Radio

You can’t ever tell how Marvin Mueller, announcer at KMOX and star of the Uncle Remus Stories, will greet you. He has a perfectly normal voice but he scarcely ever uses it. One time he says hello or comments on the weather with a distinctly English accent or in a broad German – the next time he’s a tottering old Ozarkian or a kindly old Negro of the Southland. It’s no trick at all he says to change rapidly from one person into another by a simple modulation of the voice but whether it is or not – he’s a real artist at it.

Because of this unusual talent, Marvin figures in all of the dramas produced by the KMOX Players and his characterizations are so perfect that the illusion of the actual presence of as many as ten characters at once is created by him.

During the last four or five months since he’s been at KMOX he has “been” Calvin Coolidge, Joseph of Nazareth, Samuel Insull, Abraham Lincoln, George Bungle, Herbert Hoover as well as several hundred original characterizations. He is now heard as the kindly old Uncle Remus, the Optical Service Physician, and has a full-time announcing position.

He was in charge of a banquet at Washington University several years ago and since he was a constant radio listener, he decided to burlesque several of the most notable programs as a means of entertainment. He couldn’t seem to find the right people to help him with the idea and so he did it all himself! Later he decided to try his hand at radio and as an inspiration, he wrote a play titled “The Adventures of Lord Algy” in which he portrayed a ridiculous Englishman seeing the sights of America. He tried out at KWK and the program was such a success that it ran for twenty weeks.

Since that time he has been on WIL where he was featured in the Pirate Club program as Portugee Joe, Professor Pete, The Spider and other colorful figures.

Marvin is a Junior at Washington University – although he has now abandoned the idea of being an English and French professor – and makes excellent grades. Although he has never had any training in elocution, he is a member of Alpha Phi Omega, the national debating fraternity, and has studied public speaking.

For the most part, aside from his real talent, he is a merry sort of chap with deep brown eyes, brunette hair and a ruddy complexion. He is acclaimed as being one of the best authorities on the presentation of classical music programs on the air because of his studies of foreign languages.

His voice comes to you many times each day in plays or regular programs and if you didn’t know his trick, it would seem that he is a different person each time. As Uncle Remus, he glorifies Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox with a humor that is appealing to all ages of listeners and when the script calls for it, this amazing young man adds the singing of Southern songs to his list of accomplishments.

(Originally published in Radio & Entertainment 3/4/1933)

E.B. was #1 with St. Louis teenagers even before rock and roll hit the local airwaves.
He began his ten-year-plus stint on local radio in 1951. It was a time when network radio programming was breathing its last gasps and disc jockeys had taken the place of the cancelled programs. Popular music of the day was performed by the likes of Eddie Fisher, Patti Page, Frankie Laine, Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Mario Lanza, and Les Paul and Mary Ford.

And all the kids knew E.B., Ed Bonner. They heard him on KXOK from 1951 to 1958 and WIL from 1958 to 1962, but his work involved a lot more than his airshifts. It seemed as though he spent every spare minute with his listeners, doing up to four personal appearances per week.

After graduating high school in California, Bonner became a fireman. His first radio job came in Idaho Falls, ID, but wanderlust soon took hold and he went to a baseball tryout, ending up as a shortstop on a Chicago Cubs’ farm team. Pro baseball didn’t pan out, but another radio gig cemented his future. Bonner became a disc jockey in Lynchburg, VA. The broadcast career was interrupted again by a 27 month Navy obligation, after which he found himself in St. Louis. He was 28.

His daily shows were broadcast from the KXOK studios in the Star-Times Building downtown at 12th and Delmar, and there was always an open invitation to teen listeners to come down and watch him work. His first show on the station was “St. Louis Ballroom.” Later he was heard from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 to noon on Saturday. One of his fans, Wayne Brasler, is now a professor at the University of Chicago. “In the early ‘50s,” Brasler remembers, “Ed got a teenaged sidekick on his Saturday morning shows, Maureen Arthur of University City, who went on to being part of Ernie Kovac’s cast and then on to TV and film acting in Hollywood.”
The early 1950s were also a time of unrest in the nation. Men were being drafted and sent off to war in Korea, rumors of communists among us led to nationally broadcast witch-hunt hearings in Washington, and the nation’s Negroes were beginning a movement toward equality and against discrimination.

