Do you remember when radio had personality? And personalities?
One of my favorite bloggers, Ken Levine, does. Besides being an Emmy-winning writer (he used to write for the likes of “M*A*S*H” and “Cheers”), he was also a disk jockey in Los Angeles in the late 1960’s and early ’70s. He is forever waxing nostalgic about the old-fashioned DJs who used to provide comedy and contests between the songs.
I share Mr. Levine’s nostalgia. I grew up in a tiny Illinois town named Lexington, which is about two hours south of Chicago. Every morning I would hop on the school bus, whose radio would be tuned to WLS, the Chicago station that boasted of “50,000 watts of power” and whose signal still reaches 38 states at nighttime. In the mornings, WLS would treat us to the deep-voiced tones and risque humor of “Super Jock” Larry Lujack.
Mr. Lujack.
Mr. Lujack was such a radio legend that when he died in 2013, he rated an obituary in The New York Times. His show was replete with recurring segments that were eyebrow-raising at the time but would hardly evince a shrug today, such as “Animal Stories” and “The Cheap, Trashy Showbiz Report.”
But my all-time favorite segment of his was a daily serial titled “The Adventures of The Tooth Fairy.” The premise was that a dentist named Newton Snickers (voiced by Chicago voice-over artist Dick Orkin) became so obsessed with his job that he declared himself the genuine Tooth Fairy and decided to do the job for all of America’s good little boys and girls. Needless to say, this did not sit well with the adults who saw Newton in his fairy get-up and didn’t realize his earnest intentions.
I’ve embedded one of the “Tooth Fairy” audio segments below. I don’t know how it will play to the uninitiated, but humor-wise, it’s definitely in the “Rocky & Bullwinkle” mode. A couple more segments of the show are available on YouTube. For a brief history of the show, click here.
So did you have a favorite radio “jock” when you were growing up? If so, please share your story with us.
So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am?
One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account.
When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account.
And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”)
So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog.
Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog.
If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog.
Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.
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