Leave my song alone, Lionel

Copyright laws can't possibly keep up with technology. The internet makes it so easy to get  so-callled "intellectual property" for free  that lawyers and legislators are going nuts trying to figure out how to make us pay for it.  One of the old laws, which still exists so far as I know, is that you can't copyright a title. I'm ambivalent about that one.  If I want to write a song called  "I love you, " I want to be free to do it without getting sued by the Cole Porter estate or anybody else who put music to those three little words.  On the other hand,  I hope that anybody trying to write another "Stardust" or a novel about "Gone with the wind" might get some legal flack from Hoagy Carmichael's people or the Margaret Mitchell estate. 

So where am I going with this? One of my favorite songs is "Dancing on the Ceiling."  Rodgers and Hart wrote it a long time ago. A great melody line, appealing harmonic progressions and  a lyric that is  some of the greatest  romantic imagery ever produced.

                           He dances overhead on the ceiling near my bed
                            in my sight through the night...

It ends with imagery and rhyme that gives me goosebumps.

                             I love my ceiling more since it is a dancing  floor
                             just for my love

Will I go to the federal pen for posting those words without permission from the copyright owners? Will Lionel Ritchie go scot free for his  rock song "Dancing on the ceiling" on which he steals Fred Astaire's ceiling dance  and Rodgers and Hart's title?   There oughta be a law.

Walter Tetley: Leroy and Julius

I heard one of  radio's most recognizable voices on the Great Gildersleeve show mentioned in the previous post. Walter Tetley was  the voice of Leroy, Gildy's nephew.  He was also Phil Harris's bratty neighbor, Julius. Tetley's story is not a pretty one. He was in his 30s on those shows, still sounding like a pre-pubescent boy. Later he voiced some TV cartoon characters.   His voice never changed and he was quite short.There is one awful story that his mother had him castrated because she didn't want to lose the meal ticket that he provided with his early radio work. He spent his last years in a wheel chair, the victim of a motorcycle accident. A sad show business tale.
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Added July 3:  I just watched "Gildersleeve on Broadway."  Walter Tetley appeared, not as Gildy's nephew Leory, but in a bit part as a bellboy.   A review called him "Midget actor Walter Tetley."
There's a biography, Walter Tetley: For Corn's Sake  by  Ben Ohmart and Charles Stumpf.  Listening to old Phil Harris shows every Sunday Night on Yesterday USA Radio, I am becoming very interested in Walter, thinking about springing for the book.

Old Radio Commercials as history

Some radio historian has probably written about old radio commercials as a history of the times in which they were aired.  Here's one I heard last night on a "Great Gildersleeve" show from 1949. Sponsored by Kraft, makers of  Parkay Margarine, it told us that we could now buy colored margarine if our state was one that had made it legal.  But it would cost more because of a federal tax on it. No doubt that made no sense to any  present day youngsters under 70 or so who might have been listening. I remember when "oleo," as  we called it, had to  be sold  in its natural white and colored at home with a little packet of yellow coloring that came with it.  The dairy industry didn't want the margarine makers to fool us into thinking we were getting the real thing..  Some parts of the world were behind us in accepting the yellow non-dairy spread. .  Australia didn't legalize it until the '60s.

Geriatric Obstreperousness

Thanks to Helen Thomas, former dean of the Whitehouse press corps and Bob Garfield of NPR's "On the Media," one of my blogs will have a new name.  Formerly "Farting Around," it shall henceforth  be known as geriatric obstreperousness.  That's one of the possibilites that Bob came up with to explain the  recent comments of the old babe,  even saltier than usual for her. Oh, I still believe in farting around.  But at my age I can think of nothing more fun than doing it with geriatric obstreperousness.  I don't know if Bob writes his own commentary.  I think he does.Whoever thought that one up deserves some kind of literary award.

Jean Arthur's voice

Feeling sorry for myself because I'm a quiet-loving introvert in a noisy world full of Facebookers commenting on each others status, whatever the hell that means, I googled Introverts Anonymous.  Is there such an unlikely group?  There is.  It put me onto a grand story about Jean Arthur.  She belongs here  because this blog is mostly about voices, radio, media and such. It was apparently her voice that not only gave her an easy transition from silent films to talkies, but helped to make her a big star.   She was terribly shy, tormented, hated the star system, might have been lesbian or bisexual. Said to be more reclusive than Garbo, which I did not know was possible.   I don't think I have seen any of her films, not even "Shane."  I will get around to it one of these years.
I hope friend Harry Heuser will do something about her if he hasn't already done so. There is no greater tosser of words or turner of phrases and I await what he might make of Jean Arthur, her films and her life.

Great Detroit Radio

I feel privileged to have grown up in the Detroit area, listening to the great radio that came from the Motor City.    "The Lone Ranger," "Challenge of the Yukon," The Green Hornet,"  "The Hermit's Cave." Stations identified themselves with,   WJR, the Goodwill Station in the Golden Tower of the Fisher  Building. Or   WWJ, the Detroit News.   I don't recall if  WXYZ,  which  originated the Ranger, the Hornet and the story of Yukon King had an identifying phrase. .  I seem to have a  recollection that they might have identified it as being in the Maccabees Building.  Those were the days when radio had class.
Any Detroit kid from that era can still name many of  the Detroit Tigers play-by-play announcers.  I remember Ty Tyson,  who served from before I was born on  into the '40s. That's when the Tigers played at Briggs Stadium.  There was Harry Heilmann and Paul Carey. The greatest of all was the late Ernie Harwell , currently being eulogized  throughout the baseball world. He was at the Tigers microphones for more than 40 years.    I was never a baseball fan but Ernie was a superb radio broadcaster and that's what I cared about.
When I got into the radio business  I spent many hours "riding gain" on the Tigers games.  That's radio talk for sitting at the control board, listening to the game and inserting local station breaks and commercials when the play-by-play men called for them. I literally fell asleep at the switch  at least once and let the Detroit call letters get on the air on the Flint Station.  I  never heard about it, so I assume the boss wasn't listening. 
The best part of the pre-game line checks that were sent to the stations  was listening to Tigers engineer Howard Stitzel  with his off the cuff chit chat and comments about the babes in the stands.. The listeners didn't hear that, but I'm sure Howard  had lots of fans at the stations.  As of last July, Howard , then 92, was the grand marshal at the parade in Southfield.  .  He said he plans to be 100.  I hope he makes it.  It was from Howard that I first heard that  most descriptive and colorful report of  the weather in the ballpark.  ....
"It's colder than a witch's tit!"

Dead animals, new babies and big ratings

Pardon my cynicism.  You know it's sweeps time when TV ratings that determine advertising revenue are being taken.  Kindly Dr. Phil shows off his first grandkid and properly horrifies us with graphic animal abuse pictures.

"24" is obscene

The award winning  Fox show "24" is filled with sickening, gratuitous violence.  So why have I watched it if it's so bad?  My wife likes it.  Let us hope she never gets seriously made at me. 

Facebook is so political!

The political commentary on Facebook leaves me reeling. How about "When I wake up in the morning I'm so glad that Barack Obama is President."
When I wake up in the morning I'm just glad that I woke up!

Supporting Jane Russell

I didn't see The Outlaw when it titillated audiences and irritated  censors  back in 1943. Turner Classics recently ran it for us who wonder (as in Wonder Bra) what all the fuss was about.  I was mighty impressed with the cantilevered bra that Howard Hughes designed for Jane Russell.

It gets even better when you know what a cantilever is.  It's a beam supported on only one end. It carries the load to the support where it is resisted  by shear stress. They use them for buildings, bridges and structures that project horizontally into space.

Why do I keep staring at photos of Jane's horizontal structure and the marvelous appliance that engineer  Hughes designed to support it?  Why can't  I  leave 'er?

Dinah, Dyna and Me

Over on my Facebook page there's a silly, musical video rendered on my old Hammond Organ.  One of the song snippets, played badly from my faulty memory of some of the notes, was made very famous by Dinah Shore.  If I put that hint over there, will I hear a loud chorus of "Dinah WHO?"  from 30 and 40 year olds who never heard of her? Might that confirm my  sneaking suspicion that I am much too elderly to be hanging out with those Facebook kids?  And what if I add a reference to another favorite Dyna, last name Flow,  who made my '51 Buick so shiftlessly  smooth.  Would the men in white coats be at my door to take me to the dementia ward? 

