I'm primarily here for the antique radio hardware activity, but noticed this sub-forum today...and have something that will likely interest OTR people.

I've recently acquired a large quantity of sound effects records, mostly on 78 rpm shellac but also on metal-base transcriptions and the early 33 rpm shellac. There are hundreds of discs, and they came from CBS's Columbia Square facility on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The guy I got them from cleaned out the building when CBS left in the early 2000's. The studios there produced most of the golden-age radio dramas and comedy programs from the late 30's through the 50s. Radio station KNX was there as well.

The Old Time Radio community might be interested to hear about this. There is even a disc labelled "Benny's Maxwell." I've only played a few samples of them so far, but there is a super wide variety of sounds, and so many records, that it's likely the entire library from the CBS west coast production group. There are all sorts of nature sounds - storms and water and animals and such - plus war noises and car sounds (lots of crashes) and trains and crowds and babies and traffic and doors opening and closing and on and on. Many are marked with "Property of the CBS Sound Department" or "KNX," and a large percentage of them are the famous Gennett (later rebranded as Speedy) sound effects records.

The guy also got an old Model T door, mounted in a stand-up frame, so the sound effects people could slam it. I didn't have room for that.

Not sure whether this is actually the best spot to tell about this, so if there are any OTR forums or other places where folks will want to hear about this, please share that information with me.

Do you have plans of digitizing the recordings? I wonder if they would be considered public domain now.
OTR re-creation groups, schools, etc . . could use those sounds.

No, no plan to do that in bulk, although I may put selected ones (like Jack Benny's car) up on youtube to share with interested people.

It's really fun - just randomly sampling them I've been hearing certain sounds that I've heard many times before, for example "bombers in flight."

I'm considering putting them in the hands of an archive, like the one at UC Santa Barbara, but if there are some OTR archives, that might be more appropriate.

I would suggest the Old Time Radio Researchers Group:

http://otrrlibrary.org/

and/or

The Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/about/

That way radio collectors from everywhere would have free access to them. But once digitized you can share them with multiple groups very easily.

Thanks very much for the tips.

Donated the vast majority of these to CHRS a couple of weeks ago, after working through them in pretty good detail. There were a few pretty cool items, including an acetate of a few guys talking quite insultingly about Orson Welles' producer Harry Essman.

Many were standard off-the-shelf sound effects records from Gennett and Speedy, sometimes in multiple copies for frequent use, but many were also CBS in-house items. A lot were chipped or cracked or bit, but there were about 4 lineal feet of them after weeding them out.

I noticed that everybody in the old days had squeeky brakes. That was the only way they could indicate a car pulled up. Gunsmoke had a lot of cues, the barking dog in the distance sure got around.