Who Am I? February 2024

I was born in Baltimore, MD smack dab in the middle of the ‘Roaring Twenties.” I attended Johns Hopkins but quit to join the Army Air Corps. I learned electronics in the service and served in the Pacific Theatre with stops in Guam, Saipan and Okinawa. I also developed a knack for entertaining our troops.

After my discharge I thought to make my mark in the new medium of TV but I knew a flop there might be a fatal career move so I gravitated towards radio which proved serendipitous. I stayed on-air in the N.Y.C./northern N.J. metropolitan area and came into your homes and car radios for almost 3 decades! I spent 25 of those years with a co-host who was considered my ‘straight man.’ The station allowed me to develop my own on-air zaniness. I would give my own unique comic take on the news and traffic and do parodies and send-ups of my bosses and my sponsors. My wit and humor usually kept me out of trouble. Unlike the “shock jocks” of today I was never intentionally mean-spirited or offensive. I invented approximately 40 on-air imaginary characters, expertly mimicking impressions of both real characters and my made-up characters. I’m told my assorted fake accents were spot on. Our show didn’t have any writers or scripts. My partner and I improvised all of our dialogue. I once observed that  “We were made of twominds without any.” However, it must be said that we were obviously successful because our listeners loved us. It also didn’t hurt that we provided a nice steady revenue stream for the station.

I was a frequent guest on other radio and TV shows and a regular panelist on others. I authored 2 books and was a part-time professional photographer whose works were published and hung in galleries. That's me smiling in the photo below.

(1a)Who Am I? (1b)Who was my co-host “straight man?” (2a)What radio station am I most associated with? (2b)What was the on-air clue that alerted listeners that one of my imaginary guests had arrived in the broadcast booth? (2c)Name at least 3 of my on-air personalities. (3a) Name 1 TV show that I was a regular panelist on. (3b)What are the titles of the 2 books I have written? (4) Surprisingly, none of our radio programs were recorded by the studio! However, several of our loyal and enthusiastic fans recorded some of our radio shows at home and donated their tapes to an established archive in order that present and future listeners might still enjoy the really witty repartee of radio personalities who always worked “clean.” Unfortunately, those types seem to have disappeared from the American landscape. They were replaced by the coarse and vulgar that now dominates our airwaves! What archive possesses our classic tapes today?