Facebook too personal?

Am I alone in becoming nervous and uncomfortable with the very personal stuff posted on Facebook?  Maybe I'm paranoid when I imagine all manner of bad guys using that information for purposes various and nefarious. 

I intentionally avoided mentioning last week's 56th anniversary of the day a radio fan and I got married on the air in Flint.  When you have been married that long you are expected to be wise and have profound things to say about marriage.  I'm not and I don't.

"Bones" ...Quirky fun

It's clear that I like quirkiness in my TV Fare. Which is probably why the only forensics/crime show I like is "Bones."  There's also the presence of Michaela Conlin.  She gets my vote as TV's hottest babe.  What a quirky love life "Angela"  leads. I guess she goes both ways.
Last night's episode started at a chicken farm operated by a guy named Cluckston.  That's funny.  I think the writers have great fun with their scripts.
Most interesting ... males are   most often portrayed as brilliant but dense, socially inept eggheads. But here we have a woman in that role.  Emily Deschanel as Dr. Temperance Brennan does it very well.  Fun fun fun.

Elitist Public Media

Are Pulic Radio and TV elitist?  Of course.  That's good.  We can use a little elitism to counteract the   crude, crass crapola that commercial media gives us.

Religious Jokes

This post also shows up in my Goofy Church Stuff blog. That one probably has even fewer readers than this one. Can that be possible?? Oh well, grinding out these silly things keeps me off the street.  But not always out of trouble.

Mr. Keillor might have been replaced by David Sedaris as America's greatest humorist but the aging guy from Lake Wobegon with the face made for radio reigns as our finest religious humorist. He gets away with things on Public Radio that would get him kicked off of commercial media. I love it. From one of his early annual joke shows: "What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness and a Unitarian? Someone who goes around knocking on doors for no particular reason."   "As nervous as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis." I got in trouble when I quoted that one in my column in a local paper. A member of that body was not amused, said followers of Mrs. Eddy do not get nervous about things like that.

Patriarch? Hell, No!

For the first time, I have heard myself referred to as a patriarch, which might be translated as "grand old founding father," revered and honored for something or other. I am most uncomfortable with that label.  It's not the "old" part of it, I can handle that OK.  It just sounds too serious. One definition is "last surviving member,"  so all you have to do to become a patriarch is live longer than somebody else. Being the object of reverence and honor  is laughable.  I am in at least my second childhood.  All I want to do is  write, not caring a whole lot if nobody reads it, and play with my toys. Anything heavier than that is too serious.

Tell Me A Story

I totally relate to Don Hewitt and the four words he lived by that changed TV news and made  "60 Minutes" an institution.  I loved it when he said he's not interested in issues. He just wants a good story.  Issues are boring.  Tell me a story. That's probably one of a number of things about me that irritate and frustrate friends and family. I won't talk about issues and I'm not much interested in what others have to say about their favorite issues.  Tell me a story. And that's why NPR's "On the Media" is the best thing on radio.  It's not about issues.  It's about how they are covered in the media.  It's "covering the coverage." It's about how the stories are told.  I love it.

Life's Railway to Bettie Page

With thanks to friend Beth for the title, here is one more attempt to link to my musical tribute to the great pin-up girl.  It's clear that I don't know what I'm doing but some wise guy said you have to find out what doesn't work before your great invention is produced. OK, so this is hardly great stuff.  But bodacious Bettie is!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GACpzAqzQZE

Funny Business

Talking with a retired college level English instructor, I asked if she is a Garrison Keillor fan.  All she had to say was that he's a good story teller but she's not that interested in humor.  I'm pleased at that encounter because it brought home something I had not previously realized.  I am a serious student of humor.  I'm quite fascinated by funny ideas and how they are created, presented and perceived.

That Bucket Woman

I sit here laughing myself silly, still not recovered from watching that wonderful Britcom, Keeping Up Appearances again last night. It is so hiliarious that it stays funny no matter how many times you see the same episodes.  Funny, funny stuff.  I just put a photo of the cast on my desktop.  That's good for a quick laugh anytime.

Phil Harris and Alice Faye

I somehow missed Phil and Alice on their radio sitcom when I was young.  Our family must have been listening to something else when it was on.
I've been hearing it on Max Schmid's show on  the Yesterday USA online network.  Max, who knows as much about radio's golden age as anybody, says it's the "only radio sitcom worth a damn."
He might be right.  The cast and the writing are so right. It's not clever, not witty,  It's just silly and funny,  perfectly suited to Phil, Alice and and Elliot Lewis as Franky Remley, one of the great comedy characters to come from radio's best days.

Catherine and Vincent

I saw a promo for some show featuring Linda Hamilton.  I didn't watch whatever it was.  I just enjoyed a romantic reverie thinking about her as Catherine, in love with Vincent the Lion-man who lived underground.
Ron Perlman was perfect as Vincent.

His Vincent voice was perfect, too ... quite unlike his natural voice heard in his other roles.  I don't know where that came from.  I read that he was offered deals for promoting products as Vincent, but he turned them down.  Good man. That would have been a travesty.

Oh boy, they sure don't make shows like "Beauty and the Beast" anymore.  1987 ... can it possibly be that long ago ? I suppose it's available  on DVD. I don't know if I could handle watching it again.  I'm too old for that much romance.

There's much about the show on the 'net.

"Christmas Story" heavily abridged

The channel that kept Jean Sherpherd's Christmas Story  running for 24 hours chopped it up pretty bad to make it  and the commercials fit in two hours.  It has become such a holiday tradition that we know when something is missing.

Perfectionists be Damned... or not?

Making You Tube videos is great fun but it brings out my latent, generally  well controlled perfectionism.  There is no possibility of producing sight and sound presentation of professisonal quality with the equipment available to me. Would it be perfect if I had the use of a high class production studio? Not a chance. Never good enough.  I couldn't even produce a decent, wholly satisfying  audio tape when I was in radio, presumably working with more or less professional equipment. I fussed over little things nobody would even notice but it was never quite right. Razor blades, splicing tape, multi-track machines. The digital generation doesn't know what it's missing.

The best that a perfectionist can hope for in his trek though an imperfect world is to  avoid subjecting others to his crazy standards.  We are crazed.

Herewith,  some painfully imperfect videos from my CAP production studio.  Cheap and Primitive.

Willie and me
Geriatric Playroom

Will the perfectionists be damned to an eternal hell of never getting it quite right or is there a corner of heaven where everything works?

One of the imperfections in this post, before I fixed it, wondered if perfectionists would be damed  to an eternal hell of never getting it right. I left out the "N."   Oh my, would that refer to an eternity of havng problems with dames ...dolls ... babes? Spare me that!

Invasion Iowa

I was about to risk being sent up the river to the Federal Pen for puchasing a bootleg DVD of a TV show not legally available.  It has now been released, so I must overcome my basic cheapskate nature  and buy it or ask someone who has it to make me a copy. That's not  exactly legal, either.  I'm not sure the Feds at our respective  doors would be impressed if I remind them  that everybody does it. 

What's got me into this moral dilemma is Invasion Iowa. I saw it on the Spyke channel back in 2005. There was some  kind of legal stuff that kept it from being available on DVDs until earlier this year.That mini series gets my vote as one of the funniest,  most elaborately orchestrated  and executed pranks of our time.

Riverside already had its share of what you might call future fame as the March 22, 2233 birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk, who revealed in a Star Trek episode that he was from the tall corn state. I don't know if it was William Shatner or someone else who came up with the idea of  playing  a gigantic trick on the Iowans who lived there in the fifth year of century 21.  Whoever conceived it, they did it up right.

Shatner and a crew of super-quirky movie makers blew into Riverside with a script for a sci-fi  film to star local people. It was  a gigantic prank  to see how those Iowans would perform if they thought they were actually making a film. If they did it today I guess it would be called a reality show. I don't want to spoil it by revealing many details, but  the whole thing  is absolutely  hilarious and the finished "product" is  so bad that it's good.  Some of the locals who watched themselves in the movie were mad as a flock of wet hens clucking their way out of a muddy Iowa corn field  when they learned that they had been had. Others found humor in it all  A big cash donation to the town helped to calm the angry ones.

