A Rain of Frogs 

The Nooz at Newn

We were flat, dreaming of a world where we could be round.

A disc jockey’s life is a permanent disconnect—imagining an audience while staring ahead and counting the holes in the same Celotex wall tile over and over. The resulting numbers are always the same. Every time.

Pete Myers was a friend some forty years ago. He was a master of his craft and knew by heart the Celotex hole count from any number of prestigious radio stations. Pete inspired characters in two stories of mine. In The Return of the Orange Virgin he became Pen Harrington:

Pen prided himself on his skills at reading cold copy: a meaningful delivery the first time through, his practiced baritone rhapsodizing the joys of clothing, tires, discount eyeglasses, scanning three lines ahead for syntactic traps, occasionally consulting the stopwatch he held high in his right hand near his plane of vision.

Headed back to the on-air control room, Pen paused to check the ball scores at the Associated Press wire. And froze. The swish/click of a locked groove was repeating from the control room monitor speakers. How long had this been going on? He had hit a locked groove while doing double duty—something that happens to the best of us, he rationalized.

Except it had happened now and it had happened to him, the kind of gaffe the celestial lottery reserved for the high school part-timers who staffed the station weekends. There had been no calls. No one, nobody had called the station to ask what the hell was going on. No listeners. Ergo: there was nobody listening.

Perhaps it was time to go. All the currency of his life was spent—he had clasped the last manly handshake, watched the heart-searing sunset from the only remaining mesa and fired his last and finest shot—the heart was empty and the gun was full. Ahhh, were those not the days: wenches to swive, tossings back of many neat whiskeys to accomplish. But when the gun is empty and the steely gaze of ice blue eyes seeks another dawn, then it's time to ride on.

First blood

Stacks of wax and mounds of sound...

You hit a switch and a red light goes on. There is a preternatural whistling sound in the headphones—you are breathing. A thrill chases up your spine and you quickly hit the switch again. The red light goes off. You are speechless and sweaty. You—at this, your first fling at a (most likely) low power local radio station—feel, perhaps rightly, that under your zit-covered integument there is a pulsing giant yearning to be free. It seemed so easy at home in front of the mirror. In the headphones there is silence; past the double glass a bored secretary looks up from her desk. Well? You hit the switch again. An adolescent voice, tight with strain: “And now...” An audible click, amplified by the audio processing at the transmitter, and an orchestral sting slams against your cochleae—the news music. The sheets of wire service printout are clammy in your fingers. “And now... The banana futures from Tampa.”

A perky blond news anchor makes eye contact with the camera and smiles. Her eyes are empty; she has forgotten everything. Her head turns three-quarters front and you breathe a sigh: Everything will be all right. The teleprompter. “And now... the Nooz at Newn.”

We've all been there. Pete had paid his dues.

Pete Myers

Died young and by misadventure: an anonymous obituary from any legion of unheralded insurgencies. And forty years after Pete’s death, I resurrected him (with all due respect) as a character, Pete Garland, in the second story, The Year They Invented Frozen Lemonade:

There is once a futile passion for a local disc jockey.

In the afternoons of Linda Winkelman's “young womanhood,” as her mother described her child's budding pubescence, the years from nine to thirteen, Linda sought solace from the radio, particularly 1010 WINS' afternoon personality for whom she hoped to become an acceptable offering. Pete Garland was the announcer who came on just before Jack Lacy and her mother's favorite, Murray the K.

Linda took comfort in the molassesey voice and sophisticated humor of the afternoon disc jockey. The Pete Garland Cat Exchange added a unifying dimension to Linda Winkelman's young life. Linda tried to work up the courage to call in. She even invented a cat, Conan, whom she could say would be looking for a good home because of her mother's allergies.

She sent away for a signed picture. New York radio stations nurtured the images of their stars and it had been retuned with a short handwritten note from the announcer's wife.

Long ago and far away, there was a radio man of surpassing skill, and what small cachet Lemonade might have, it is only a minor postponement of oblivion. Ave atque vale, old friend.

Mad Daddy

excerpted from the bio by David Hinckley on the WNEW tribute site

On the radio, Peter Myers called himself Mad Daddy, which by all evidence was truth in advertising.

He spoke in maniacal rhymes over the sound of bubbling cauldron, cackling as he raced to the next rock 'n' roll record or perhaps the next ad spot he had taken the liberty of personally rewriting into a Mad Daddy-style rhyme.

Did you ever see a Martian beard?
The whiskers are purple and curly and weird
And two faces are harder than just one to shave
So the two-headed Martians just naturally race
For the cooler more comfortable shave they get
With push-button lather and blade by Gillette.

Alas, by the time Mad Daddy got to New York, 1959, time was running out for his kind of radio.

