The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Description
Nineteen top citizens from the proudly moral town of Hadleyburg fight over a bag of gold coins, each trying to show everyone how honest they are, but their hungry desire for money slowly shows that the town's famous goodness is just a fake cover hiding their real dishonesty.
A town advertising itself as the most honest place in the world falls from grace when a poor citizen finds a sack containing 160 pounds of gold on his doorstep. An accompanying note says the money was brought by a gambler who won it with $20 from one townsperson. When word gets around, hardly anyone doesn't claim to have lent that $20.
Nineteen leading citizens of smugly honest Hadleyburg compete to claim a sack of gold and prove to the world their incorruptibility, but their greedy self-justification gradually reveals the town's celebrated virtue to be merely a thin veneer over deep-seated hypocrisy.
CBS Radio Mystery Theater is a radio drama series created by Himan Brown that was broadcast on CBS Radio Network affiliates from 1974 to 1982, and later in the early 2000s was repeated by the NPR satellite feed. In New York City it was not aired by the then all-news WCBS but by its originating station, WOR, which produced and announced it as simply Radio Mystery Theater.
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