It's ten episodes long..  If you have plenty of time and want to laugh yourself silly, don't miss Invasion Iowa. But be sure your copy is legal, in case the copyright cops are watching.

Tall Tales from the Tall Corn

What is it about Iowa that lends itself to huge hoaxes and pernicious pranks? Riverside's claim to fame is the future birthplace of Star Trek's Captain Kirk and a monumental hoax, Spike TV's   Invasion Iowa  from 2005.  Now the  town of Bancroft, Iowa is in the news.  An old hoax about Animusic, that astounding feat of computer animation that PBS runs at fund raising time,  is circulating again. The story says an incredible music machine was fashioned from tractor parts. The tale, a prank of the highest order, names names and institutions,   all phony, to add credibility to it all.  I don't think the person who started it has laid claim to his creation .  That's too bad.  It's as much a work of art as Animusic itself,  which exists only on  a computer's hard drive.   Rube Goldberg would love it.

Introverts and Cats

Harry is right.  A meeting of introverts would be a most  unconventional convention. It gets funnier as I think about it.  A ballroom full of tables with a lone occupant at each one, being his or her best introvert self. 
Putting together such a meeting would be like herding cats.  I wish I had thought up that phrase.  It's more than a clever analogy.  Its a fact of feline life.  Cats will not be herded.  I have three and they herd me.

 Up there is Amos, who became Amy, soaking up the heat from the Comcast box. She is evil.

Here is Andy.  He is a sweet old guy.  Like me. His full name is Andretti, after the race car driver.












Willie is much too cute and charming and she knows it.




I wonder if there could be a convention of introverts and their cats.  That might work for those who get along better with pets than other people.

I learn about Joseph Schmidt

Technically, if I wish to be painfully precise about word meanings, I cannot feel nostalgia for something I have not experienced.  I can't long to return to a place or time where I have not been.  But I can have a love of learning about things that happened before I was born or when I was too young to know about them. Harry Heuser puts it perfectly as "keeping up with the out-of-date" in his Broadcastellan Blog.

I  knew nothing of Joseph Schmidt until I watched a most fascinating TV documentary. A Rumanian born operatic tenor, he was  apparently an earlier version of Mario Lanza. A superb singer, very good actor, romantic movie star, much  loved in Germany and the Netherlands during the '30s.  All this in spite of being only five feet tall, standing on a platform so as not to be dwarfed by his leading ladies.   He died in 1942.

Does anybody remember  Joseph Schmidt  these days? Does anybody care?  I care.  That's why I blog.

His story:   http://www.dutchdivas.net/tenors/josephschmidt.html

Old songs

One of the fun things about being elderly is having a head full of old songs that nobody under 50, or maybe even 60, ever heard of.  My town has a new mayor.  He beat the incumbent.  He's also my insurance man.  So I go around singing "There's no one with endurance like the man who sells insurance." They don't write 'em like that anymore.   Frank Crummitt recorded it in the '20s. He did "there's no depression in love" just a month before the big crash of '29.
I just heard a reference to "rose colored glasses."  Oh yeah, there's a song about it.  "I'm looking at the world through rose Colored Glasses.  Everything is rosy now." I'm not sure what recording of it was in the old Victrola.  I think it was George Olsen's orchestra. Those songs are so firmly planted in my head that I can go to the mighty Hammond and play 8 bars from memory. If it's raining, what tune comes to mind but "What do we do on a dew dew dewey day."

No Parties Please

A gay friend speaks of being "mixed up and unable to mix."  You don't have to be gay to relate to that in a big  way. I found some interesting web sites about public figures and performers who are introverts. Robert Young, remembered by most of us as the father who always knew best and as kindly Dr. Marcus Welby, was troubled by alcoholism, depression and who knows what other demons.  He said he was an introvert in an extrovert profession.

Take away my microphone,  keyboard, spotlight, stage, TV camera and an adoring audience and I just want to be alone and quiet. There is none of the party animal in me.  My sole involvment in a New Year's Eve Party was when I was playing in a band. That memory does not warm my heart or anythng else.  We rode to the job in a VW bus.   If you have experienced one of those refrigerators-on-wheels  in  a Michigan winter, you know whereof  I speak.

I am in good company.  Fellow introverts are  Clint Eastwood,  Harrison Ford, Grace Kelly,  Steve Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michele Pfeiffer, and Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts cartoons.  I suggest that Garrison Keillor also fits in with those who don't fit in. 


Steve Martin, that wild and crazy guy, an introvert?  So says Dr. Marti Olsen Laney in her book, The  introvert  Advantage; How to Thrive in an Extrovert World.  She has another one, gleaned from her own "mixed marriage," a union of an innie and an outie, The introvert and extrovert in love.  Now there is a challenge.  Read about her here.

Introverts of the world, unite! Maybe we are Ok and don't need to be  fixed.

Hey Culligan Person

One of the advertising industry's greatest, most memorable campaigns has fallen victim to politcal correctness.  Who can forget the voice of Jean Hughes Williams calling Hey Culligan Man!  for decades.  She died in 1985 and I think they used other voices to keep it going.  The latest Culligan TV commerical has gone gender neutral.  Or gender absent. It just says ""Hey Culligan." 
I don't give a rodent's rear whether a man or woman installs my water softener.  But aren't there some institutions  that just shouldn't be messed with?

Charlie McCarthy's Sister

Whaterver happened to Candice Bergen? Those supposedly in the know report that she did not have a stroke a while back, but an episode of high blood pressure. Ms. Bergen's voice and speech manerisms
fascinate me. I liked her on  "Murphy Brown" and even more on the wonderfully quirky "Boston Legal." Dan Quail's still famous speech about Murphy being with child without marriage does not cool my fascination with the former fashion model. Her voice, her looks, what a package.  One web site called her eternatly cool and classy. I wish I had said that.

I know,  I use "fascinate"  too freely.  I should look up some good synonyms. Alright,  so maybe I'm too easily fascinated.  Can't help it. All sorts of things grab me and won't let me go.  That's fascination..  Maybe it's some form of nuttiness.  Is there a room in the nut ward for the chronically over-fascinated?

Charlie and Edgar

Harry's Charlie McCarthy sketch put me in my"spend too much time searching for useless information" mode. Just to see what might happen, I entered "World's greatest ventriloquist."  Paul Winchell's name popped up, along with several that I never heard of.  There's Ronn Lucas.  I watched some videos.  He's very good, but too contemporary, too Las Vegas style for me.  Edgar Bergen was credited as the performer who paved the way for later ventriloquists   said to be "better" at it than he was. Some historians claim that Bergen and Charlie became an institution mostly because radio was their medium and we couldn't see Bergen's lips move. That makes steam and smoke come fom my orfices. Edgar Bergen was an absolute master of being two very different, totally contrasting characters at the same time, instantly switching from the bewildered father figure to the bratty kid. No one has done it better, or made a wooden alter ego more real and believable than Charlie was.  It still works when we see him them.  I just watched the 1938 "Goldwyn Follies" on TCM.  Edgar and  Charlie had several appearances.  I  don't know how much Bergen's lips moved. I was too busy looking at Charlie and wondering what he might say next that would make Edgar nervous.

A Face in the Mirror

A Face In the Crowd,  the 1957 film that made Andy Griffith a star, left me  fascinated and nervous.  It was in the '50s  that televsion was replacing radio as the major home entertaimment medium. The story came too close to home for many of us in the broadcasting industry.  That was a time when many highly successful network radio artists failed to make it into televsion, while some small town radio performers went on to become huge TV stars. One of them was Johnny Carson.  I do not recommend  screen writer  Bud Schulberg's tale to anyone who likes to think of  Andy Griffith as the sheriff of Mayberry or Lawyer Ben Matlock. It's nothing like that.



