Shadow of the Wings - Quiet Please - Easter Celebration of Life

A little girl, ill to a point near death, lies alone in her room. She lies quietly on her bed, unmoving but awake, contemplating the moment as well as what is to come. Having long ago learned control of herself, she does not fear her fate. The girl looks up, and sees a shadow of a man by the window. She calls to him, but he will not show himself. She begs him to keep her company, but he stays just out of sight, tantalizingly close and yet never in full view.

The girl's mother longs to go in and comfort her daughter, tell her stories, keep her company, but the doctor has told her she cannot. The girl must be kept calm at all costs. If anything should happen to cause her to become excited, she will die. When the mother enters the room to administer another dose of medicine, she is told about the man by the window. She tells her daughter it was just a dream, but when she goes over to the window she can see that someone has been there. Frightened, she asks the doctor who it could have been. She answers her own question, drawing on what she knows in her heart to be true.

"Shadow of the Wings" is a deeply emotional story. Touching upon the foundations of life and death, it examines the thin line that separates the two. The penetrating themes, as well as the characters themselves, are deeply tied to Easter. Above all, the story is a celebration of life.

Quiet, Please! was a radio fantasy and horror program created by Wyllis Cooper, also known for creating Lights Out. Ernest Chappell was the show's announcer and lead actor. Quiet, Please debuted June 8, 1947 on the Mutual Broadcasting System, and its last episode was broadcast June 25, 1949, on the ABC. A total of 106 shows were broadcast, with only a very few of them repeats.

Earning relatively little notice during its initial run, Quiet, Please has since been praised as one of the finest efforts of the golden age of American radio drama. Professor Richard J. Hand of the University of Glamorgan, in a detailed critical analysis of the series, argued that Cooper and Chappell "created works of astonishing originality"; he further describes the program as an "extraordinary body of work" which established Cooper "as one of the greatest auteurs of horror radio." Similarly, radio historian Ron Lackmann declares that the episodes "were exceptionally well written and outstandingly acted",[2] while John Dunning describes the show as "a potent series bristling with rich imagination

Quiet, Please had its roots in The Campbell Playhouse (1938–1940), the successor to Orson Welles's The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which achieved notoriety with its 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds. Cooper was a writer for the Campbell Playhouse, and Chappell was the announcer. They became friends, though Chappell had little (if any) acting experience, Cooper imagined him as the star of a new radio program. Cooper's earlier Lights Out was famous for its gruesome stories and sound effects, but for Quiet, Please, Cooper would cultivate a subdued, slower-paced, and much quieter atmosphere that could still, at its best, match Lights Out for frights and thrills. Chappell had ample experience in radio, but mostly as an announcer. As Hand writes, "With Quiet, Please, Cooper gave Ernest Chappell the chance to act, and the result was a revelation. Chappell proved himself to be versatile in accent and delivery." The differences could be broad or subtle, but in nearly every episode, Chappell created a distinctive character, rarely using the same traits in multiple episodes. Writer Harlan Ellison, a longtime Quiet, Please fan, writes that the programs were "backed by sound effects and music…but it was essentially Chappell, just speaking softly. Quietly. Terrifyingly."[4] Ellison also describes Chappell as having "one of the great radio voices. A sound that combined urbanity with storytelling wisdom

Originally Broadcast April 17, 1949