On many stations, the jocks were bigger stars than the artists they played, a stature traceable in large part to black rhythm-and-blues jocks like Jocko Henderson, Hot Rod Hulbert, Dr. Jive and Willie Bryant. Their style was picked up by white jocks right alongside the records they played.

That Pee Myers was a descendant of Jocko was hardly surprising. The San Francisco-born Myers had studied action as a young man at the Royal London Academy of Dramatic Arts, and he knew all about learning from the best. After London, Myers migrated to New York. But he found himself on the second tier, a character actor who worked regularly on TV but never got any indication producers saw leading man potential.

One too many shifts in the toy department at Macy's sent him back to San Diego where he landed a radio gig. The work was routine. But a new wind was blowing through radio now, as rhythm-and-blues started plowing the ground for rock 'n' roll. Ohio became an epicenter of this new sound, and Myers got a gig in Akron, where he played a wild mix of rhythm-and-blues he called “wavy gravy” many years before the term resurfaced in San Francisco.

If you are seeking vagrant Mad Daddy tapes and bits—engineers are a packrat breed. Here are some names you might follow up on. There were five of us—young engineers surprised and awed being involved in something that was approaching “Art.” I was one of the five. We were Rob Hunter, Steve Safion, John Molnar, Carl Infantino and Alex Kaye Gold. I have lost track of my union brothers over the years, but when the radio station said sayonara to playing music, Carl and I split the WINS record library. Yes—they threw it out. Carl and I rendezvoused at Central Park West and Columbus Circle with a borrowed truck on or around the weekend they dropped BMI licensing to [save big money and] go all-news. Steve died on the golf course in his thirties. Carl Infantino, Al Gold and John Molnar (and I, for a short while) stayed with the all news WINS as Group W moved their New York flagship to the 18^th and 19^th floors at 90 Park Ave. 

A Columbus Circle memento—the Mad Daddy theme (stream MP3). Our radio station, WINS, occupied all available interior space in a Gothic chapel that William Randolph Hearst had disassembled and trucked over from Normandy, numbers on every stone, to plop on top of the 59th Street subway station. This happened just before the Crash of '29. Hearst did it for Marion Davies, his main squeeze, who had religious inclinations.

The second floor is where WINS—Crosley, then Westinghouse broadcasting—held forth in the days of Murray the K (see The Year We Invented Rock N Roll), Alan Freed and Pete Myers. We are facing north (uptown). We were #1 in New York City in the days of pre-Beatles rock and roll. Next year we were #3. Murray the K blamed it on Pete Myers.

The picture was shot from atop an Edwardian mansion—later The Regal Shoe outlet—torn down in the early 60s to make room for Huntington Hartford's Museum of American Art. The trolley tracks were there till the late 50's when they repaved Broadway (to the left). In the heyday of rock 'n' roll a Bickford's cafeteria and Gristede's supermarket occupied the ground floor. We had an elevator to the 59th Street/Columbus Circle stops. We used to bring Roy Campanella (wheelchair bound) up from the subway to tape "Campy's Corner," a weekly show about baseball with anchor Chris Schenkel.

Alex Gold ended up the Chief Engineer at WABC. Al Gold and I last spoke in 1985 when the studio I worked for was trying to rent or borrow satellite uplink time for a Steve Allen Show bicoastal pilot proposal. I know all of these guys—we are of course all now in our 70s—saved the 7½ ips reverb tapes when they produced—freehand and “live-on-the-air,” a perfect Mad Daddy Show. If you’re interested in a search, they’re out there somewhere. Uncle Rick Irwin of Reel Radio has a representative cross-section of Mad Daddy airchecks.

And I thought I would never run out of words. One morning the well is empty and it's time to move along. The cowboy of another day—an anachronism, a redundant—has been vetted to a future that looks a lot like now.

—Pete Myers as Pen Harrington

Pete and I connected through the WINS talkback—the intercom from the announce booth to the studio control room—announcers didn’t touch the controls (IBEW contract) and the engineers and producers didn’t talk (AFTRA contract). This was the early 60s and the John Wayne stereotypes merged with the sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll models. In short, we boozed and we pilled. A lot. Even with the difference in our ages (Pete was the older, drama school trained; I was the East Village dropout, had made a living playing guitar and saying funny things in coffeehouses), there was a bonding as we cracked jokes at the sponsors, the music and life at large.

Through a haze of downers and uppers that somehow didn’t prevent us from doing our jobs, we had each discovered a kindred spirit. At least while the booze and drugs lasted. Who knows what might have happened? I went off speed and booze many years later: May 9th 1979, to be precise. Pete died. The traffic over the intercom was hilarious. I served a hitch as production manager at non-commercial radio (WBAI-Pacifica, there was no NPR yet) while Pete went to WNEW (still simulcasting their FM at this time). We met again when my union card dragged me to a much bigger and regular paycheck at Metromedia/WNEW. “You’ll be sorry,” Pete shouted up to the control room whilst Max Weiner, the chief engineer, gave the guided tour.