Andy Griffith was a natural for the role of Lonesome Larry Rhodes, a folksy, down home country boy with a gift of gab that people loved .  As “Deacon Andy Griffith,” he had recorded his big selling comedy monologue, "What it was football” four years before the film's release. That recording still gets laughs today. As one who understands nothing about football, I love it when Andy wonders why those fellows on that cow pasture are fighting over the punkin' and trying to see how much they can kick it without bustin’ it or steppin’ in somethin’.

 Lonesome Rhodes is a drifter, discovered in the rural Arkansas town jail by a woman who works at the local radio station. She sees possibilities in him, puts him on the air and he catches fire. Listeners love him and his home grown stories. He kids one of his sponsors who cancels the account but is forced to take him back when the sales soar.  I wondered if  Bud Schulberg was thinking of Arthur Godfrey when he wrote that. Godfrey was one of the broadcasting industry's most powerful radio and TV performers. He was a master  of the folksy style, famous for mercilessly kidding his sponsors.  At the height of his popularity he was responsible for more than a quarter of the CBS Network’s advertising revenue.

Lonesome Rhodes moves from Podunk radio to bigger stations, to regional TV and all the way to the top on National Network TV. Schulberg's  script has several refrences to Will Rogers, the  legendary performer and folk philosopher of the  early twentieth century.   The inference seems to be that Lonesome Rhodes is destined to become the next Will Rogers.

A scene that hit me between the eyes and just about knocked me off my chair was the "Lonesome Rhodes Cracker-Barrel show" on TV.  As an adjective, cracker-barrel means excessively folksy, corny, down home style or content. Near the end of my less than spectacular radio career, the boss complained that my style was too cracker-barrel. When I tried doing news, the news director ordered me to quit the folksy introductions and just read the srories. I might have been imitating my idol, Arthur Godfrey. Folksiness didn't work anymore and it was near the end of the line for Corny old Clif. I still have an old letter from a listener who was sent right up the wall when I played with words and pronunciations as Arthur did.
At least I didn't go as far down as Godfrey did. A 1975 book about the CBS Network called him the forgotten giant. He died a bitter old man in 1983 after  failed comeback attempts following  a long recovery from serious surgery.   Times had changed and folksiness didn't work for him, either.

Lonesome Rhodes couldn't handle the  power. He went nuts, aliented fans and friends. Judging a cheerleader contest, he chose a  blonde who gave him the eye,  played by 22 year old Lee Remick. Rhodes dumps the good woman who had discovered him and been his mentor through his rise to fame and marries the girl. He displays his young trophy wife with her baton twirling act on his TV show.

 I  spent some broadcasting time in the Great Northwest  at Havre, Montana. I suppose I was a local star. As master of ceremonies for the Miss Havre Scholarship pageant, I had a favorite and she knew it. Most fortunately, I had no power to influence the judges. She did not win. I don't recall what her talent was, but I remember her red dress. I remember the winner, too. She had green eyes. Should there be a female person reading this and thinking, "You men are all alike," what can I say. Show business, with its fame and power,  is a slippery, tempting slope.

It was the early '60's when I was in Montana. I went to work there after getting  the pink slip from W-DOG
in Marine City, Michigan. It was 1957 when I moved to W-DOG, the same year that A Face In the Crowd
hit the theaters.  I didn't make that up.  There really was a W-DOG. We even had a Miss W-DOG. That was my idea. Marine City is on the St. Clair River, across from Sombra, Ontario, Canada. We had a young guest who looked across the river and asked, "Is that England over there?

A nearby community is Muttonville, hardly the most euphonious name for a town. That village became infamous when W-DOG's popular country singer and deejay was murdered in his Muttonville home, shot in the head by a jealous husband. Lonnie Barron is said to have come from a one room cabin in Louisiana, the son of a cotton farm sharecropper. After some years of driting, he joined the service and was stationed at Selfridge Air Base near Marine City. He had a show on W-DOG, which I believe was still WSDC when he started there. He became very popular, worked on a country show on WJR, a 50,000 Watt station in Detroit,  made  records and was on his way to big time country music fame. He was about to be signed by Columbia Records when he was cut down at Muttonville. During the shooter's trial, his wife admitted an affair with Barron. Her husband said he went to Barron's home to get letters his wife had written and that Barron taunted him. More than three thousand fans viewed Barron's body, dressed in a white gabardine cowboy suit. 

LONNIE BARRON

In the final scenes of A Face in the Crowd, Lonesome Rhodes has totally lost it and become a screaming maniac, threatening to jump off of a building. So now you know why I became more than a bit uncomfortable watching that film. As did other broadcasters that  I know. If I had made it to the top,  could I have handled the pressures and temptations?  How far down that slope might I have slid? I don't like to think about that.

Deviates Anonymous

My septum is not the only thing that is deviated. Some of my deviations from normalcy are best not described here but I have it on the authority of a man of God that my idea of what is funny is more than a bit off base. On a silly local yokel TV show that I was involved in, I told this wonderful true tale about a Catholic Cat. He was left on the doorstep of the St. Felix Nunnery in Chicago, found his way across Lake Michigan as only a cat could do and became my yellow and white feline, "Sunshine." Inspired by that great polka song, "Who stole the Kishka," Sunny was spotted going down the road with a purloined Polish Sausage in his mouth, pulling the tire we tied him to. He got caught, repented and went to St. Michael's where he confessed to Father Hack. Sunny chose St. Mike's because they have a large Polish membership, even an annual Polka Mass. I thought this was all pretty funny. The good father's comment was, "You have a devious sense of humor."

Men Don't Get It

It must be frustrating to be a woman. We men are real dumb about the women who love us. We just don't get it. We don't even get what it is that we don't get.

Oops, this was supposed to go in my "Farting Around" blog. Canary Feathers is dedicated to media and communication. Oh well, communicating is one more thing we don't get so I will leave it here.

Who is that voice?

The woman who waited on me in the store recognized my voice and knew my name. That happens a lot even though I have not been on radio since the '90s. If I were to let my ego run wild, I might say that's a tribute to my magnificent set of pipes.

Actually there's only one pipe. One of the old vocal cords got killed when my esophagus went away. It is quite amazing how many body parts we can get along without. I expect to keep on keeping on as more parts are removed, quit working or fall off. But I digress. I wander. I meander.

If recognition of my voice is a tribute to anything, it is to the powerful and intimate role that radio once played in our lives. We who lived through radio's golden age still hear favorite voices in our heads. When I hear them on a recording it's old home week. I have found a long lost friend. Maybe recognizing my voice does something like that for the old folks in my town. I hope so.

Face to Face with Facebook

I find Facebook unsatisfying. That's probably due to my age. I am more than 4 times the age of that Social Network's youngest users and 2 and 3 times older than those in the fastest growing demographic. That puts me in a very different place in life from those who are caught up in today's breakneck pace of living. I fully understand that there is no time for more than a quick stop to see what their friends have posted. I'm disappointed to hear that Social Networking is replacing e-mail, the last vestige of traditional letter writing. Remember pen pals? Then there was "taperespondence." First we did it with little 3 inch reels, then cassettes came along. Talking letters. What fun that was. Things are moving too fast for this old man.

A Face In The Crowd

Thanks to Turner Classics, I have finally seen A Face in the Crowd.
There's a powerful personal and emotional impact in it for broadcasters who were in the business in the '50s. It was a lot like that. I need to sort out my memories before I can say more. Stay tuned.

Melody Malady

I saw my shrink today. She is an unlikely but fascinating combination of Mother Angelica,beloved foundress of the Eternal Word Televion Network and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. (Foundress? Is that what you call a female founder these days?)
Anyway, this shrink lady's cat, Henry, sleeps on her desk. Therapy consists of asking, "How do you feel about that" to whatever I say and asking Henry what he thinks about it. She says I not only have Associative Thinking Disorder in which everything reminds me of something else, but there is a new aberration on the books that fits me perfectly. It's Melody Malady. I get obsessed with certain songs until they make me crazy.

Comcast Ain't All Bad

The Comcast digital box is a nice warm place for Amy the evil queen to snooze.
The Comcast people have taken their lumps. Literally. One of their offices got trashed and smashed by a hammer wielding old lady who was not happy with their service or lack thereof. Maybe that's why their commercials now tell us how much they love and value their customers.
I am now prepared to heap richest blessings upon Comcast and Ted Turner for his Classic Movie Channel. I can catch up with the great old films that I never saw or forgot if I did.

