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Unless you’re a fan of trivia, you may not realize that Garry Moore once did a stint as a radio staff announcer here in St. Louis. His name was different then, and his goals didn’t exactly envision the new medium – television – which would make him famous.

Thomas Garrison Morfitt was born in Baltimore January 31, 1915. As he grew up he was able to witness the development of the exciting new entertainment medium called radio. Morfitt was convinced he could be a part of it. He worked selling ties in a local department store during the day and spent his evenings writing radio scripts, which he would try to “sell” during his lunch hours, hawking them to owners of local stations.

“I always wrote a strong part of the script for myself,” he told Jack Carney on KMOX in 1979. “Finally, one of the radio managers said to me ‘Look kid. You’re a lousy actor, but you write pretty well.’” Moore was given a job as a writer.

It was the sort of job that offered plenty of opportunities, including the one Morfitt had been hoping for: “You got into all sorts of things. You wrote mysteries, shows, advertising, spot announcements. I wrote the jokes for a daily one-hour variety show. It was emceed by an ex-Vaudevillian brought down from New York. And then, just like a bad ‘B’ movie, he got ill one day and the station manager came to me and said, ‘Listen, you’ve been writing this junk. You may as well get up there and read it.’ The emcee turned out to be terminally ill and I inherited the job.”
Morfitt admitted to Carney that he had no delusions of his ability as an entertainer. “I had always wanted to be an actor, but the show was very successful. After I’d been there about 2 1/2 years, I guess, I began looking around for other pastures where I could be an actor, or at least something more important than an entertainer. I sent demo discs around to several radio stations, and one of them was KWK in St. Louis.”

In the 1930s radio was maturing as an entertainment medium, and when KWK made an offer, Morfitt accepted. “I went out there principally as a special events man because my forte turned out to be ad-libbing. While I was in Baltimore I used to do a lot of things like call the horse races – whatever called for extemporaneous chatter. So I went off to St. Louis in that capacity.”

Once again, Thomas Garrison Morfitt’s plans for the future got sidetracked.
“Then they decided that they wanted an afternoon variety show just like the one I had fled in Baltimore. They told me they wanted me to do it and I told them I wasn’t very good at it. They said ‘That’s not what we hear from Baltimore.’ The program they gave me had the magnificent name of ‘Mid-Afternoon Madness,’ and I kept telling them I was no good at this kind of thing.”

Morfitt was getting depressed at the way things were going at KWK. “I started sending out resumes and I had already had some interest expressed by WLW in Cincinnati. But to show you how fate can randomly step into your life, there happened to be a man from NBC in Chicago who was just passing through St. Louis. While he was at his hotel he turned his radio on and heard this afternoon show I was doing. At that time up in Chicago they were in need of an emcee. Next thing I know I get a call from NBC asking me to send them a demo record, which I did, and the next thing I know, I’m on a network show based in Chicago, much to my surprise. And I’m still doing this thing I thought I was no good at, but I thought, ‘Well, if they want to pay me this much money to do something I don’t think I do very well, why should I argue?’”

Fate, and a little effort on his part, provided the next step for Morfitt. “When my vacation time came I went to NBC in New York. They transferred me from Chicago and put me on the same kind of a show. So the only difference was that I was based in New York.” He was 25 years old at the time.

One thing led to another. Garry Moore was paired with Jimmy Durante on the “Comedy Caravan,” which gave both of them much-needed nighttime radio exposure. He went over to television in 1950, doing a daytime variety show for eight years. It was during that stint that a pair of producers came to him and proposed an emcee slot for him on a nighttime game show they were pitching. It was called “I’ve Got A Secret.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 4/2000)

KADI Montage 1976

The early days of FM rock radio in St. Louis were anything but organized, but that’s what made them so much fun. Sam Kaiser is 46 now, but at the ripe old age of 18 he was pressed into duty as a disc jockey at KADI-FM. As he tells it:

“Christmas night 1972 – 10:30 P.M – I was at my parents’ house in Ferguson desperately trying to start my car, my hands shaking so bad I could not get the key into the slot. I had scored an on-air position at KADI, which at the time was the prime competitor to rock powerhouse KSHE. I’d been hired to do mornings, and they figured the best way to break me in was to have me sit in with Gary ‘Records’ Brown that night until about 3:00 A.M. and then take my show solo from there.

I don’t really know if I was all that good, but I had pestered [program director] Peter Parisi relentlessly from my overnight air shift at WRTH while he was on KADI. It was the only time I’ve ever confirmed a new job at 3:00 A.M.

