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I was a radio deejay for almost 50 years. Here I go again, talking about radio. Before I got into radio at age 20, I grew up listening to shows like “Mr. District Attorney.” It ran for 14 years, starting in 1939. The comic book didn’t come along until 1948. There were a couple of movie versions and it was also on TV. But it all began on radio.
Walter Winchell invented the term Disc Jockey in 1935. You never heard of him? You are so young. Walter Winchell was a wildly popular and influential newspaper and radio news commentator and gossip columnist from the ‘30s into the ‘50s. His gossip about the stars got him punched by Al Jolson for something he wrote about Jolson’s wife, Ruby Keeler. Like lots of other radio stars, some later becoming famous in movies and TV, he had been a vaudeville performer. He knew how to give an audience what it wanted. If you are superannuated like me, you can still hear his unmistakable voice and shotgun delivery opening the show. “Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press!”
If you have the good fortune to own that issue of the Mr. District Attorney comic book, please tell me about the sinister gangland disc jockey. How sinister was he? How did they catch him? Any chance he got shot by a jealous husband? That happened at a station where I worked. Oh, the radio stories I could tell. But they must wait until my generation of record spinners has gone to that radio station in the sky._________________________________________________________________