In Prom Magazine, reporter Mary Lou Matthews quoted an unnamed civic official who said “Ed Bonner has probably done more to make St. Louis Teenagers prejudice-free, responsible citizens than any other person in show business.” His personal appearance roster included the Catholic Youth Organization, Cancer Fund, National Conference of Christians and Jews, Red Cross and the campaign for the Y.M.H.A. He was remembered as a sharp dresser with a great voice whose appearance at a public event would guarantee the event’s success.

E.B.’s influence was felt by the record industry too. Al Chotin was a record distributor who was quoted by Post-Dispatch gossip columnist Jerry Berger remembering Bonner. Chotin said Bonner, whose nickname was “Monkey,” was the top disc jockey in St. Louis, and when it came to promoting records, “If you didn’t offer Ed the artist first, forget it. He wanted total exclusivity.” At Christmas, Bonner was always showered with gifts from local record stores, but it wasn’t payola. It was their way of recognizing his contribution to their business.

Bonner held down a slot on KXOK until 1958, when he moved his allegiance to WIL, which had studios in the “lower level” of the Coronado Hotel on Lindell across from the St. Louis University campus. Neither E.B. nor KXOK management would comment on the change in employment. He was given the noon to 4 p.m. shift. His short-lived replacement on KXOK was Buddy MacGregor. It seems E.B.’s listeners moved up the dial to 1430 with him. The 1959 Hooper radio survey showed him topping every other disc jockey in town, including WIL’s Dick Clayton and Jack Carney.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 3/03)

“There was a joint across the street from KMOX, a tavern. We used to hang out in that tavern.”

The speaker is Harry Gibbs. He’s talking about how he got started in the radio business with the help of his friend Chuck Barnhart.

“Chuck was one of the most talented guys I’ve ever known. He was remarkable. He used to go on the air about 5:30 in the afternoon on KMOX and he would do a one-man soap opera. He played all the parts, and he did it strictly by winging it. He didn’t write it. I used to go down there and bum with him. “He was a copywriter. He was a show producer. Whatever you needed he could do. I needed a job bad and I had narrated this housing show on KMOX with Chuck.”

Barnhart, along with Post-Dispatch drama critic Jack Balch, took up Gibbs’ cause and pitched him to one of their acquaintances.

“They talked to Mike Henry at WTMV and they said ‘You’ve gotta take this guy.’ They bugged him every day. They’d call him and ask if he’d hired me yet. He finally said ‘Okay. Send this paragon of everything over to see me.’”

The broadcast career of Harry Gibbs is usually associated with his many years on KSD-TV (Channel 5) as Texas Bruce, host of the Wranglers’ Cartoon Club. Few people realize he started here in radio in the late ‘40s.

WTMV, at that time, was an interesting place. Located in East St. Louis’ Broadview Hotel on the mezzanine, the station, according to Gibbs, was much more free-wheeling than the business is today. “Mike had employed quite a few people who really needed work. Ray Schmidt, the sports guy, was one of those Mike referred to as his ‘crippled children.’ Ray would get pretty well loaded and he had a habit. In the middle of his sports cast, when he came to a stopping place, he’d put his head down on the table and sleep a little bit.”

Staff members in the small but mighty radio station were expected to wear many hats. “There was a program that I did at 11 in the morning,” says Gibbs. “It was just a sort of a thing where I talked to myself for an hour. It seemed like forever. I’d just open the mic and wing it. I was talking to anybody who was listening.

“I also wrote copy for the whole station. I can still remember writing ‘Merry Christmas’ spots for the funeral parlor. Anything that they were going to put on the air, I wrote. I had a sort of an office right next door to the men’s john and everybody went through there at one time or another.”

The radio business itself was very loose compared with later years. Gibbs’ voice could often be heard on several different stations in the same week, often on the same day. “I’d sit in that little office and write copy and then I’d come back across the river and do ‘Land We Live In,’ and then eventually the Pet Milk program.”

Musicians were the same way, with their groups playing on whichever stations found sponsors for them. And the pay was so low that anyone who had a family to support would take whatever work was available.

So when the opportunity to do a show on a network came along, Gibbs grabbed it. The show, sponsored by Pet Milk, was a conception of Gardner Advertising, headquartered in St. Louis. They wrote all the scripts, hired the talent, bought the time on the networks and produced the show at local radio studios. Mary Lee Taylor was heard on NBC and CBS during its run.