Toselli Trauma

He did it again. Harry jabbed my ATD (Associative Thinking Disorder) button by reminding me that The Golbergs radio theme music was Toselli's Serenade. All kinds of references and reminders of that haunting melody are coming at me with such force that I am obsessed, possessed and distressed. I'm way off the deep end, on the verge of getting all weepy. All due to the main claim to fame of the hot blooded Italian pianist and composer, Enrico Toselli. Get out of my head, Signore Toselli.

Rod Serling: Big in Binghampton

Too bad I did not pay more attention to The Twilight Zone 50 years ago. On its golden anniversary, Rod Serling's creation is hailed as one of the greatest things to happen to TV. School kids in Serling's home town, Binghampton, New York, have a course about the show and what it teaches about morality. J. J. Abrams, creator of Fringe and Lost, says Serling's show had a major impact on him. He made up excuses to stay home from school so he could watch it.

Wonderful Town

Yet another story about Flint, Michigan, the town that made Michael Moore and me famous. OK, so he is a lot famouser than I am. But I was a pretty big hot shot deejay back there. Anyway, the Flint Musical Tent was actually closer to Clio, hometown of the bedazzled fan who decided to marry me. I don't know how Clio got its name, maybe from some god or goddess of something, I forgot what. Maybe from Clio, Alabama. I know the best commercials get a Clio award. It's pronounced with a long "I," not Cleo.
So the Musical tent show of "Wonderful Town" about the sisters who leave Ohio to make it in the big city, has a great song near the end when they decide to go back home. "Why oh why oh why oh did we ever leave Ohio. Maybe we'd better go
O H I O ... maybe we'd better go home. That lent itself to a grandly fortuitous parody for the Flint/Clio show: "Why oh why oh why oh did we ever come to Clio. Maybe we'd better go O H I O ... maybe we'd better go home. That one will never be forgot by anyone who was there. It brought the house ... I mean the tent... down.

Social Nutwork

No, that title doesn't contain a typo. I am now on Facebook, one of the social network places. That one's not as nutty and juvenile as some of the others. I joined mostly for the amusement of my grandsons who think it's cool that an octogenarin grandpappy still has enough working brain cells to turn on a computer and type something that makes sense most of the time. I still like blogging better. I do that alone and I am not all that social. I just keep on grinning like a cheshire cat, greatly amused by what I grind out, burping up those canary feathers.
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Other blogs:
goofy church stuff
farting around

New TV season makes me barf

Pardon me for being an old fuddy-duddy, but the gratuitous violence and gore on the crime and forensics shows is getting disgusting. One of them opened with a scene of a bunch of cats chomping on a long-dead and seriously decomposed human body. To lighten it up, one of the detectives cleverly remarks about the dead guy becoming kitty kibble. What bugs me about it is the networks wouldn't be doing it if it didn't get ratings. If they must do something sensational to boost the ratings, let 'em give me hot sex. That wouldn't fly because the same viewers who love the explosions, shootings and autopsies would complain. Is there something wrong here? Is there any chance of re-defining obscenity? There. I feel better now.
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Other blogs:
goofy church stuff
farting around

A Whale of a Wales Tale

Two Winters ago, or was it three, I went totally crazy nuts over a 30 second TV commercial for the Jeep Grand Cherokee. The vehicle plowed merrily through deep snow in the mountains, accompanied by a grandly appealing 1940s style big band boy singer. I can still hear him in my head as I type the words.

The snow may fall but I don't mind at all
Because you keep me Winter warm.
It's cold and wet but I don't get upset...
With you I'm always Winter warm.

I put the You Tube of that commercial in my favorite places so I could go to it whenever I needed a fix, which was several times a day, playing it over and over. Somehow, after hours of searching, I found the entire song, only 30 seconds of it used in the commercial. I don't know if i-tunes has the entire song. That's not where I got it. I put it on an audio tape and drove the family nuts with it. I was not alone in my obsession. People were calling their Jeep dealers and joining online groups, trying to learn the identity of that singer. Some said he reminded them of Vic Damone. I was closer to those who thought he sounded like Eddie Fisher. It wasn't hard to find the agency that produced the commercial but they had no interest in supplying the name of the performer.

My hearing is pretty well shot but I still have a good ear for accents and I was convinced that the fellow was from someplace in the United Kingdom. How right I was. A day or so ago I decided to google "Jeep Winter Warm commercial" and this website popped up. It does include a You Tube of the commercial. Jeff Hooper is his name. He's from Wales, apparently a big cabaret star. You know he's some kind of a Brit, as his website calls the video an advert. They don't call 'em commercials over there. It looks like he performs the Jeep song at his concerts.

So the mystery is solved and Jeff Hooper is now even more internationally famous than the website says he is. If internationally fanmous Welsh blogger Harry Heuser will put me up at his new old Victorian home in Aberystwyth, I'm on my way to Wales. Dont ask me how to pronounce it.
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Other blogs:
Farting Around
Gooofy Church Stuff

Radio Child

Should I become so enamored of my own timeless prose that I decide to further clutter the internet with a fourth blog, I will steal my title from Brent McKee. He's a Canadian. He lives in Saskatoon. What a grand name for a city. I wonder if Canadian comedy writers have used city names as effectively as Jack Benny's writers did with Anaheim, Azusa and especially the town with a wacky sounding name, Cucamonga. While searching for the correct spelling of Cucamonga I found this song about those three towns made famous by Benny's writers. When I was in Havre, Montana I listened to Canadian radio weather reports for Flin Flon, Moose Jaw and Saskatoon. There are lots of songs about Saskatoon. I'll bet Brent knows my favourite. (I put the "U" in there for my vast Canadian readership.)

What a de-light when I think of the night that I met you on, in
Sas-ka-toon, SAS-KATCH-E-WAN;
Oh, what a thrill was the spill down the hill I upset you on, in
SAS-KATCH-E-WAN;
Swift as the breeze was the race on the skiis I would bet you on - in
Sas-ka-toon, SAS-KATCH-E-WAN;
I'd walk a-head while you rode on the sled that I'd fetch you on, in
SAS-KATCH-E-WAN

Heavenly days, what wonderful rhymes. And all dreamed up by three American songsmiths, Irving Ceasar, Gerald Marks and Sammy Lerner.

Oops, I got all caught up in that and forgot where I was going with this. Brent's blog is "I am a child of television." I recommend it. It's here.

My blog number four will be "I am a child of radio." Of course. What else?
I read almost no fiction and I know next to nothing of the great classics that everyone should be acquainted with. I love Harry Heuser's highly literate blog. Broadcastellan. I don't always know what he's talking about but I sure love the way he says it.

I don't read fiction becauase I have little patience with the stuff without which it wouldn't be fiction.. I skip right past the description, characterization, scene setting, situations and all that adds up to the author's style. Give me dialogue. I want to hear voices. Give me a Hammond Organ barking and biting transitions and scene settings as only a tone-wheel Hammond can do. I don't want somebody drawing word pictures for me. I am quite capable of doing that for myself in my head, thank you. William Conrad's voice gives me a perfect mental picture of a marshal in the old west. John Todd, no more Indian than I am, was the ideal "Tonto" to the Lone Ranger on radio.

So I'm ignorant of stuff I should know about. I was raised on radio. It's radio's fault.

Mae West In My Ear

What a way to wake up. Mae West in my ear, inviting me to "Come up and see me sometime when I don't have anything on but the radio." No, it was no dream of a senile old coot. Nor was Mizz West literally in my ear. She wouldn't fit. Too big in all the right places. Her voice, however, was quite literally, audibly purring in my left ear at 5:30 AM.

