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Death of Joel A. Spivak

D

Dusty Dale Brooks

Please note on today's R-I news the passing of Joel A. Spivak on Friday at 75 in Alexandria, VA.

Joel worked at KNBR during the "Goodtime 68" period of the 1980s. He was well-travelled in this business and a splendid talent, who happened to also be a wonderful man.

RIP, Joel.
 
I'm sorry to hear of Spivak's death - he was a sharp and witty guy. My mother would listen to his show in the mid 60s on Two Way Radio KLAC. It was the top rated station in LA for a few years, particularly attack-dog Joe Pyne, who also had a popular syndicated TV show. The KLAC "communicasters" (that's what they were called) were mostly right-wing, the exceptions being Spivak and Roy Elwell.

In the 80s, I was a NewsTalk junkie, and the nearest thing to a full-time talk station was KGO. But there was no talk during the Morning and Afternoon News blocks, so KNBR cleverly counter-programmed the Afternoon News with Joel's afternoon talk show.
 
Did Ron Reynolds succeed Spivak in the afternoons on KNBR? I started listening to the station after Spivak left, but his name was mentioned occasionally by the other hosts; I recall Mike Pechner joking that the station's djs/hosts needed to have more 'rivalries' with each other, the way 'Frank (Dill) hated Joel Spivak'. ;D
Also, Reynolds and the other KNBR afternoon guys used to break up the talk segments by playing records. Did Spivak also follow that format?
 
onairb said:
Did Ron Reynolds succeed Spivak in the afternoons on KNBR? I started listening to the station after Spivak left, but his name was mentioned occasionally by the other hosts; I recall Mike Pechner joking that the station's djs/hosts needed to have more 'rivalries' with each other, the way 'Frank (Dill) hated Joel Spivak'. ;D
Also, Reynolds and the other KNBR afternoon guys used to break up the talk segments by playing records. Did Spivak also follow that format?
Click to expand...

No - Joel A. was all talk . That was my first exposure to Ralph Barbieri, who had a lot of sports cut-ins on Spivak's show, but other than that it was standard News Talk. He would have fit in fine at KGO.

But Joel apparently did spin records at KLAC. I googled his name yesterday, and found a 1969 Billboard article about an engineers strike at KLAC in that year. By 69, KLAC's talk format had tanked, and they went back to an MOR music format. Apparently, Spivak stayed on for awhile because the article mentioned Spivak's name as one of the personalities that normally played music. I do recall that Roy Elwell left KLAC, and went back to his roots as a Top 40 DJ at KRLA.

I don't know the answers to your other questions - I don't recall when Spivak left KNBR, so perhaps I stopped listening to his show for some reason before his departure...can't recall.
 
I started listening to KNBR in late '86, and Reynolds had taken over for Spivak a while before that(although Reynolds left the following spring, and after a six-month trial by Jack Diamond, Leo Laporte took over that slot; all of them played records, unlike Spivak.) Barbieri started at KNBR in March of '84, so I guess Spivak was there by then.
 
onairb said:
I started listening to KNBR in late '86, and Reynolds had taken over for Spivak a while before that(although Reynolds left the following spring, and after a six-month trial by Jack Diamond, Leo Laporte took over that slot; all of them played records, unlike Spivak.) Barbieri started at KNBR in March of '84, so I guess Spivak was there by then.
Click to expand...

Even by then, like a lot of full-service AMs, KNBR was getting out of the music business. And much like we've been talking about over in the KSFO thread, it was confusing. Frank and Mike were still going strong, and was C.J. Bronson doing middays then, or had she left for KKCY? And Carter B. was back at KSFO. For a while, it was Ron Lyons right after Frank and Mike, then Tom Brown, who had been doing evenings (and, of course, Ron and Tom Foolery and 12:30), then Spivak, followed by Sportsphone 68 (when not preempted by the Giants or Warriors) with Scotty Stirling, then Dave Newhouse.
 
CJ Bronson was one of the many casualties of NBC selling the station to Susquehanna in '89. She never did get to say goodbye on-air.
 
CJ Bronson worked several places in the Bay Area, including the infamous Double 99.

She was a very engaging personality, warm and intelligent. Is she still working?
 
I'm not sure where CJ lives nowadays. Ben Fong-Torres interviewed her about a year ago, for a 'whatever became of..?' column in Radio Waves'. At that time, she was living in Minnesota(her native state), and had done some work for public radio stations there. More recently, she was mentioned as having visited Carter B. Smith, and accompanied him to a chemo treatment at the UCSF medical center. If she has moved back to the Bay Area, she is not currently doing anything in radio that I know of.
 
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