Radio Jockey Quotes

Bob [Crane] was driven to success, and he sought perfection in his work, right from the start.

Sinatra’s final radio days were filled with minor quarter-hours and one full-length series in which he was relegated to the role of a disc jockey. By 1950 people were writing his professional obituary. His public image had taken a beating, his personal life a succession of wives, scrapes, and alleged friendships with gangsters. It would take a 1953 film, From Here to Eternity, and a subsequent acting career to save him.

From the race’s conception, the press viewed it with skepticism. Sportswriters argued that the rich event was a farce arranged to pad Seabiscuit’s bankroll. Del Mar, conscious of the potential conflict of interest for the Howards and Smiths, barred public wagering on the race. But the press’s distrust and the absence of gambling did nothing to cool the enthusiasm of racing fans. On the sweltering race day, special trains and buses poured in from San Diego and Los Angeles, filling the track with well over twenty thousand people, many more than the track’s official capacity. Lin plastered a twenty-foot LIGAROTI sign on the wall behind the “I’m for Ligaroti” section, and scores of Crosby’s movie friends, including Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Spencer Tracy and Ray Milland, took up their cerise and white pennants and filed in. “Is there anyone left in Hollywood?” wondered a spectator. Dave Butler led a chorus of Ligaroti cheers, and the crowd grew boisterous. Crosby perched on the roof with Oscar Otis, who would call the race for a national radio broadcast. In the jockeys’ room, Woolf suited up to man the helm on Seabiscuit while Richardson slipped on Ligaroti’s polka dots. Just before the race, Woolf and Richardson made a deal. No matter who won, they would “save,” or split, the purse between them.

The telephone company is urging people not to use the telephone unless it is absolutely necessary, in order to keep the lines open for emergency calls. We'll be right back after this break to give away a pair of Phil Collins concert tickets to caller number 95. -unidentified radio disc jockey after the 1990 Los Angeles earthquake

1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon announced he was not a crook, the year Edward G. Robinson and Noel Coward died. It was Devin Jones’s lost year. I was a twenty-one-year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford (with a good radio), occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart.

This series capitalized on the new Red scare of the early 1950s: 78 episodes were recorded, without any assistance from the FBI, which refused to cooperate. It didn’t matter: anti-Communist hysteria was at a peak, and by the end of 1952 I Was a Communist was scheduled on more than 600 stations—far more than if it had been on any network. The show was based on the book (and subsequent movie) by Matt Cvetic and purportedly told of his adventures as an undercover operative who joined the Communist Party to spy from within. Many of the stories contained double-edged conflicts: Cvetic constantly jockeyed for information, walking a tightrope among suspicious Party officials while unable to reveal his true mission even to his family, who shunned him. Communists were stereotyped, much as Hitler’s Nazis had been a few years before: they were seen as cold and humorless, with their single goal to enslave the world. Cvetic could never be sure who might be a Party spy. Dana Andrews gave it an air of Hollywood glamor, always closing with these words: “I was a Communist for the FBI. I walk alone.

Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1 Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2 For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3 What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits.

Jack Webb had been active in radio for several years before Dragnet propelled him to national prominence. He had arrived at KGO, the ABC outlet in San Francisco, an unknown novice in 1945. Soon he was working as a staff announcer and disc jockey. His morning show, The Coffee Club, revealed his lifelong interest in jazz music, and in 1946 he was featured on a limited ABC-West network in the quarter-hour docudrama One out of Seven. His Jack Webb Show, also 1946, was a bizarre comedy series unlike anything else he ever attempted. His major break arrived with Pat Novak: for 26 weeks Webb played a waterfront detective in a series so hard-boiled it became high camp. He moved to Hollywood, abandoning Novak just as that series was hitting its peak. Mutual immediately slipped him into a Novak sound-alike, Johnny Modero: Pier 23, for the summer of 1947. He played leads and bit parts on such series as Escape, The Whistler, and This Is Your FBI. He began a film career: in He Walked by Night (1948), Webb played a crime lab cop. The film’s technical adviser was Sergeant Marty Wynn of the Los Angeles police. Webb and Wynn shared a belief that pure investigative procedure was dramatic enough without the melodrama of the private eye. The seeds of Dragnet were sown on a movie set.

