Ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Plugcheck!

    As I mention more or less daily, I'm a big fan of old-time radio. One of my favorites was a show called Suspense. It was a brilliant show, but with the onset of television, radio economics got more than a little screwy. Thus, Suspense had a lot of sponsors, one after the other. This doesn't mean what it would to those of us from the TV generations. In those days, each show had one sponsor. So Suspense had one sponsor for one season, then another for the next, etc.
    Towards the end of the years covered by my collection (up to the early '50s), that sponsor was an auto parts outfit called Autolite. Apparently, they're still around. Advertisers from today could take lessons from Autolite. It isn't that their ads were conspicuously good; mostly they weren't. But they were cheerful, positive, and here's the big one: they were different every week! Wouldn't we all hate advertising a little less if it weren't for the constant, unending repetition? Or is that just me?
    So listening to Suspense when I started this obsession a few years ago, I was delighted to encounter a character called Johnny Plugcheck. He had a ridiculously high falsetto and his only role in life was to remind people to check their plugs. When I tried to track the little fellow down, I was surprised to learn what I conveyed in the last paragraph, that every Autolite ad was different and that in fact Johnny P only made one appearance. (I was equally surprised that in spite of this, Google was able to track down the actor playing him; it was the same guy who did Gumby!) The episode featuring Johnny is actually on YouTube, but wouldn't you just know it? This one time when I didn't want them to cut the ads out, they did. Ah well; sic transit gloria mundi, even for an imaginary character who reminds you to check your spark plugs.