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THE GULF FREEWAY, GORDON MC LENDON AND HIS FLAGPOLE SITTER

B

Bill Cherry

Guest
THE GULF FREEWAY, GORDON MC LENDON AND HIS FLAGPOLE SITTER, DON KEYES​

By Bill Cherry
Copyright 2004
All Rights Reserved​

While Galveston and Houston have always been rivals, there has never been a time when wisdom didn’t show it to both cities’ best interest to work together.

When construction on an electric railway was begun March 28, 1910, to connect the two cities, Galveston had a population of about 40,000. Houston was just twice as big.

The new electric train was called the Interurban, a made up word, and it was built in just one year, and that included laying the tracks and building the large plants that generated the electricity that fueled it. The cars, much like trolleys, ran down a single track for just over 50 miles, and at a speed of 60 miles per hour. They hauled passengers and freight from downtown Galveston to Houston and back until October 31, 1936.

“Galveston’s historic Interurban line between Houston and Galveston, once the fastest in the nation, gave away last night to the march of time, and ceased operation after 25 years of almost continuous service,” The Galveston Daily News said the next morning.

Just three years later, the Houston Electric Co. that owned and operated Houston’s downtown streetcar system shut down. Because the Interurban shared some of its tracks in Houston-proper, through some intercompany trade-out, Houston Electric ended up owning a major portion of the Interurban’s right-of-way that connected Galveston with Houston. To be allowed to shut down, Houston Electric was legally responsible by their contract for removing the tracks.

Houston’s Mayor Oscar Holcombe told Houston Electric that rather than pull them up, a task that would be extremely costly, he would let them just pave over them if they would donate the right-of-way to the city. The deal was cut.

Holcombe said in 1952, “I felt sure we would be able to use that right-of-way, and equally confident that someday a major, multilane highway would be constructed there.” When the state opened the first section of the proposed super highway connecting Houston and Galveston in 1948, it was built on that right-of way.

The first business on the highway opened up a few days later. It was a service station. When the owner applied for mail service, the highway had no name. The postmaster called Mayor Holcombe and told him the road needed to be formally named. A contest was quickly put together, and Sally Yancey, a Houston bank clerk, won a hundred bucks for naming it, “the Gulf Freeway.”

The Gulf Freeway was officially proclaimed completed in 1952. Four years later, Houston’s first enclosed shopping mall opened. Called Gulfgate, it was anchored by Sakowitz’s and Joske’s. Galveston’s E.S. Levy’s also had a store there.

The following year, Dallas’ Gordon McLendon, the radioman who stole broadcasting from network stations with his Top 40 format and personality disc jockeys, bought back Houston’s KLBS, an AM radio station he had previously owned. To build interest in the new format he planned for it, he had a disc jockey lock himself in the shack at the station’s transmitter and play nothing but Ray Anthony’s “Dragnet” for several days before the call letters were changed to KILT and the new Top 40 was introduced.

And then with the salvaged frame of an oil derrick he had put on the corner of the Gulfgate parking lot, Don Keyes become a flagpole sitter, attempting to break the world record for KILT.

Keyes was not just some silly DJ trying to make a name for himself. He was McLendon’s right hand man in the development of the Top 40 concept from the very beginning, and he had personally come to Houston from Dallas’ KLIF to put KILT on the air and win over the market.
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The personality disc jockeys that opened KILT included Joel A. Spivak, Red Jones, Bob White, Leaping Lee Perkins and Bill Slater. Shortly thereafter, legend Rascal McCaskill joined as the host of the all night show, “Milkman’s Matinee,” and a few years later one of the now most noted names in Top 40 radio, Chuck Dunaway was brought in to take over a shift and pump up and stabilize the numbers. Under the name, Van Anders, Galveston’s Vandy Anderson did news there for awhile.

As unusual as it may seem today, driving to see the KILT flagpole sitter did more to get people from Galveston County to have their first experience with the new freeway and the enclosed shopping mall than any of the advertising and promotions the stores and the mall owners had done.

So with the opening of the Gulf Freeway, Gulfgate and the KILT flagpole sitter working congruently, traffic began building faster than anyone had predicted. The highway department built a crude, tripod duck blind looking affair and moved it up and down the freeway from Gulfgate to the Galveston causeway. It kept two employees on top of the thing to take photos of the traffic.

Several places along the way, they constructed traffic counter mechanisms that were attached to thermometer-looking signs. This was for public relations purposes, to show everyone how popular the new roadway was.