Harry Gibbs remembers that the Mary Lee Taylor Show started out as a women’s program that gave out recipes, but then Gardner decided to expand the offering. “They’d decided that the Mary Lee Taylor thing, which was just recipes, needed to be goosed up, so they threw this 15-minute soap opera into it.”

And that meant more work for St. Louis actors. “I was Jim and Tommye Rodemeyer was Sally.

Little Eddie Stemmler played Spud. Sue Cost was Mary Lee Taylor.”

Since the show was heard nationally, the work schedule was a lot more complicated than one might imagine. “We would do a broadcast from the KMOX studios in the morning for every market from St. Louis east. Then we’d come back in the afternoon and do it for everything west. Then we’d go to Technisonic Studios and do one special show for Utah, where Pet Milk was marketed under the name of Sego. That show was transcribed and shipped out.”

And in those days of wearing many professional hats, it was necessary to become a chameleon, adapting to one’s surroundings to meet the needs of station management. In addition to his appearances on a weekly network program, Harry Gibbs also found himself hosting a women’s show on another St. Louis station.

“There was a time when I was doing a morning talk show on KSD. Then I’d head over to KWK for a noon show sponsored by Biederman’s. The concept was that women in the listening audience would come to the studios with the most useless thing they could find in their house and then describe it on the air. The winner would get me for the rest of the day. I did all kinds of chores – whatever they wanted – and then would take them to the Chase for dinner.

“My favorites were two little girls from East St. Louis who won. They wanted to go to the Forest Park Highlands. I rode that roller coaster so much that I could practically drive it from memory by the end of the day.”
After several years of a professional roller coaster in St. Louis radio, Harry Gibbs jumped at the chance to host a kids’ show on the newest medium – television.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/2006.)

The days of free-wheeling rock radio in St. Louis are history, but many of those who participated enjoy looking back and remembering. Peter Skye recently took time to reminisce.

Things started out innocently enough. Skye came to St. Louis from the New York area to study Applied Mathematics at Washington University. On an impulse visit to campus radio station KFRH he and his roommate student John Gilbert decided it might be fun to be disc jockeys. The carrier current station could only be heard around the campus, but that didn’t matter. Station manager Phil Steinberg, himself a student, put them on the air. The pair was bitten by the radio bug.

“Things were really loose in those days,” Skye says. “We hopped around and stopped in and saw all the local stations. They’d all let us come in and watch. Nick Charles was the all-night guy at KXOK. John and I used to go over there and bug him. The studio at the time was in an old house. Big studio as far as radio goes.

“Dave Scott was the program director out at KIRL in St. Charles. It was a Top 40 station with three towers with a banana-type signal pattern that got them into St. Louis. I visited it once and was fascinated by his cart machine system. When one tape cartridge finished playing it would automatically trip-start the next one.”

Fast forward to a cinder block shack in Crestwood. A guy named Ron Elz is making some changes at a radio station called KSHE, and Gilbert and Skye are disc jockeys on a big time commercial FM station. John Gilbert has become John Roberts, and the atmosphere of the station and chemistry with the listeners are the stuff dreams are made of. “Elz instinctively knew all about demographics and the business side of radio, and that’s what helped make KSHE a success as the market’s “underground” radio station from the beginning. He personally took both KSHE and KADI-FM to rock. When Elz changed KADI to Top 40, he had me generate the playlists by computer. I wrote the computer programs to do this while I was still a student and got a full class credit at Washington University for the effort. Boy, did the announcers complain. They hated having to follow the lists,” Skye says.

There had been some sort of disagreement at KSHE that caused Elz to leave for KADI. He suggested to management that John Roberts be named his successor as program director. Ron Lipe was there, variously known as “Ron Brothers” and “Prince Knight.” So was Bob Skaggs, whose air name was “Jack Davis.” In Skye’s words, “The program director had his hands full.”

At KADI-FM, owner Richard Miller offered Skye an airshift, which Skye accepted. “This is Peter Skye, your curly headed kid in the third row, on the KADI Original Oldies Show!” He served as chief engineer and did morning drive Tuesday through Friday. Sam Kaiser did the morning show on Mondays so Skye could sleep in after the late Sunday oldies show. “Rich Dalton, with whom I worked at KADI, was an extraordinary person. He cared more about the audience than any other jock I’ve worked with. That is his secret: His caring comes through on his show and everyone senses it.”

