The usual intended effect of footsteps in radio was to create dramatic tension or comic anticipation. I suppose that most listeners responded in the expected way, and then forgot about it. For me, the immediate experience of those footsteps on some imaginary path or street, or the floors of some imaginary house or deserted office building or hotel corridor, would linger in memory and take root in my dreams and waking fantasies, leading me through places the writers had never discovered. Sometimes frightening, or at least anxiety inducing, and sometimes filled with some undefined promise of wonders to be revealed, the sound of footsteps, which outside the radio programs I always heard as my own, became a dominant theme in the creations of my imagination.
As I grew older, and less inclined to dwell in fantasy, the sound grew less important to me, as though the footsteps, no longer my own, were passing away from me, diminishing in the distance, falling into silence. But some memory of them remains with me even now, so that when I hear myself walking I sometimes recognize the sound, and my present self merges with my younger self, and we walk together for a while, blending reality with the mystery of imagination.