How could this happen, you ask? Do you really want to know? I have a hearing aid that has a thing in it called a t-coil. In my Bettie Page corner, repository of thrift store electronics, home of the vintage Hammond Organ and Zenith Radio is a little black box hooked to wires running all over the house. These wires
"broadcast" whatever sound source is plugged into the box right into my ear.
Unfortunately much better known in Europe than here, the "induction loop system" is a great help to the hearing impaired. Many public buildings are looped and the wearer of a t-coil equipped hearing aid just pushes a button and what's being said is brought clearly and up close right into his or her ear. Someday, when the rockers have all lost their hearing, loops will become standard in public places as well as homes where they are a great help for talking on the phone and TV listening.

When I go to bed, I go to the Yesterday USA site, which runs old radio shows 24/7, plug it into the loop amplifier box and go to sleep listening to Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Gunsmoke, Amos 'n' Andy or whatever they are running. And that's how Mae West got into my ear. I don't know if it was that infamous Edgar Bergen show where she invited Charlie McCarthy to come over and play in her woodpile. I think it was an interview with Rudy Vallee, reminiscing about shows he did. Anyway, there she was, giving me quite a start. Quite a thing for an old guy to wake up to.

By the way, most antique radios, my big old Zenith included, are worth lots less than you think if you are planning to retire by selling grandad's old Philco. I might get 50 bucks or so for it if I could find somebody that wanted it. The exception is the rare, unusual models like the Zenith table model seen on the "Walton's" TV show or the Emerson radio from the 30s, known to collectors as the "Mae West" radio. They go for several thousand. Why do they call it the Mae West model? Use your imagination.

The Horn Blows at Midnight

I have finally seen it, the 1945 Jack Benny film that he used as a running gag for decades. It's funny. It's silly. I laughed a lot. I suppose it's funnier to me because of my memory of Benny going on about what a bomb it was. Anyway, a thousand thanks to Turner Classics channel for running it.

Clif's Calliope

Crazy things deejays get into. The price of stardom


Date: January, early '90s. Temp:low 20s.


This town's annual Winterfest. We borrowed the calliope from the Grand Rapids Museum. It's mounted on a pickup truck. The pipes are blown by a gasoline engine powered air compressor. I'd play for a few minutes, then go into the building to warm up. I think I tried playing with gloves on and it didn't sound all that bad, calliope music being what it is. Oh, the price you pay for being a star.

Ethnic comedy, Yiddish Dialect

Many years ago I played the Spike Jones recording of "The Tennessee Waltz" on my deejay show in Flint, Michigan. It featured a wildly exaggerated, stereotypical Yiddish Dialect by Sarah Berner, whose list of radio, film, TV and record credits is one of the longest I've seen. I thought it was hilarious, and so did all those who made it a best seller. I got a long letter from a very offended listener who wanted me to apologize and break the record. Did Berner ever wish she had not made the record?

Mickey Katz, who worked with Spike Jones on "Cocktails for Two" specialized in broken Yiddish-English material. And Fannie Brice used a pretty heavy dialect in her early recordings.


Listening to some old Jack Benny shows with Artie Auerbach's "Mr. Kitzel" character, I wonder if some listeners were offended at the time or they are now if they hear the old shows. Would that character play today? How about Mrs. Nussbaum? Not likely.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I leave that to philosophers, sociologists and commentators.

Old Age Test: Berlin and Greenwood

You know you're old when you ask a guy in his 50s if he knows anything about Irving Berlin and Kate Smith and he says they are dead people that his grandparents talk about. You know it's time to call the undertaker when you read that Lee Greenwood wrote "the greatest patriotic song of the century." I read someplace that Greenwood said God Bless America is too old fashioned and the new generation needed a song they can relate to. What sends me into a major depression is that he's probably right.

High Ideals for Flint's Rebirth

WMRP, FLINT, MICHIGAN, 1950, where my less than spectacular almost 50 years in radio started. Was I cute, or what? That station no longer exists. Most of the stations I worked at are long gone. I don't think I killed them. Things changed. Flint is still there,more or less, its once great auto factories all gone.
Like Detroit, Flint is in deep trouble. But there's a creative write-in mayoral candidate who has it all figured out. Ronald Higgerson proposes to turn the recently closed Flint Central High School building into a big plant. I use "plant" advisedly. The particular plant is marijuana. That's right, If Higgerson gets the votes, good old Flint Central will become a big medical marijuana growing factory, employing hundreds, pulling Flint out of its doldrums and presumably making its clients feel real good. I learned of this through Gordon Young's great site of interest to us who lived and worked in Flint in better days. Flint Expatriates.
Does Michael Moore know about this?

Ethel and me

Let me see now, how can I relate this one about my mid-sixties interview with Ethel Waters, the first Black superstar, to early radio history. You oughta know that I have an ace in the hole.

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear and Jazz Age Evangelism. It's the Roaring Twenties and a fiery preacher, Paul Rader, is sermonizing on the air from a wooden building atop the Chicago city Hall, beginning what will become the electronic church. He will later become the pastor of the historic Moody Memorial Church, named for Dwight L. Moody. After that he is a high powered entrepreneur of evangelism, building big Christian campgrounds and tabernacles that attract thousands. The biggest and best is the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle. Of special interest to historians of early religious radio, Paul Rader preached for three months at the Angelus Temple of the most colorful of evangelists, Aimee Semple McPherson, during her strange and still questioned disappearance. I'm still working on a post about her.


In the late twenties, Rader journeys across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, my town, and buys 200 acres on the big Lake where he builds Camp Chi-Co-Tab, named for his Chicago Tabernacle. By 1936 the facility was sold and became Maranatha Bible and Missionary Conference.

By the mid '60s, after getting canned from Grand Rapids station WMAX, I was in Muskegon at an Evangelical Christian station, WKJR. Ethel Waters, then in her 70s and not in good health, was here for an appearance at Maranatha. My interview has not been preserved but I'm sure it was mostly about her personal story and her commitment to her religious work, including her appearances in the Billy Graham Crusades. I don't recall if I asked her what she thought of the "Cabin in the sky" film from twenty years earlier. She continued to sing the title song, along with her beloved signature song, "His eye is on the Sparrow," also the title of her autobiography, throughout her lifetime. She sang "Sparrow" with young Brandon De Wilde and Julie Harris in the 1952 film, "Member of the Wedding." Here is a You Tube of it. If it doesn't make you blubber or at least get all misty, you're not as sentimental as this silly old blogger. The film did not get great reviews, with complaints that Julie Harris was too old to play a 12 year old. Who cares. I love what I love and I don't care if nobody else loves it.

Ethel Waters lived until 1977, so she certainly experienced the civil rights movement but I don't know if she spoke of it.

Update July 1: I found Ethel's Lp on the Word label that I thought I had sold when I was all hot to restore the antique radio. "Just a little talk with Ethel." There's a brief talk track, recorded at her home not long before she died, before each song. Now I must find a thrift store record player so I can listen to it. Thank goodness I didn't get totally stupid and let that one go when I sold off my precious junk.

One biographer wrote that Ethel Waters "got religion," a demeaning phrase that I don't like very much. There have certainly been questionable "conversions" by the famous and not-so=famous. I have doubts about Hustler Magazine's Larry Flynt and I will reserve judgment on Jane Fonda and for Bettie Page, who also worked with Billy Graham. But for Ethel Waters it was a genuine and deep commitment to a faith that she believed and practiced for the rest of her life.

Ethel Waters kissed me on the cheek after that interview. Looking back at almost 50 years in the wacky, wildly unstable radio business, that memory makes it all worthwhile.

Bettie Page and Errol Flynn??

How about that for an unlikely pairing on the silver screen. But it might have happened if things had gone differently for the queen of the pin-up girls. Asked in an undated interview if there was anything she wished she had done, Ms. Page said she wanted to be a movie star but her marriage kept her from answering Jack Warner's offer of a screen test. She had failed an earlier test at 20th Century Fox. She said, "I would like to be in Errol Flynn's swashbucklers." There's a thought to wrap your mind around.

It's not easy being ...

Finish that title for yourself. What is it not easy being? Green like Kermit, my favorite frog, who decided he liked being what he is? Old? Young? Black? White? Male? Female? Gay? Straight? Etc. Etc Etc.

