News from Our Archives

(By Nancy Frazer)
Getting Henry, Zeb and Otto all rounded-up for an interview requires so much effort that I was exhausted when I finally got them cornered. Gasping for breath, I, by degrees, managed to get this much information out of them.

They are quite as aimless off the air and the stage as they are on – even after I got them all together, they sat on the edges of their chairs and wanted to know after each question whether or not that was all and they could go. How they ever all get into a studio at once remains a miracle but we have their daily programs over KMOX as positive evidence of their one-purposeness when it comes to music.

They were all born in Topeka, Kansas, and all came to radio by devious routes. Being all born in one place is about the only unified thing about them except their programs and so we’ll have to take them singly.

Henry – the first in point of name of the trio – is Merle Hausch and plays the guitar as well as sings with Zeb. Some years ago, a paper hanger in Topeka had a dream of being on the radio in an act named Henry and Hiram. He had never been on the air in his life but the dream was so impelling that he took the name Henry and started out to find himself a partner. Two weeks later, he was on the stage in Topeka doing the act of which he had dreamed (This is a true story. All three of them swear to it).

He took guitar lessons from the time he was twelve years old and the first tune he learned was “Gates Ajar.” So it was with guitar playing that he essayed to make his radio fame – and he has. He went from Topeka triumphs to Chicago and then to the Dixie Columbia Chain. When his act with Hiram was broken up, he found Zeb and then they set for Otto. They had never met before – although they grew up in the same town!

Then there’s Zeb, whose real name is Rene Hartley. He always smokes a big, black “seegar” and notoriously never talks on the air. He is reticent about himself but this we managed to elicit from him.

He took his first violin lessons from a Negro who was in jail – no Zeb wasn’t in jail but the Negro was and he was the best violinist in Topeka. So every day the little lad trudged down to the jail to learn to “fiddle.” Since that time he studied two years with Bissing in Chicago.

He has had two orchestras all his own in Topeka and Kansas City where he violined and led and has composed several song hits. He does all of the arranging for the three as he did for his orchestra. He is tall and slender and has gloriously wavy hair. He is not sure where he got the name Zeb except that youngsters always called him that.

Making personal appearances lately, he has gone back to stage work from whence he came but he likes radio work best of all. “More interesting,” he says, with Calvin Coolidge brevity.

Last, but in no way least, is jovial Otto who was christened Ted Morse. He played a bugle much to the delight of all his neighbors and had a band all his own when he was a youngster. His family bought him and trumpet and a trumpeter he has been ever since. He started in stage work at a very early age and appeared here with the “Six Brown Brothers.”

He was the leader of the 139th Infantry Band in France and graduated from the American Band Leaders’ School in Chaumont, France. He sings second tenor with Henry when their voices come over the air. He is jovial and as much like the title “Otto” as anyone could possibly be. The others gave him that name when he joined them in Chicago.

Otto’s favorite tune to sing is “Ach die Lieber Augustine” and by some amazing manner he has managed to grow one hair on his head that has attained the length of four inches!

They have a collection of more than 700 songs that they sing including ballads, hymns and hillbilly music and they nearly always play with their music perched in front of them. The only tune that they could all agree on as being their favorite was the “Naughty Waltz.”

Zeb supplies the arrangements. Henry has amassed the words for their songs and Otto is the droll wit. They all contribute real musical training and experience to make them the popular trio that they are.

There they are – at least those are the last words that I managed to get as they rushed off in three directions. All born in Topeka – got together to make radio fame in Chicago and came to KMOX where they have made it.

And that’s Henry, Zeb and Otto when they whale into their rollicking melodies with “Let ‘er go, Zeb – Let ‘er go.”

(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment 10/29/1932).

The story of the Girls of the Golden West is one of determination and centered purpose. They wanted to be singers, they wanted to sing over the air and they have succeeded.

Their real names are Dollie and Millie Good. They come from Texas and at heart they are real Texans. Their mother plays the guitar, their father sings and all eight children are musical.

When they were youngsters, they were ushered into the front room after supper and had singing bees all their own. Their oldest sister played the piano, both their father and mother played and they all sang. They had contests to see who could sing the loudest and best, whistling contests and so on and hilarious in their idea of make-believe, they always pretended they were on the stage. They “played like” they were bowing to vast audiences and they acknowledged the applause as graciously as if they were.
While Dollie, the youngest, was still in school she decided that she wanted to play and sing more than anything else. Her mother told her that she would either have to stop school or stop spending so much time in learning to play a guitar. So Dollie, intent on her purpose, stopped school.

She wanted to play a guitar because her mother played one but she wasn’t quite sure just how to go about it. She played a ukulele ever since she was a child. and so she tuned the guitar in just the same way and managed to get music of a sort out of it. Then she started harmonizing with her own music and playing while Millie sang.

When they had learned about two songs together they decided to attempt a radio tryout. They went down to WIL and had an audition on one of the two songs that they knew and they were so well received that they were given a job immediately. They were scared to death for their repertoire was limited and so they started learning some popular songs. The program director there told them to play and sing more “hill billy” songs and they were so new in the game that they didn’t even know what he meant!

After about six weeks, they decided to devote more of their time to learning to sing and concentrated on that. They came down to try out on “Hank” Richards’ County Fair last summer and have been at KMOX since then with the exception of three months they spent at the KER outlet in Milford, Kansas.

