While most businesspeople strive to be mindful of the future, Dennis Wright wants just the opposite. You even could say the Spokane entrepreneur was born quite a few years too late.


Wright owns Audio Adventure, a year-old Spokane company that sells old-time radio shows in MP3 format on compact discs. He has an inventory of almost 30,000 programseverything from Gunsmoke to Baby Snooksand a passion for all things old. Although his client base is small and his revenues are minimal, Wright says he hopes to be selling compilations of the radio programs in conventional CD format and cassette tapes in gas stations and bookstores and also open a downtown Spokane storefront within a year.


I want it to be as popular as audio books, he says. I think because of the word old in old-time radio, people think there isnt entertainment value there, but there is.


What started as a hobby has grown into a small business. Audio Adventure employs one other person, Emily Wallace Avent, who handles sales and communications tasks for the company.


Because both Wright and Avent work full time for other organizations, they often end up burning the midnight oil in Audio Adventures 100-square-foot office in the former Music City Spokane Inc. building, at 1011 W. First. Wright is a virtual incubator manager for The Inland Northwest Community Action Network (TINCAN), of Spokane, meaning he helps startup companies use the Internet to promote and operate their businesses. Avent conducts economic-development surveys in the Peaceful Valley neighborhood for Northwest Regional Facilitators to connect residents there with better job and training opportunities.


On a recent Wednesday, Wright was at the Audio Adventure office until 2 a.m., burning CDs for customers and converting old radio shows from tape to the compressed MP3 file format, he says. He says he also spends a lot of time talking to customers who call from as far away as Japan to reminisce about the old shows.


Other companies sell (old-time radio) shows, but they just process the sale, he claims. A guy called from New Jersey the other day looking for an old Hop Harrigan show. After talking to him for an hour, he ended up ordering five more programs.


Wright provides customers with more than just an ear, though. He also offers old-time radio knowledge and enthusiasm. He says he listens to the shows all day long, including when he wakes up in the morning, while hes at work, and when he goes camping with his family. His mobile phone is programmed to play the theme from The Lone Ranger when someone calls.


Im extreme, Wright laughs.


Wrights prices appear to bolster his claim that hes not out just to make money. A CD with 26 15-minute episodes of Flash Gordon, for example, sells for $6. He recently sold a customer six CDs containing more than 200 hours of programming for $50. He sells a three-volume CD set that contains 319 Christmas-related radio shows for $15. Each show runs from 15 minutes to 60 minutes, he says.


I tell him hes crazy for not charging more, Avent says.


Audio Adventure isnt required to pay royalties, because many of the earliest old-time radio shows werent copyrighted. Others the Spokane company re-records have passed the initial 28-year term of protection under copyright laws, and their copyrights never were renewed, as is possible under the law.


Wright has been collecting old-time radio shows on tape and CD for 23 years. To build his collection, he trades on the Internet, bids on eBay, and buys old records at music stores, he says.


Wright and Avents desks are crammed side-by-side in Audio Adventures tiny red-walled office. Two old-fashioned radio replicas rest atop a bookshelf in the office across from much newer-looking technology that sits atop and under Wrights desk. He uses a PC equipped with a good sound card and a fast CD recorder to manipulate the recordings and transfer them to a CD. Wright uses software to transfer MP3 files onto CDs. He also has a reel-to-reel player and a turntable available to transfer radio programs from reel-to-reel tapes and records to CD.


Wright originally planned to sell the shows only in the compressed MP3 format so that he could give customers more shows than in a noncompressed format. He has learned, though, that fewer people than he thought have MP3-enabled CD players, so he plans to start putting conventional audio files on CDs in about a month.


To get the word out, Audio Adventure has set up a Web site and is relying mostly on Internet search engines to direct customers to its site, he says.


Wright was born in 1957 in Connell, Wash., about 50 miles north of the Tri-Cities, around the time televisions were broadly surpassing radios as the dominant broadcast medium in the U.S. When he was a teenager, Wrights family moved to Michigan, where he worked on a dairy farm. Despite TVs ubiquity by then, Wright had few entertainment options on the farm. To pass time while milking cows, he listened to radio programs, including The Shadow, a popular radio mystery series about an elusive crime solver who fought evil while living a double life.


I picked up on those values, the things the Lone Ranger and those other guys would say on the air, he says.


The values embedded in those shows included lessons on fairness, kindness, friendship, and treating people with respect, Wright says.


It was almost like the Ten Commandments had been rewritten for these guys, he says.


Avent says that families today also want to rekindle the values that those shows taught. She asserts that because listeners must transform the spoken word into images in their own minds, rather than letting television force-feed viewers those pictures, listening to radio programs can foster creativity.


Old-time radio exercises the mind, she says. It grows imagination.


Contrary to what he had expected, Wright says most of Audio Adventures current customers are between the ages of 30 and 50, and some are as young as 20.


I think people are getting sick of whats on TV. Theyre going back to radio, he contends.


Avent adds, however, that Audio Adventures best bet is to hook customers where theyre most likely to be both captivated and captive: in their cars. The company is researching how to get its products on convenience-store and gas-station shelves and hopes to sell its CDs in independent stores in six months to a year, she says.


Separately, Wright is working on tentative plans to open a storefront in the alley behind Audio Adventures office, which is on a block downtown that a group of developers hopes to transform into a retail, restaurant, and office district called RailSide Center. Jill Smith, one of the RailSide Center developers, says 18 businesses, including two photography studios, an art gallery, and an antique store, among others, have opened there already.


At its proposed store, Audio Adventure would sell its old-time radio programs on CDs and tapes and also would sell some old-time radio memorabilia, such as photos and Ovaltine shake-up mugs once sent to children by a sponsor of the Little Orphan Annie show, Wright says. He says he hasnt decided on a particular space for the shop yet, and doesnt know how much room hell need.


Audio Adventure also plans to participate in trade shows in Arizona and Florida next winter to tap into a population of elderly snowbirds from all over the U.S. who take their winter vacations in the Sunbelt.


When they leave those places, they disperse and would take their shows with them and share the programs with friends and family in other parts of the country, Avent says.


Wrights interest in old-time radio and in nostalgic stories in general advanced during the 1980s and 1990s, when he operated adult-family homes in and around Othello, Wash. He says he loved hearing the hundreds of stories the residents told.


Before then, Wright lived in Spokane briefly and, in 1981, attended the Ron Bailey School of Broadcast, housed in the Flour Mill. He worked in radio broadcast in Alaska after that, and with his brother, Bill Wright, hosted a radio variety show in a town there called Wrangell.


Wright thinks old-time radio appeals to all age groups, but especially to families that are seeking a more creative form of electronic entertainment than TV. He plans to begin holding performances of old-time radio programs for audiences at CenterStage, a new theater opening at RailSide Center at the end of this month. The performances, which he hopes to begin this summer, would resemble the original format through which many of the old radio shows were recorded. The actors would use the original scripts, make many of their own sound effects, and dress as their characters, just as Clayton Moore, the actor who played the Lone Ranger, did, even though few people actually watched him perform, Wright says.


For me to be able to do that on Sunday nights will be an incredible confirmation, Wright says.