Programming the oldies show was a challenge. The station’s music library wasn’t varied enough to support a show like his, but a solution came in the form of another announcer at the station, Joe Edwards. Skye remembers: “Joe supplied all the records for the oldies show. I still have the book he published based on the Billboard charts. Joe was the nicest guy I ever worked with. I hold him in the highest regard.”

“On Sunday, September 23, 1973, one of the news teletype machines in the KADI building on Bomparte caught fire (a bad bearing in the motor according to the fire marshal) which lit the varnished wall paneling which then came up the stairs. John Killian, who had been ‘Johnny K.’ on KXOK, was on the air at the time. The whole building burned – a six-alarm fire. I owned and drove the KADI Car, my fastback yellow Mustang with KADI plastered all over it, and was up in North County dropping off my date when I heard the station go off the air. I hit the flashers and came in at 90 miles per hour. Fire trucks everywhere.”

“A policeman stopped me at the driveway entrance and I rolled down the window and yelled ‘I’m the chief engineer’ and he waved me through. I went into the building with the first firefighters because, without windows and with lots of rooms, they weren’t sure what they would find. Two firemen were on the roof and it gave way, dumping them into the building. They were brought out and an ambulance came full-tilt-boogie across the open field in reverse (the driveway was full of fire trucks) and the driver didn’t notice the guy wires supporting the big 385’ antenna. He hit one and the back of the ambulance rode up the wire until the wheels were off the ground. Several guys had to push it off. Wow, that tower shook!”

Skye was also a jock on KSLQ working for program director Gary Bridges in 1974. “It was funny getting calls from girls who had listened to me at KADI and KSHE wondering what I was doing at Top 40 KSLQ! Mike ‘The Red Baron’ Jeffries was a jock at the Q back then. He was probably the most energetic announcer I’ve ever worked with. His upbeat style was truly infectious.” The job was short-lived, with Peter Skye heading west to try his hand at a different side of the business. He can now be found in Hollywood, where, among other jobs, he worked for 14 years helping Casey Kasem produce “American Top 40.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 5/02)

It’s probably a part of life for many teenagers. One day while listening to the radio, there’s that exclamation to one’s self: “I could do what that disc jockey’s doing, and I could do it better.”

While there may be a lot of truth to that statement today, it’s a sentiment that’s been around as long as there’s been radio. In the very early days of the industry, people were literally taken off the street and put in local radio studios to help fill air time as piano players or singers. Within a few years, each station had its own stable of talent, but managers were still interested in what the public had to offer.

Regular auditions were held by stations looking for more talent. Here in St. Louis stations provided on-air exposure for amateurs. KSD ran a show called “Stars of Tomorrow” which the station called “A radio broadcast given entirely by boys and girls of the St. Louis vicinity who are not more than 16 years of age.” One of the top performers on this show in 1933 was 12-year-old Marshall Zwick, who appeared several times playing Sousa march music on the xylophone.

Radio & Entertainment, a weekly equivalent of today’s TV Guide, even ran a two-page feature story encouraging people to audition, but noting in the headline, “You have three chances out of 500 to become a radio star, if you have talent.” One can imagine a weekly cattle call of people, all of whom think they have what it takes to be a star. And since many people were stretching to make ends meet during The Depression, some were willing to do whatever it took to put food on the table.

Studio auditions were held at KWK each Friday morning. Amateurs had to perform before a screening committee made up of members of the station’s musical and on-air staffs. At WIL, program director Franklyn MacCormack was the decision maker, often offering advice on how applicants could perform better. KMOX pianist Margo Clark handled all musical auditions at the station, which was only fitting since she herself had obtained her job through the same process several years earlier.

KMOX even held an audition on the air each week, which was a tradition at the station for years. Over 30 hopefuls were given a tryout on the airwaves and feedback came in from listeners. It was through this process that KMOX hired its chief announcer Woody Klose and one of its well-known hillbilly stars, Roy Queen.

Not that all the applicants were star quality. One local man showed up at his audition saying he could play 14 different instruments, and he had made each one of them himself out of soap and cigar boxes.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 6/06)

What began on KMOX in 1937 became a bastion of radio drama for 25 years in St. Louis, thanks in part to the work of a twenty-something man named Kensinger Jones.