Besides being talented, (they both play banjos and violin) they are pretty and friendly and happy in the work that they are doing. Millie has dark brown hair and laughing brown eyes and Dollie is taller, quite slender with broad shoulders and has light brown hair and a smile that would win anyone.

Their childhood ambition of being on stage is gratified in the personal appearances that they make throughout the surrounding cities. They are a part of Wyoming Jack’s rodeo unit that is booked out for personal appearances and they are featured as the only two girls singing yodeling Western songs on the air. Millie harmonizes yodeling which is a unique feat.

When they sing “I Want to Go Back to Texas,” they really mean it for, as they explain with a dreamy look in their eyes, they really love Texas and the West. They can visualize the mountains when they sing about them, they can picture the camp fires and are really inspired when they are singing about that country. It takes real feeling to be able to sing about that territory, they explain, and they have it.

They appear on the Early Morning Farm Folks Hour, the KMOX County Fair as well as on special programs when Wyoming Jack is the announcer of his own Western Rodeo.

They have talent and ambition and a native interest in things, they are determined to succeed further in radio work and in talking to them and realizing what pretty, clever girls they were, I decided that they started out to win, and at the moment that is…success.

(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment 4/22/1933).

 It was just like those stories you hear the old timers tell: He was a 15-year-old kid who was so fascinated with the radio business that he just hung around the radio station until someone decided to hire him. His name – Dick Castanie.

When Dick was 15 in the late 1950s, he started spending all his free time at the KCFM studios in the Boatmen’s Bank Building downtown. The station had no openings for announcers, but Chief Engineer Ed Goodberlet recommended Dick be hired on a part-time basis to do some engineering work like meter reading.

“I got paid $19 a week for about 35 hours,” he says.

The station’s format consisted of instrumental music tapes. The “studio” from which the broadcasts originated was a room at the top of the building next to the elevator shaft, which made it impossible to talk on the radio when the elevator motors started up.

Castanie says that was no problem. Back then the KCFM broadcasts were based on music,  not personality. When listeners heard a voice, it was seldom, if ever, live. The drop-ins were recorded at KCFM’s other building at 532 DeBaliviere – where station owner Harry Eidelman owned and operated a hi-fi shop – and brought downtown to be broadcast. All the music was on huge reels of recording tape which were played on the big machines in that small room at the top of Boatmen’s Bank. Castanie says there was an emergency microphone there to be used should the need arise.

Eidelman had bought the KCFM frequency from KXOK for $1 after KXOK-FM had shut down. In an effort to keep breathing life into KXOK-FM, the station’s owner, the St. Louis Star-Times, had tried something called “transit radio.” The city’s streetcar and bus system had been outfitted with FM receivers tuned to the station’s frequency. But lawsuits shut down transit radio in other cities, and in 1954, Harry Eidelman became the proud owner of the frequency. KMOX gave Eidelman a used Western Electric control board from its old Mart Building studios.

“I remember Harry bought all the radio receivers used in the streetcars,” says Castanie. “We converted them for use in automobiles and sold them over the air for $19.95 apiece.”

A couple years later, Castanie got a chance to jump stations when a friend let him sit in and watch a show. While Dick Kent was on the air on KWK, the 17-year-old Castanie sat in an adjacent room next to the turntable operator behind the glass. These operators were leftovers from the days when radio stations had employed live musicians. Their union, the American Federation of Musicians, negotiated a deal with the station that would allow members to continue employment as “platter spinners.” Castanie was hired at KWK in 1959 as vacation relief for the turntable people, but he had to join the musicians’ union. His dad loaned him the dues, and Dick was soon elevated to a full-time slot. 

“I worked with Buddy Moreno and King Richard, and for a short time with Gil Newsome before he went to KSD. Gene Davis was the program director, and I worked with him when he was the midday announcer in 1961,” says Castanie.

That union situation hit an interesting juncture while he was working at KWK. Radio stations were limiting their playlists, so they dubbed most of their popular songs onto tape cartridges. This meant the turntable operators were no longer playing records, and they weren’t supposed to handle the tapes. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers argued its members should be playing the carts since they were the audio engineers, and the announcers’ union, AFTRA, argued its members should be playing the carts since the little plastic contraptions were part of program content. The entire argument centered on who would push the button to start the tape cartridge.

Castanie has other vivid memories of his work at KWK: “I was there during the ‘treasure hunt’ fiasco, and we had to go to work through the back of the building because the crowd up front was very upset about being scammed.” KWK was later found guilty of hiding the “treasure” in Tower Grove Park the day before it was found by a listener even though clues to its whereabouts had been broadcast for several days. The Federal Communications Commission eventually found the station guilty of conducting a fraudulent contest and revoked KWK’s license to broadcast, shutting down its operation.

When Ed Ceries signed on with a new FM station in St. Louis in 1961, Castanie went to work for him. The station, known as KSHE, featured female announcers playing classical music and was located in the basement of Ceries’ home in Crestwood. Castanie says his work with the new station didn’t last long: “I was let go because they couldn’t afford to pay me.”
Looking back on his experience over the years gives Castanie a different perspective, especially when it comes to the real reason he was hired at his KCFM job. “Years later my uncle, who managed the building, said that Harry [Eidelman] hired me hoping that if he couldn’t pay the rent there my uncle wouldn’t evict him.”

(Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Journalism Review. Originally published 11/2001).