BossRadioDJ said:
The KGO Radio website has an article about Paul Harvey's death, noting he "was heard here on KGO for more than 30 years":
http://www.kgoam810.com/Article.asp?id=1190037&nId=0&spid=30365
We've got a schedule for KGO with "Paul Harvey News" listed in Winter 1964 (weekdays, 8:55 AM), and the station's schedule in 1958 showed "news" at 8:55 AM, which may or may not have been Harvey's broadcast.
Either way, that's at least 45 years on KGO.
I'm quite sure my mother listened to Paul Harvey in the
early 60s...KABC, I think. Harvey was the most successful of a breed of personality based news anchors that was quite common on radio and television from at least the 1940s through the 60s.,dying out in the 70s with the exception of Harvey. Others were Alex Dreier (also ABC), and Lowell Thomas on CBS.
If you grew up in the Bay Area, you missed the great George Putnam - a staple of Los Angeles radio and TV for many years - and the highest paid news anchor in the late 1960s, making more on his local independent TV broadcast than Walter Cronkite on the CBS network.
In fact, I remember one of the times Putnam switched stations (he would move from KTLA to KTTV and back again when his contract came up for renewal to keep his price up), KTLA tapped Paul Harvey to do a daily TV commentary on their news. It was a battle of pompous conservatives. Putnam died last year at age 94.
Paul Harvey famously deserted the Republican party in 1968 to support segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace for President on a third party ticket. On the other hand, Harvey changed his mind about the Vietnam War, and started to oppose it..about a year into the Nixon Administration, if I remember correctly.
Though I never shared their politics, I truly appreciated their magnetism, and entertainment value. They were also fun to satirize.
RIP Paul.
