I guess. I mean, I was "Mike Hagerty" on the radio for ten years before I went to TV and for ten years after I left TV and never got misspelled mail. And given that one of the deciding factors to use "Michael" was that it was going to be in font on the screen...
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Question about AM radio usage today
- Thread starter garfradio
- Start date
I guess. I mean, I was "Mike Hagerty" on the radio for ten years before I went to TV and for ten years after I left TV and never got misspelled mail. And given that one of the deciding factors to use "Michael" was that it was going to be in font on the screen...
But Michael W. Hagerty will work better if he ever wants to take the time machine back 50 years and jock at a carrier-current college station.
The one thing I never had was a jock jingle, because while you can say "Mike Hagerty" or "Michael Hagerty" fairly easily, it's not singable.
Bill Drake would have made me change my name.
Is that Jerry Lewis?
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I dunno, Mike. I can hear those in my head.
That is.
I was asked to host the local Reno cut-ins of the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon in 1979, 1980 and 1981. I only did the first two, because I was hired to do news at a competing TV station in 1981 and I'd be starting the very next week. It was a deal-breaker for both stations. Fortunately, a KOLO radio colleague (the suave, sophisticated Dave Finley) stepped in, did it for decades and launched his own long-running career in TV as a result.
In those days, MDA flew all 212 of its local hosts to Las Vegas six weeks before the telethon (so, mid-July) and put us up at the Sahara (then host hotel for the telethon) for three days worth of seminars on the latest advances in combating MD and promo tapings with Jerry.
In 1979, Jerry was away, filming a movie, so he spoke to us via satellite, we shot the promos without him and they built him in at the beginning and the end ("And here's your local host, Reno---Mike Hagerty." "Thanks, Mike, so join us Labor Day weekend.")
In 1980, he was there. Live. In the room. That photo was taken during the promo taping.
They split the tapings into two days. 106 each day.
If you were number 1 through 10...you got fun Jerry. If you were 11 through 20, you got slightly less fun Jerry.
I was number 41. I'm 24 years old, Jerry F. Lewis is hovering over my shoulder and I'm nervous, so I blow the first take.
And Jerry says "Do you wake up stupid?"
Thank God I got it on the second take. The 59 hosts who followed me that day probably still have PTSD.
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I'm surprised it took til person #11 for not fun Jerry to make an appearance....
I used to have a stock joke when people asked me why I left Las Vegas after only 18 months:
"Jerry Lewis, Wayne Newton and Robert Goulet."
I suppose if I had to do that many tapings a day two days in a row, it would get old pretty fast....
c
My great-grandfather Roberts was also named David. As far as I know, no one ever called him Dave. That form may not even have existed in the 19th century. In his rural Missouri community, older men prominent in the community would often be referred to as "Uncle", an honorific kind of like "don". Thus, in my great-grandfather's 1919 obituary, he was referred to as "Uncle David", and the local weekly papers before that mentioned him as "Uncle David". Similarly, another great-grandfather was often called "Uncle Philip".
My mother would tell this story on herself: how she was surprised when, taking up a teaching position in Albuquerque, that her students named "García" (the Jones of Albuquerque), "Sandoval", etc. had blond hair and blue eyes. Yep, the ancestors came from Spain.
Yeah, but not as fast as it did for Jerry, who'd been working in radio and film for decades and knew how this stuff goes.
But...look...marathon sessions aren't fun.
In 2002, I got the gig as station voice for KAZT, an independent TV station in Phoenix. I was thrilled. Charlie Van Dyke and I had been friends for seven years at this point, and I had visions of following in his footsteps.
What CVD didn't tell me was that first session---when they need EVERYTHING in your voice---is a doozy.
"Monday at 12."
"Monday at 12:30."
"Monday at 1."
"Monday at 1:30."
"Monday at 2."
...."A week from Thursday at 6:42."
It was all damn day.
And only one of them is still among the living...
It was actually a funeral that put Goulet on my FTG list. He screamed at me and my cameraman as he left the chapel:
"F***ing vultures!"
And I replied...because it was true.
"Bob, he worked for us. He was one of our Channel 13 team. You only know him because he had you on his show."
I almost threw in "No wonder Elvis shot his TV when you were on it", but that probably wouldn't have been my best move.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Reminds me of 1986, when one of my colleagues from our short-lived tenure at KACY-FM in Oxnard after they went Beautiful Music. Charlie Champion -- yes, that was his real name -- had become OM/PD at an AM/FM combo in the Antelope Valley in north Los Angeles County and got the management to pay me some ridiculously overpriced amount of money to do all the liners for the Beautiful Music FM.
After the first half-hour of ...
"FM 106.3, KKZZ Lancaster-Palmdale ... the Valley's place ... to relax."
"All day, all night, all Beautiful ... FM 106.3, KKZZ."
"Mojave's Beautiful Music station ... FM 106.3, KKZZ."
... I never wanted to hear those call letters again.
Unfortunately, KKZZ was the station of choice for in-store music (even in Grocery Warehouse!), so when I would come out there on weekends to check on some business interests, I heard myself over and over and over ...
You could’ve been the next Don Rickles!
Rickles was actually a sweetheart. One of the nicest of the Vegas players I ever met.
There was another Don Rickles who was a staff announcer at NBC radio and TV and worked in Portland near the start of his career. It's possible that they bumped into each other when the former was doing "CPO Sharkey"!
Yes. I remember reading and hearing many stories about the tempermentalness of many crooners.
They met long before that. Rickles the announcer had been at NBC in L.A. since 1948 and did live staff announcer duty for the Dean Martin and Flip Wilson shows and Bob Hope specials, all of which Rickles the comic appeared on.
In fact, looking at IMDB, Don's fifth TV appearance as himself was on The Eddie Fisher Show in 1957. It was an NBC show, and Donald Rickles was Eddie's staff announcer.
I have no idea if they were friends, but by CPO Sharkey, they'd known each other for 19 years.