There is no Cedarburg in New Jersey, but there is one in Wisconsin outside Milwaukee. There is a Cedarville, a Cedar Grove and a Cedarbrook but none of these has a local stick. This still may of course be a veiled reference to some radio station from the resume of writers Oceo Ritch or Charles Beaumont. 

It originally aired in March of 1961 starring Dean Jagger as the cranky old man. The context here is that may old radio writers were re-purposing themselves as TV writers about then. It's a script an old radio man, who didn't feel that magic in TV, would write. More info here, and here.

It wasn't until 2002 that The Twilight Zone TV show was adapted as a radio drama series of the same name. Of course this is the opposite of the traditional media shift.