I was scheduled to go on at midnight that night, but in my absolute terrified state, I arrived at the concrete blockhouse on Bomparte in Brentwood an hour early. Gary looked up and said ‘You must be the new kid. Here are the music sheets, commercial logs and transmitter logs. I gotta go to a Christmas party.’ I was left alone with a record playing on the air, and it was about to end. So much for the break-in period.”

Throughout the 70s, KADI made many attempts to unseat KSHE, and that meant great radio for all the rock fans. There were free concerts, lots of giveaways, and listeners who called the stations and talked about the music with their favorite jocks. And being a jock, while it didn’t pay well, was great for the old ego.

“The KADI job put me in the St. Louis radio rock and roll culture I so much wanted to be a part of,” Kaiser says. “Boy, what a coming of age it was. Not only did I get paid for playing all the bands I worshiped, working at a station that I listened to 24 hours a day, but I also became part of the incredible cast of characters that comprised my hometown rock and roll royalty.

There were plenty of extremes at that radio station. I was fired and rehired at least three times. During one of those fired times, I went on the air at KSHE. We had complete freedom on what we played and how we constructed our shows. All we had to do was make sure the commercials went on as scheduled. I’m talking about 12-minute Pink Floyd epics, song sets that included Herbie Hancock and Brian Auger, obscure but famous tracks from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Sammy Hagar, Foghat, Nectar, J.D. Blackfoot, the list goes on.

The KSHE staff had hotwired an audio box from the soft-porn drive-in theater next door to the station on Watson Road. The jocks would put on long record cuts and watch the dirty movies with the audio coming in on the studio monitor.

During the KADI days, when the ‘Concerts for Bangladesh’ album was big, jocks would play the 16-minute long Leon Russell track ‘Youngblood.’ It was a musical signal to drop by the station and smoke a joint with the jock on the back stairway of the transmitter shack.

Then there was the story of the infamous KSHE staff meeting in which Shelley Grafman [the station owner] started screaming that ‘youse guys gotta stop smoking that shit in the studio…the fucking studio reeks of marijuana!’” Sam Kaiser also remembers his cohorts of those times: Radio Rich Dalton “still the best FM jock I have ever heard, bar none,” Shilo Brunswick, Steve Rosen “one of the original KSHE jocks,” Paul Donahue “the best audio engineer I ever encountered,” Sir Ed, Ron Stevens, John Ulett, Ted Habeck, Jim Singer, Tom Gordon “extremely talented,” and of course, Gary “Records” Brown “larger than life.”

The crazy days of seat-of-the-pants FM rock are gone, and maybe it’s for the best, but people like Sam Kaiser who lived to tell about it know what a “long, strange ride” it was.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 9/2000)

2000)

Jesse “Spider” Burks was given his unique nickname by Nat “King” Cole because of his agility on the college basketball court. But when it came to his performance on the radio, his focus was straight ahead toward jazz, and that focus led to some serious confrontations with station owners and managers.

From 1947 to 1956, Spider held court on KXLW, but it wasn’t easy getting his foot in the door there. His widow, Leah Sue Burks, remembers the story of a Mr. Benton who owned a record shop on Easton Avenue. He had purchased time on KXLW and he wanted Spider to be the announcer during his half-hour show. Station owner Guy Runnion was always looking for ways to create advertising income, so he agreed. Mr. Benton’s shop saw an increase in business, and Runnion hired Burks as a disc jockey and expanded his time on the air. Burks would sell advertising to supplement his relatively meager wages.

A KXLW promotional article in a local newspaper in 1949 noted, “Spider Burks, the first* Negro discer (sic) in the St. Louis area, is a Be-bop enthusiast, even to wearing a Be-bop cap.” And a funny thing was happening to “race Radio” in St. Louis. White teenagers were tuning in.

Tony Cabanellas of St. Louis was “just a kid” back then, but he was a regular listener. He even has a clipping about Spider Burks from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat July 1, 1951, headlined “Disc Jockey is Proof A Negro Can Go Places in Radio Here.” It boasts the fact that Burks was pulling down $20,000 a year at KXLW, which would have come as no surprise to record companies. They knew that any record played on his programs would jump off the shelves of local record stores.Talk to some of these listeners today, and they’ll tell you of their fond memories of hearing Spider on the radio. His afternoon shows on KXLW were called “After School Swing Session,” “The House of Joy” and “Down in the Alley Behind My House.” You could tune to KXLW in 1955 and hear him kick off his broadcast with “Good afternoon, someone. This is your boy Spider Burks climbing into your loud speakers for another afternoon to dust the grooves and change the needle on another “House of Joy show.”