"Disc jockeys are so two-dimensional...

...just like comic strip characters.” Bruce Glaser was a curator at the Jewish Museum and a volunteer producer of an arts show for Pacifica. I had played him some Mad Daddy stuff. Bruce was, of course, right. He had not meant the comment as a putdown. He was wondering what was behind the billboards—another Hollywood backlot or flesh and blood. Everything was new in the 60s—the generational curse of self-discovery—High Camp, Andy Warhol and Batman. We lived in Camelot.

Bruce liked to hang around while I assembled the Second City show. Nancy Weyburn, George Coe, Reni Santoni, Peter Boyle and the gang were broke and trying the new improv comedy out on New York. We did the Levitical 13 weeks. I learned a lot putting their bits together and thought a lot about the magic Pete and I had on the bitch box.

Local staff picked up the slot on WBAI when 2^nd City went home to Chicago. Local staff meant Bob Potts, the news director, Don Calfa (an unemployed actor—that year he was demonstrating pogo sticks in Macy’s window for Christmas) and me, the engineer, editor, mixer. The Mad Hatter ran on and on, recycling taped bits, until I ran out of steam. There was lots of energy—I was renowned for having a quart of Wild Turkey and a few grams of amphetamine in the sound effects cabinet on any given day (just like a doctor’s prescription—a combination of ingredients).

I burned out at listener-sponsored radio, my wife beaned the station manager with a huge glass ashtray (she was the traffic manager), and Rob Hunter ended up back twiddling the knobs at WNEW. I gave Pete some of the Mad Hatter tapes and we practiced routines on one another whenever time and the Metromedia intercom permitted. We coulda been contenders. My wife and I, like true speed freaks, had a short attention span and Pete was deep into medicaments and psychological problems himself. We made a decent try and lost. The wife and I realized we were killing ourselves with crystal meth so did a geographical and split for New England on a moment’s notice. Shortly thereafter, one Sunday morning in Rhode Island, I caught Pete Myers’ picture and obit in the NY Daily News. The article quoted Nat Asch, a station factotum, as saying Pete had been despondent over impending shift changes. An easy cosmetic wallpapering for the station. They had no idea what was going on. Or preferred to ignore it.

To revisit the Bruce Glaser quote—Just like comic strip characters. Yep, we were flat, dreaming of a world where we could be round. Pete didn’t make it.

Pete used to refer to Ernie, a brother. I knew Annie Myers (Mrs. Myers #1) and met Lisa (Mrs. Myers #2) at the studio . It was 1966 and Bob and Ray were leaving the morning show at WHN. Pete and I thought we had a catalysis for humor. We practiced our routines on each other and loved it. However, we dropped the ball at that time and never picked it up again.

Why have I saved this snippet of the wild and wonderful world of a forgotten top-40 jock? Moderate guilt and occasional melancholia. I have a pretty good idea of just what goes on inside the tormented souls of outrageous funnymen.

 

NOTES:

* All new stuff, a new experience for for me and the other sirs and brothers of IBEW local 1212. Slide faders (potentiometers**) were available in high-end, boutique operations, and usually found only in well-funded, new, construction projects. McCurdy Electronics of Canada supplied WINS, New York City, with the first 19-in, 4-outbroadcast boards on the East coast while I was an engineer there in 1964. Remember, this was pre-digital, and the ‘state of the art’ was a console with no audio (low-gain) signals in the board and all operations done by DC (direct current) to control ambient electrical noise.

** There is a substantial difference between a ‘fader’ and a ‘potentiometer,’ but board ops like me used the terms interchangeably—referring to their effect, not to what they accomplished electrically. Hey, let's ask the pro. Damned if I know. (Actually, I do. There is a reason buried in the mists of history for these particular numbers of inputs. It has in part to do with the width of the fader modules as opposed to off-the-rack mounting hardware (the famous ‘mainframe’) and the fact that no matter how convoluted the design, somehow a human being was going to have to operate the thing.
 

RESOURCES:

Jay Hunt's discussion forum is a must visit for Daddy-o-philes.
Mad Daddy's Favourites http://v-rocket.blogspot.com
Pete Myers last day at WHK in Cleveland http://permanentcondition.blogspot.com
Wavy Gravy and Mellow Jello www.freewebs.com/maddaddy
Myers bio at “The World's Greatest Radio Station” www.wnew1130.com
WINS history page www.1010wins.com

NOTE—On the WINS website, the guys in the newsroom picture (left to right) are: Stan Burns, don't recognize, Stan Brooks, Paul Parker (on the phone), Jack Smee, Henry Marcotte, Hank Schnaue, Charles Scott King.