In the '30s and early '40s I was a White, country kid, laughing along with my father at the hilarious radio misadventures of Amos 'n' Andy. I suppose I knew, on some level, that the characters were played by White Men using what we might now call stereotypical Negro Dialect. At that time and place, that was beside the point. We laughed because it was funny. For those who came along 25 or more years after I did, racial stereotyping is the point, dwarfing whatever entertainment value the program offered at its time in history.

My ten year old African American Grandson loves the old, classic Disney and Warner Brothers Cartoons. They are full of racial and ethnic stereotypes and violence, with characters getting flattened and immediately springing back to life without so much as a scratch. Many of the DVDs in his huge collection include an apologetic disclaimer for the content that is deemed no longer acceptable. The boy has zero interest in that. Maybe that will change as he gets older. But for now, he laughs at those cartoons because they're funny. He found an old Muppets video that we watched last night. Kermit, Piggy and the whole crew that was hatched in the brilliant mind of Jim Henson did their version of the classic fairy tales. That show has taken some lumps from critics, too. My kids loved it and I couldn't be happier that the grandson does, too. I laugh myself silly every time Miss Piggy decks poor Kermie. My very favorite such pig-to-frog violence happens when Kermit serenades
Lydia the Tatooed Lady. That song was such a favorite of Henson's that it was performed at his memorial service.

Jon and Kate ... How we relate

The world is blubbering over Jon and Kate's divorce. The network brass are jumping up and down almost as high as the ratings that went through the roof. Frustrated women are saying to bewildered spouses, "See? That's where we're headed, but we could fix it if you would just talk to me." Bewildered spouses are thinking, "If I spill my guts will I be in bigger trouble than I already am?" The great marital impasse.

Ethel on a VCR

I am about to watch that wonderful Ethel Waters film, "Cabin in the Sky" again. One of my thrift store VCRs recorded it for me while I was away. Yes, I actually enjoy the challenge of programming those primitive machines. I wonder how many of the young pups who are so quick at texting and tweeting could do that.

A Prairie Home Enigma

Friend Harry and I had some offline talk about Garrison Keillor, parts of which will surely show up in our respective blogs. Harry said listening to A Prairie Home Companion made him feel as if here were crashing a private gathering. I, on the other hand, immediately related. I thought, "These are my people" and I became a dedicated member of the Keillor cult following. I suspect that those reactions are typical. No middle ground about Lake Wobegon. You either love it and become one with it or you stand back and scratch your head trying to figure out why the Public Radio Show has become an institution and the tall Minnesotan is some kind of broadcast icon. One might at first think I relate to it because I come from very rural Michigan in the '30s. But hold everything, Keillor has been the darling of young, liberal college types as well. New Yorkers love him. Go figure. The Garrison Keillor phenomenon has already been analyzed to death by minds much greater than mine, so I try hard not to rehash what's already been written.

A most fascinating thing about the BBC's broadcast that Harry heard, apparently a heavily edited one hour version of the two hour presentation, is that they changed the name. It's just Garrison Keillor's Radio Show. I wonder if Prairie Home companion, a totally American Phrase that evokes a reaction something like viewing a Norman Rockwell Painting or hearing Kate Smith sing "God Bless America," means nothing to the rest of the world. Incidentally, Keillor took the name from the Prairie Home Cemetery in Minnesota, a perfect mid-American name for an eternal resting place.

Another puzzlement about the program is that the Lake Wobegon monologues almost always include references to the importance of church-going. That's often the main point of the tale. I totally relate and smile, sometimes laugh out loud at Keillor's sharp insight into the funny and human things that happen in church. His Young Lutheran's guide to the Orchestra is brilliant religious satire. He has been quoted from pulpits of just about every denomination. But why are secularists who have given up on traditional, organized religion still such devoted fans? It makes no sense. The annual joke show sometimes makes me cringe a bit at the religious jokes. He gets away with things that I don't believe Letterman could do. "Phenomenon" and "enigma" seem to be the only words that work when we think about A Prairie Home Companion.

Here's my personal bottom line. Garrison Keillor loves and understands radio. He is ideally suited to that medium. He knows how to make love to a microphone. I was luke warm about the Altman film and Keillor's books don't do much for me. But give him a radio microphone and something special happens.

Scary Thought

Dagmar in 3-D. That's alarming!

Jack Benny at the Detroit Fox

Was it coincidence or astute scheduling that Bill Bragg's Yesterday USA internet radio station has been playing a 1948 Jack Benny show from the Fox Theater in Detroit? The great days of network radio, Detroit, General Motors, a great star and the fabulous Fox. Enough nostalgia to give an old guy a major jolt. Thanks to some investors who poured millions into its restoration, the Detroit Fox is still in business. And so is the St. Louis Fox, where Garrison Keillor recently did a show. I'm not sure how many of the original Fox movie and vaudeville palaces are still standing. Remind me to look that up.

Benny's writers came up with lots of great automotive gags. Listening to it, as sometimes happens when I hear the comedy radio shows I grew up with, I find myself thinking I had forgotten how funny they were. But I wonder if that's true. Did I forget or was I all primed and conditioned to laugh because I remembered and I knew what was coming. Wouldn't it be interesting to put an audience of persons old enough to have heard it the first time together with younger ones who had not heard a Benny radio show live on the air and measure their respective reactions.

Going Forward With Flint

I am among those who call themselves Flint Expatriates.
That's the name of a most interesting blog hosted by Gordon Young who now lives in California. Take a look at it for photos, comments and memories of the town that General Motors made famous and Michael Moore made infamous. I became a reader of Gordon's blog with the hope of finding something about the Flint Musical Tent that brought professional Broadway type theater to Flint when I was there. But most bloggers are too young to know about it.

Like the old gray mare, Flint, Michigan ain't what she used to be. The old horse went to the glue factory, replaced by those horseless carriages built in Flint's auto factories. My in-laws worked at the Fisher Body plant, demolished long ago.

Flint was still in pretty good shape in 1950 when I spoke my first words into a microphone, "Going forward with Flint." That was the theme of an advertising campaign on WMRP, the station where I would be a hotshot deejay, driving around in my big Buick Dynaflow and on which my marriage to a fan would be broadcast in 1954. Like most of the dozen or so stations I worked for, that one is long gone. My last one in that town, one of the several employers that would eventually find me of no value, was WTAC. That stood for "The Auto City," I think that one is still on the air with those call letters. I also worked at WKMF, no longer on the air. That one was owned by Fred Knorr, who also owned the Detroit Tigers. I went to sleep during a Tigers broadcast and failed to cover the Dearborn feed's station break with our own and "WKMH" got on the air. Actually I didn't get canned from that one. My term there was to sub for the evening deejay until he returned from several months at the TB sanatorium.

Leaving Flint, the next stop was WDOG in Marine City, on the St. Clair River, a short ferry boat ride across the river from Sombra, Ontario, Canada. Someday I will tell stories about weird stuff that happens at radio stations. Readers might think I made it up. Maybe I did. But there really was a WDOG and a Miss WDOG. I think I blogged about her someplace in the oldy moldy archives. The best stories must go to the grave or the oven with me or be published after I go to that great radio station in the sky to protect the innocent, the guilty and my family. Stay tuned for the rest of the story. Apologies to the late Paul Harvey for stealing his line.

Dagmar Bumpers...Perky Pointed Protuberances

Remember Dagmar? She was the bodacious blonde on the '50s TV show, Broadway Open House.Her name lives on in the hearts of classic car buffs and fans of early network TV variety shows. When GM's designer Harley Earl put those perky, pointed protuberances on the '50s Chevy, Buick and Cadillac bumpers, he thought he was reminding us of the artillery shells that helped to win the war. But that's not what every red-blooded American Boy thought of when he saw them. There was little doubt left about what they looked like when the black "pasties" were added to the tips on the Cadillac Eldorado.
Virginia Ruth Egnor was given the Dagmar name and told that her job was to be a ditzy blonde, but she was dumb like a fox and way out in front in more ways than one. Show Host Jerry Lester was not happy when the network listed her as the star. She made the cover of Life Magazine. Jerry did not. She went on to considerable success on other shows.

I first learned of "Dagmar Bumpers" when a special friend passed along his copies of that wonderful magazine that makes a guy drool over classic and antique cars, Hemmings Motor News. They don't build women or cars like that anymore.