But Leah Sue Burks says it wasn’t easy. There was pressure from the station’s new owners to play some of the new music, called rhythm & blues. Things came to a head, and in 1956, Spider Burks took his jazz and bop show to KSTL. During his career, which also included on-air work at KATZ and KADI-FM, Spider did hundreds of live remotes from jazz clubs in the region.

A former business partner, Jorge Martinez, said Burks knew how to work a crowd, “He had a great radio voice and always handled himself well on the air.”

When Spider was doing a remote, you never knew what kind of audience would show up. There are literally hundreds of people around today who would sneak into the jazz clubs as underage fans to hear the likes of Getz, Bird, Chet Baker and others. And if they couldn’t get past the bouncer, they’d stay outside to listen.

Virgil Matheus, who grew up in St. Louis, said Burks “educated you. He was big on modern jazz and he explained it to the listeners. I was 14. I’d come home from school and turn on the radio and it just blew me away. It was Bop.”

From his wife’s perspective, Spider Burks’ career was a team effort. Although she wasn’t always directly involved in his work, Leah Sue Burks says “If I said I wanted to come to the station, he’d let me. I put shows together for him, typing up the song sheets. For the remote broadcasts I’d do the pre-interviews.”

Spider Burks owned interest in several clubs over his career and he was known to drive around in his big, pink Cadillac. He owned a horse farm and was dedicated to playing and promoting jazz. When that was no longer profitable to radio stations, Burks left the business and began working with inmates to ease their transition from jail into the community. Spider Burks died in September of 1974. The East St. Louis Monitor, in Burks’ obituary, called him one of the area’s sharpest dressers.

*Recent  research indicates that Wiley Price, Jr. is St. Louis’ first Black DJ.

When she began her radio career in 1939, she was known as Jane Foster. That was on WTMV, the progressive little AM station in East St. Louis. By the time she left the broadcasting and free-lance business a couple decades later, Kay Morton was a local celebrity. Now, as Ruth May Markus, she’s enjoying retirement in the Metro East. When she reminisces about her broadcasting career, she has no trouble holding the attention of her audience.
She joined the WTMV staff immediately after graduating from Washington University. There was no pay, just 25 cents a day to cover her bridge fare from St. Louis to East St. Louis. The studios were in the Broadview Hotel, and the town was bustling. She was given her own program, a half-hour women’s show five days a week. Of course, she had to line up her own guests and write her own scripts. When she began selling commercials she was able to generate some income.

“I used to go out to the airport at 2:00 in the morning (Thank goodness I had tolerant parents.), meet people, chat with them, bring them back. We didn’t have limos in those days. You picked them up and fetched people, doing it all yourself.”

When she moved to WIL in the early 1940s, Markus was given the name Kay Morton by program manager Dave Pasternak. Again, her job was to produce a daily program for women. Again, it was up to her to find guests whose subject matter would be appealing to her audience.“In October of 1941, I got to interview someone from the cultured pearl industry, and it turned out to be a very interesting Japanese gentleman. He found out I was going to be married the next month and he gave me a very beautiful string of pearls which I thoroughly enjoyed – wore on my wedding day walking down the aisle. Less than a month after that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 10, I was visited by the FBI. My pearl expert was one of many Japanese who had gone to radio stations around the country whose towers were on rooftops, and they turned that information over to their government. I still have the pearls.”

In 1943 Kay Morton moved from WIL’s Melbourne Hotel studios to the Star-Times Building in downtown St. Louis, the home of KXOK’s studios. “I worked with Harry Caray there for awhile. He and I did a thing about Hollywood and we’d get to giggling so much that they eventually had to reassign us. We had a 10-piece orchestra in the studios at KXOK; Ralph Sutton was a member, Bobby Swain who was a symphony violinist, Orville and William Klein.”

In those days there were engineers who did all the technical work in radio, and the announcers and talent worked out of a separate room. Engineers were also needed every time the station did a remote broadcast. “One of them, Ed Henry – I had to do an interview in a lion’s cage with Clyde Beatty. Of course, I was holding a little lion, and poor old Ed Henry just stayed outside and handed me the microphone through the bars. He refused to come inside.”

Ruth May Markus has lots of memories. During her work in radio she had the presence of mind to keep an autograph book for all of her guests to sign, and a glance through the yellowed pages yields some familiar names: Fannie Hurst, Sonja Henie, Duncan Hines, Karl Wallenda, Clyde Beatty, Claude Pepper, Cesar Romero and Edith Head.