But it was those fellows taking photos from atop the tripod and the traffic count thermometers that were the basis for 100% of the research that the highway engineers used to remold sections of the roadway over the next twenty years. No one had dreamed up a scientific methodology.

The advent of Top 40 in Houston; Don Keyes, the flagpole sitter; and the Gulf Freeway being set on top of the old Interurban right-of-way did more to get Galvestonians to explore the world off of the island than anything had before or has since.

And McLendon’s KILT, with its zany disc jockeys, fast paced and tight programming, station ID jingles, listener contests and rhythm and blues music, moved teenagers into a dimensions that no way resembles that of the teens of the past.
 
I remember the flagpole sitting stunt but have no memory of Don Keyes and didn't know of the relevance to Gulfgate and I-45. Keyes died just a couple of years ago. Before passing he had posted an autobiography of his years with McLendon on line which was a great read but it's apparently been taken down. He went on to be National Program Director.

The first morning man on Color Radio 610, as the introductory ads called it, was Eliot Field from Boston, a rather low key guy as I recall who did voices. He left in less than a year and went to Los Angeles where I think he wound up on KLAC for years. I found him on-line a couple of years ago, still alive and doing voice-overs in LA. I remember Joel A. Spivak, or Joel A. Kavips as he sometimes put it -- it was a big thing in the 50s to pronounce your name backward. Tremendously entertaining, one of my favorite jocks of all time. I think he followed Field to LA and also worked at KLAC. I came across him in Washington DC in the 90s, hosting a talk show on WTOP, at least someone using the same name. He was very rational and reasonable with callers and listened to all sides of the issues, so I'm sure that's no longer on the air!

Some of the other jocks I remember from the early days of KILT were Thom Whalen and Buddy McGregor but I just can't place Keyes.
 
I had never heard of Don Keyes until I was trying to get this story together. Chuck Dunaway put me on to him.

It turns out Keyes was one of McLendon's first DJs at KLIF in Dallas, and was so good at programming and promotions that McLendon moved him to the position for all of the stations. McLendon credited him more than once as pretty much the brains behind their interpretation of Top-40.

Anyway, McLendon had owned KLBS before, sold it, then bought it back and changed the letters to KILT. When he did, he sent Keyes down to Houston to get the thing on the air and to build its market share fast. And that's what he did. I had heard Keyes was the guy on the flagpole. I called him and he confirmed that it was he.

With respect to Joel A. Spivak. I absolutely, positively agee with you. He was one of the most amusing DJs ever. I remember he had an obsession with the flugal horn. He would work "flugal horn" into almost every one of his bits. His father was famed bandleader Charlie Spivak.

And Buddy MacGregor. I hadn't thought of him in years. I would really like to know what finally happened to him. Gosh those guys were good!
 
Apparently McLendon moved his djs around quite a bit, or used the same names in different markets. I read that History of KLIF (no longer on line) and saw names of several djs on KLIF that had also worked on KILT, Thom Whalen and Buddy McGregor among them.

One line in Keyes story stood out to me, something to the effect that McLendon made mistakes of one magnitude or another in every market he went in to except Houston, Keyes said some thing like everything they did in Houston was perfect. Bill Weaver, GM, was credited with a lot of the success. I remember the treasure hunts that had people digging up stranger's front yards and such better than the flag pole stunt.

Spivak was kind of in the vein of Mad Magazine and Stan Freberg in that era. I wish I had a better memory for his stuff and how I'd love to find airchecks! The thing I've remembered the best were his faux commercials, especially the ones for Polly Pelham Pizza. You listened for them as much as for the hit songs (actually, I started about that era tuning around a lot; I wanted to hear a lot more R&B and Rockabilly than KILT played). Pizza was a relatively new phenomenon in Houston and kids craved it; there weren't many places to get it and you couldn't buy frozen pizza, you bought a Chef Boy-ar-dee make you own pizza mix. When you first heard the commercials you might not understand it was a fake until the tag line, which was always something like 'look for Polly Pelham Pizza wrapped in old newspaper in the freezer section of a grocery store near you' or sometimes 'near me.' As the routine became known, the descriptions of ingredients and toppings got wierder and wierder. That was wild and wacky stuff in 1950s Houston.

Which reminds me, of course, Gary Owens is supposed to have jocked at KILT but I don't know when.
 
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