Them Was the Days

Harry Heuser's post about a 1936 question of who would be the big radio stars by 1950 caused me to contribute a few cents' worth to that interesting thought. Then Harry opined (how's that for a grandly archaic word) that I might not view the end of network radio as a major, end of an era event.

Not quite right, Harry. Maybe it's my age or my badly split personality that lets my fragmented brain think two or more thoughts at the same time. Is that what you call paradox? Whatever you call it, the part of me that grew up listening to what is now Old Time Radio in the '30s and'40s misses it, mourns its loss and often wishes I could tune into Jack Benny on Sunday and Fibber and Molly on Tuesday. Listening to recordings of those old shows just isn't the same.

But like Tevye in that great "on the other hand" scene in "Fiddler," there is my other hand, the part of me that began a radio career in 1950, at the tail end of radio's so-called golden era. I miss that free form radio, too. And I miss AM radio as the major home entertainment medium. AM was still king when I got into the business. Antique radio collectors, unless they want to listen to Rush Limbaugh and pop shrinks, have a hard time hearing a non-local station through the dreadful electrical interference caused by devices that didn't exist when those magnificent 12 tube superheterodynes in their beautiful cabinets were built. A VCR (don't bother to tell me nobody uses those anymore) or a DVD player can wipe out the whole AM radio band with a horrendous buzz. Those "environmentally friendly" squiggly light bulbs that contain mercury also emit terrible radio frequency interference. I hardly turn my big old Zenith on anymore. WGN did make it across the lake pretty well, but now that once great station is going to pot.

So here I am, all elderly, messed up and fragmented, not quite sure if I should say so long to an old love, quit thinking about her and find myself a new one. Were I as young as Harry (aren't you pleased to hear that, Harry) I could think about radio as history and study it and not get all personal and nostalgic about it.

On the other hand ........

Lux Presents Hollywood!

Hired and fired by Victor Lundberg. That is my claim to radio fame. Who was Victor Lundberg, you ask? And what does this have to do with the Lux Radio Theater? Be patient. I am inclined to wander but I'll get there.

Lundberg hired me at WMAX in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1963 and canned me three months later. I was the news director, a position for which I was singularly unqualifed, unfit and incompetent. Oh well, it got me back to Michigan, where I would rack up a history of many moves, most of them not voluntary.

Anyway, Victor Lundberg had a big hit spoken word recording, "An Open Letter to my Son." in 1967. It was a tear-jerking, flag-waving oration about hippies, long hair, Vietnam War Protesters, draft card burners and everything that the turbulent '60s stood for. Spoken over The Battle Hymn of the Republic, it ends with "if you burn your draft card you should burn your birth certificate, too. From that moment on, I have no son." The recording, which you can listen to from several links, hit number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and he performed it on the Ed Sullivan Show. Just google "Victor Lundberg." for some sites that have the audio.

Lundberg, originally from Grand Rapids, said that he had been a network announcer, one of the golden voices that proclaimed "Lux Presents Hollywood" to introduce The Lux Radio Theater. Whenever he did a microphone check at WMAX, he got as golden as he could get and spoke those words as if he were introducing that great theater of the mind.

There is much about Victor Lundberg and an Lp he also produced, which didn't go anywhere. And there are comments from his family that are best not quoted here.

Maybe I will start yet another blog, number 4. "Colorful characters I have known." Vic Lundberg will be in that one.

Musical Canine Trivia

Trombonology's Beautiful and eloquent blog about the music she loves makes me wish I knew more about it. Her latest, Benny, Tram and my little dog too, leaves me unable to resist sharing an interesting bit of trivia, inspired by the mention of her little dog, Nelson. Ms. Trombonology's favorite singer, Jo Stafford, recorded the old standard duet, "Whispering Hope" with Gordon MacRae many years ago. The trivia part of is that that Septimus Winner, who wrote the song, also wrote "Where oh where has my little dog gone" and "Listen to the Mocking 'Bird." He was arrested for treason when he wrote a song in praise of a general that President Lincoln fired. Paul Harvey would have loved that one for one of his "The rest of the story" episodes. Maybe he used it and I missed it. Here's my own "Rest of the Story." Little Dog Nelson's full name is Nelson Eddy, no doubt named for another famous duet singer whose claim to fame was duets with Jeanette MacDonald. Isn't life interesting?

1930s predictions of radio's future

Harry Heuser quotes a 1936 radio magazine wondering about who will be the big radio stars in 1950. Who could have predicted that network radio would be pretty much gone, with Ma Perkins, Don McNeil's Breakfast Club and one or two other remnants of that kind of radio hanging on for dear life while the big radio personalities of the '50s would be disk jockeys. That's the year I began my less-than-spectacular career in the radio biz. But even I was a local hotshot star of sorts in Flint, Michigan. It was a good time to be a deejay. We had fans and fan mail. And we had women! I married one of my fans. Strictly formatted, top 40 radio had not yet taken away our freedom to be creative. We learned to adlib. We became good air salesmen. One of the stations where I worked had no written commercials. There were little cards with a few lines about the advertiser and what he was selling and we had to adlib an effective commercial from those notes. We played our own favorite records and talked about them as much as we wanted to. The great "announcers" who came before us orated to a faceless entity, the ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. They even used their stentorian tones to identify themselves in impersonal terms. "Your announcer has been Clanton W. Clanton." But I'll give them one thing. They knew that "W" has three syllables. We deejays learned to communicate, one-on-one, to be a friend in homes and cars.My personal broadcast idol, who came from that stiff, formal kind of radio and broke out of it and poked fun at it to become the industry's greatest communicator and air salesman was Arthur Godfrey. He could sell Chesterfield Cigarettes and Lipton Tea like no one before or since. It was a wonderfully creative time in radio. I am grateful to have been a part of it.

WGN goes to hell

I do not often use profanity, either writing or speaking. I am so old and old fashioned that I believe those words lose their power and punch if they are not reserved for extreme situations that call for the strongest possible exclamation. WGN radio, which I have long and often spoken of as the country's greatest station, has put me in a veritable emotional tizzy. Once an institution, an icon, a station which, through many changes of management, continued to hire the industry's greatest one-on-one communicators, has begun a descent into the depths of perdition. From Franklyn MacCormack to Wally Phillps to Uncle Bobby and Spike O'Dell, Orion Samuelson and Milt Rosenberg, WGN was simply unique. It got into our heads and hearts as only radio can. When my then teen age daughter took a job on the other side of Michigan, one of her major concerns was whether or not she would be able to hear WGN. When she was a big Hockey fan, WGN sports announcer Chuck Swirskey phoned her to personally thank her for her interest. WGN was family.
In November of 2008, Chicago Tribune writer Phil Rosenthal wrote, "In an age of change, WGN chooses to bank on stability." That was then, this is now. His column for May 23 this year begins, "The Girlfriends are gone. The "Kathy & Judy" show, a groundbreaking weekday coffee klatch presided over by former Chicago newspaper columnists Kathy O'Malley and Judy Markey, ended its run of 20 years on WGN-AM 720 Friday, with the Tribune Co. station calling the cancellation of the one-time ratings juggernaut "a business decision." WGN's program director has issued memos ordering a more edgy presentation. He wants his people to "get pissed" on the air. Will evening WGN host Dr. Milt Rosenberg be next? I continue to be convinced that he knows more about more things than any other broadcaster, past or present.
Why am I so personally disturbed about what happens to a radio station? I've been there, not at WGN but at a dozen or so smaller stations. A most painful memory, I was at a station that made a sudden and dramatic format change with the hope of garnering the younger demographic that advertisers want. I had to answer the phone, dealing with swearing, crying fans, beside themselves at the loss of "their station." It was my job to tell them it was just a business decision. The funny thing about it, not really funny at all, is that it didn't work. It got rid of the older, undesirable listeners but it did not replace them with new, younger ones. That station is long gone. Another one where I worked spent a ton of money in a switch to a contemporary format, going head to head with the established rocker. The building and the nine towers are gone and it is now the site of condos.
So pardon me while I join Kathy and Judy and their girlfriends, many of them male, in a tearful goodbye as another great radio station goes to hell.