“The Land We Live In” was a presentation of Union Electric, heard at 5:30 Sunday evenings and performed before a studio audience. Each episode was a recreation of an historic event or series of events from the St. Louis area. Ken Jones was hired by KMOX in 1945, ostensibly as a continuity writer, but as he put it more succinctly, “My real work was to make sure there was never again a shortage of scripts for ‘The Land We Live In’ radio show.” He and his young wife Alice worked in conjunction with director Ted Westcott and music director Seth Greiner (Alice was never on the payroll) to produce 52 half-hour shows a year.

Even though that number was later cut to 39, the schedule was brutal. Jones says he did get some help from free-lance writers from time to time, but he still was expected to be the script editor.

An average week, Jones says, went something like this: “From 1946 on, Alice and I lived in a log house just outside of House Springs. That’s where I wrote the shows. We’d do our research at the Central Library, the Missouri Historical Society, and by visiting individuals related to stories. That would take Saturday through Tuesday or Wednesday.

“I’d write frantically on Wednesday and deliver the script to KMOX at the Mart Building where it had to be duplicated. Copies would go to Ted Westcott for casting, Seth Greiner for music, and to Walter Heren at U.E. for client approval. There would be a quick rewrite and then a full cast and orchestra rehearsal.

“Then the show would be timed and recorded. On Thursday morning the rehearsal record would be played for the agency and the client. Their suggestions were cranked into a final rewrite on Friday or maybe Saturday. On Sunday at 2:45, a rehearsal with rewritten ‘final’ scripts commenced. A timed run through occurred from 4 – 4:30. Ted raised his hand and threw the first cue at 5:30. Usually by that time I was back in House Springs working on the next show.”

His wife Alice adds that he was often researching several shows at the same time, and he was picking up free-lance work on the side and writing other shows for KMOX.

Sponsor Union Electric decided in the late 1940s to move the show from KMOX to KSD, and the writers and producers moved too.

In conversation with Kensinger Jones, it’s obvious he and Alice loved what they were doing. They dug deeply into St. Louis history, and while it would be impossible to recreate historically accurate dialog, all facts represented on the show were correct. Suggestions for show topics would come in from listeners, some of whom had material to help the Joneses in their research.

As Ken Jones says, in radio, sound effects, words and music, along with the listeners’ willing imagination, can create anything you want, from a skirmish to a full scale battle. “The theater of the mind is surely the best auditorium ever provided for a writer’s work.”

The scope of their accomplishment is even more admirable when one realizes that this was done before computers, before word processors, before the Internet. The late Bea Adams, who worked at UE’s ad agency, Gardner, wrote of this process in her book Let’s Not Mince any Bones, “In an office only big enough for a small desk, typewriter, chair and raft of reference books, Kensinger Jones wrote “’The Land We Live In.’ He wrote it, lived it, researched it, personally watched over it and shaped it into one of the finest radio shows ever to come out of St. Louis.”

An October 1975 St. Louisan magazine article penned by Nancy Leutwiler told of our town’s local actors who made a good living as regulars on “The Land We Live In.” Hiring was usually done through the St. Louis Players’ Guild, depending on the number of characters needed for the week’s production.

If only a few were needed, they came from the on-air staff of the individual radio stations. Conditions for the actors could be as stressful as they were for the writers. ”

The first run-through came Thursday afternoon when parts were assigned, and the production crew would tell actors which accents, if any were needed. Then followed rehearsals, musical insertions, dress rehearsal, and live production four days later when the staff announcer intoned: “The Land We Live In, where if you listen, you can hear echoes of the glamorous past.

There were also some well-known guest stars. One of Ken Jones’ fondest memories was of the program that featured Maureen O’Hara, a show written as a tribute to the late John Cardinal Glennon. Jones gave Miss O’Hara the narrator’s character, that of Kathy Dunn, a niece of Glennon’s friend Andy Dunn. But as the live presentation was wrapping up, Miss O’Hara began to sob and left the stage. Director Westcott immediately cued the orchestra and Jones was summoned to go onstage and finish the wrap-up speech. Later, Maureen O’Hara told those assembled that the script evoked such vivid memories of her own childhood in Ireland that she was emotionally overwhelmed.

Alice Jones was Ken’s partner throughout the whole “Land We Live In” effort. “It was an exciting time in my life,” she says. “Young, married, no kids, no car, and all these wonderful stories.” The couple truly enjoyed their work here.

“The Land We Live In” was primarily a public relations vehicle for the Union Electric Company. After the final broadcast in April of 1952, Kensinger and Alice Jones moved to Chicago where he accepted an attractive offer from the Leo Burnett ad agency writing for television.

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 10/04)