Then, in 1942, a disastrous strike against the record companies disrupted the industry and upset the delicate balance of business. Though it hit directly at record producers, the real target was radio. James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, was alarmed at the rapid proliferation of disc jockeys. He objected to the free use of recorded music on the air, charging that jocks had cost musicians their jobs at hundreds of radio stations. Petrillo wanted to impose fees at the source, the big companies like RCA and Columbia, where the records were produced. The final agreement, which was not accepted by the two biggest companies until 1944, created a union-supervised fund for indigent and aging musicians

While he is universally remembered as Colonel Hogan, Bob Crane must be credited for paving the way for radio personalities and disc jockeys for generations to come.

Bob Crane’s advancement to KNX is the stuff of legend.

Broadcaster's Poem I used to broadcast at night alone in a radio station but I was never good at it partly because my voice wasn't right but mostly because my peculiar metaphysical stupidity made it impossible for me to keep believing their was somebody listening when it seemed I was talking only to myself in a room no bigger than an ordinary bathroom I could believe it for a while and then I'd get somewhat the same feeling as when you start to suspect you're the victim of a practical joke So one part of me was afraid another part might blurt out something about myself so terrible that even I had never until that moment suspected it This was like the fear of bridges and other high places: Will I take off my glasses and throw them into the water, although I'm half blind without them? Will I sneak up behind myself and push? Another thing: As a reporter I covered an accident in which a train ran into a car, killing three young men, one of whom was beheaded. The bodies looked boneless, as such bodies do More like mounds of rags and inside the wreckage where nobody could get at it the car radio was still playing I thought about places the disc jockey's voice goes and the things that happen there and of how impossible it would be for him to continue if he really knew.

The truth of the New Democrats’ purpose was presented by the journalist Joe Klein in his famous 1996 roman à clef about Clinton’s run for the presidency, Primary Colors. Although the novel contains more than a nod to Clinton’s extramarital affairs, Klein seems broadly sympathetic to the man from Arkansas as well as to the DLC project more generally. Toward the equality-oriented politics of the Democratic past he is forthrightly contemptuous. Old people who recall fondly the battles of the Thirties, for example, are objects of a form of ridicule that Klein thinks he doesn’t even need to explain; it is self-evident that people who care about workers are fools. And when an old-school “prairie populist” challenges the Clinton character for the nomination, Klein describes him as possessing “a voice made for crystal radio sets” and “offering Franklin Roosevelt’s jobs program (forestry, road-building) to out-of-work computer jockeys.” Get it? His views are obsolete! “It was like running against a museum.” That was the essential New Democrat idea: The world had changed, but certain Democratic voters expected their politicians to help them cling to a status that globalization had long since revoked. However,

I dated a disc jockey for a time, a man I met at a jazz club. That went on for only a few months. After he’d worried me half to death with too much talking, I dumped him by calling into a radio station and dedicating the Billie Holiday song to him “You Ain’t Gonna Bother Me No More.

Meanwhile, I still worked with Dr. Ferrante. He came up with different ways to try to help me with my approach to football. Back then, we listened to Walkmans and cassette tapes before games. This was almost ten years before Apple invented the iPod. Dr. Ferrante asked me to put together a playlist of the top twenty pregame songs that got me in the right football mood. Then he asked me to record my dad, my mom, my sister, and my brother as they each gave me a positive thought to take out onto the field. I took all the recordings to a local radio disc jockey, who was nice enough to mix them together on a cassette tape for me.

Peary played the role in its best years, he and Waterman shared about equally in real time as Gildy at the NBC microphone. After Gildersleeve, Peary shaved his mustache, lost 50 pounds, and, in 1954, turned up as a disc jockey on KABC. He died March 30, 1985; Waterman died Feb. 1, 1995.