“I was making $25 a week at WIL and KXOK, but I don’t know of anything I would rather have done in life. My being a woman made no difference one way or the other. I think the men I interviewed were a little nicer and maybe even a bit surprised that I knew what was going on.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 3/1999)

She was on her way to a job interview in Kansas City, but she never got past St. Louis. Anne Keefe got an early morning phone call from Robert Hyland, who convinced her it would be worth her while to put down roots here and work at KMOX.

During her stopover here, some of Keefe’s acquaintances let Hyland know of her extensive broadcast background, and he phoned her at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday.

“I got to the phone and he said, ‘This is Robert Hyland.’ Now I had no idea who Bob Hyland was. I’d been working in television in upstate New York for 20 years!”

He said, ‘I hear you’re a top-notch news broadcaster and I’m interested in hiring you.’ And I told him I wasn’t so sure he could afford me because radio people were paid a lot less than those of us in television. And he said, ‘I can afford anything I want.’”

Hyland had already dispatched a car to pick her up and soon Anne Keefe was sitting in the corner office at 1 Memorial Drive. After a brief conversation he asked her if she’d go on the air that night. That was in 1976. Seventeen years later Keefe retired from broadcasting, having attained renown as the woman in the KMOX lineup.

In 1976, broadcast operations were not enlightened in terms of gender equality, and Anne Keefe had just settled into a den of testosterone. Why? “Well, I was 50 years old. I was not a kid. If I’d been 25 I couldn’t have survived. The male talent were absolutely cold. Thank God for the engineers. They got me through it.”

KMOX wasn’t her first foray into radio. She’d been in that end of the broadcast business in 1946. “I got a job at WHAM while I was in college in Rochester [N.Y.]. It was a 50,000 watt station and they had ‘old time radio.’ They had copy writers, continuity writers, a full, 17-piece orchestra. Nothing was said on the air that hadn’t been written in advance. There was no ad-libbing. I learned the news business from the former newspaper guys who were working in our newsroom.

“I worked on the station’s dramas. They paid me $7.00 a show. I was a great screamer. Audiences would come to watch the production.”

In 1950, Anne Keefe moved into television, hosting “Anne’s Attic,” “Romper Room,” even a cooking show. Later, at age 50 and looking for work, Keefe didn’t immediately accept the offer to join the KMOX staff. She consulted with a friend in the St. Louis broadcast industry who warned her that Hyland was known as a man who would hire someone, but, tiring of that person quickly, would then find a reason to fire him or her.

She had two kids in college and one in high school, and as a single mother, she couldn’t afford to make such a risky move. Before saying “yes” to Robert Hyland, she was able to secure the offer of a backup job at a local tv station if things didn’t work out at KMOX, an arrangement she kept secret from Hyland. But things did work out at KMOX.

“Hyland was a star maker, and he never interfered with the content of my shows or my approach.
“When I first came here, I think I was too abrasive. The style back East was to hold people to account. That didn’t work here. It was too aggressive. My mother advised me on how to soften the approach by coming in the back door rather than using direct confrontation.”

In retrospect, the job she thought long and hard about taking turned out to be the best professional move she’d ever made. “I could call anybody in the world for my show. I could call the Soviet Union. I interviewed the greatest writers. It was an ideal job and the young people who worked with me were so wonderful. I can’t imagine anyone having a job like that today, and I got paid for it!”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 9/06)

Sterling Harkins, announcer and soloist at KWK, never sings alone!

His three-and-a-half-year-old daughter knows every program that he has on the air and plants her small self by the radio when it is time for them so she can sing with him, putting in variations all her own. Bettie Ann knows the words for all the currently popular melodies and shows promise of being a singer too.
Sterling Harkins came to KWK last July after successes as a singer at WODX in Mobile, Alabama. His family lives here and he listened to their pleas to hear him sing over the radio here. His guest performance received so much comment that before he left the studio, he was signed up as a staff artist.

A gift of being able to project his brown-eyed and sympathetic personality into his tenor voice is probably the greatest secret of the following he has amassed during his radio career both down south and here. His real career started when he was scarcely older than his daughter when he was a church soloist but he abandoned singing after graduating from the University of Missouri and went into business. The habit of being able to express himself in song was greater than the call of business triumphs and thus we have “Sterling Harkins announcing” and “Program by Sterling Harkins, tenor,” coming out of the air through a twist of the dial.

(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment 6/18/1932.)