SEQUIM — John Grissim wants to take old-time radio drama, give it a contemporary twist and base it near home — John Wayne Marina, specifically.
The author, journalist and Vietnam veteran has done just that with “Adrian Cross, For Hire,” planned for airing on KSQM 91.5 FM public radio.
Right now Grissim, who in the 1960s and ’70s, interviewed and wrote about rock and country artists such as the Grateful Dead and Johnny Cash for Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco, plans to produce an original one-hour radio mystery drama and is issuing a call for actors, musicians and production volunteers for the program.
“We’re hoping word of the production gets out to Port Angeles, Port Townsend and Sequim, especially to musicians,” Grissism said, adding he has already talked to some two dozen actors wanting to audition for 19 voice roles in the radio drama.
“We’d like to score the show with a studio orchestra like they did in the ’40s and ’50s,” he said.
“Looking way ahead, we think the North Olympic Peninsula is loaded with talent, and there’s a huge national appetite for syndicated radio drama.”
Grissim described the show’s protagonist, Adrian Cross, as a lover of the ocean, an adventurous self-reliant loner and slightly jaded romantic.
“He lives aboard an aging cabin cruiser in the John Wayne marina, and scrapes by as a yacht surveyor, charter captain, hull cleaner, salvage consultant, boat repo man — anything more or less legal — and regularly crosses paths with Sequim’s police chief with whom he has a flinty relationship,” the 68-year-old silver-haired Grissim said, adding the character is sort of based on his own surfing alter ego.
Grissim is also a former editor for Surfing magazine in Australia.
Grissim approached station founder and board president Rick Perry in February, pitching the project.
Perry embraced it.
Initial episode
In the show’s initial hour-long episode, “The Schooner Mystic Rose,” Cross tracks down a priceless artifact stolen generations ago from a renowned elder of the Jamestown-S’Klallam tribe, tangles with a notorious motorcycle club, courts the aristocratic daughter of a timber baron, foils a kidnapping and participates in a dramatic shoot-out in the waters off Salt Creek State Park west of Port Angeles.
“There’re even a couple of steamy scenes that probably wouldn’t have been aired in the old days,” Grissim said.
The project is designed to appeal to the station’s older listener demographic as well as attract new listeners from younger generations.
“So many of our listeners grew up in the golden age of radio, listening to radio shows like ‘The Shadow,’ ‘Gangbusters’ and ‘Dragnet,’ and we think this will be a perfect fit,” station manager Jeff Bankston said.
“We’d been looking for opportunities to expand our in-house programming and whenever radio mystery drama was mentioned, people’s eyes lit up.”
Lifelong fan
Grissim, who moved with his family from the Bay Area to Sequim in 2001, said he is a lifelong aficionado of radio theater, and that is what pushed him forward into his first foray in radio script writing.
Grissim did his homework before writing the script, contacting a Native American linguistic expert and U.S. Coast Guard personnel to ensure his radio drama would be realistic and true to Peninsula form.
Shortly after moving into his new manufactured home near the Dungeness River, Grissim wrote and published The Grissim Buyer’s Guide to Manufactured Homes & Land: How to find a reputable dealer and negotiate a fair price on the best kept secret in American housing (2003), and The Grissim Ratings Guide to Manufactured Homes (2006).
In 2008, he completed Killer Dana, a mystery novel.
Last year, he launched the monthly newsletter, The Grissim Report — news and commentary about the North American factory-built home industry, a subscription-based publication, but suspended it after the housing market decline.
Anyone interested in learning more about volunteering for the KSQM production is encouraged to contact the station at 360-681-0000 by next Thursday.
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Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
