Tag: WNYE-FM

Eartha Kitt and I Go Way Back

The AP story was short and to the point:

WESTPORT, Conn. — Eartha Kitt, the original Catwoman on the Batman television show, suffered minor injuries when the vehicle she was driving collided with another car and flipped over, police said.

Kitt, 77, was treated at Norwalk Hospital and released, hospital officials said.

The accident occurred Thursday morning, said Sgt. Jerry Shannon. Kitt’s all-terrain vehicle was crossing an intersection when it collided with a car, causing Kitt’s vehicle to roll over onto its roof, police said.

Her two toy poodles, who were in the actress-singer’s car, escaped injury.

The cause of the crash was under investigation.

I’m glad she’s out of the hospital. I’m surprised she lives here in Connecticut. To mention Eartha Kitt and not mention her one-of-a-kind voice and amazing jazz perfomances is tragic.

I first ran into Eartha Kitt in 1967 at CBS on West 57th Street in New York. Since I was in high school at the time, you might be wondering how I got there? It was not where most 16 year olds got to hang out.

In high school, I was a radio actor. My junior and senior year, instead of taking English in the conventional way, I was a member of the New York All City Radio Workshop. The workshop members, drawn from high schools across the city, were cast in radio plays which ran on WNYE-FM, the Board of Education’s station.

Even in the late 60s this was an anachronism. Drama on radio had been dead for a decade or more. On the other hand FM radio was a underdeveloped technology that few people listened to. We were the worst of both worlds!

At the same time, somehow, the Board of Education ‘sponsored’ a weekly public affairs program, “Dial M for Music,” which ran on WCBS – TV. Why the Board of Education would care about this was, and still is, beyond me. It seemed then, as it does now, like a weasel deal for Channel 2 to get some sort of FCC Brownie points.

“Dial M” brought jazz acts into the Broadcast Center and then taped their performances in front of high school kids. That’s where I came in. Instead of rounding up random kids and then letting them roam free through the CBS studio complex (which is what we did, as the show taped 2-3 episodes on a Saturday afternoon), they called on members of the All City Workshop. I guess the idea was, we already knew a little about broadcasting and would be less troublesome.

I got to see some jazz legends – people like Lionel Hampton, Mongo Santamaria and Hazel Scott. And, I got to spend 6-7 Saturdays a year at CBS, poking around the studios and signing for food in the cafeteria. I remember visiting “The Treasure House” set from Captain Kangaroo, some soap opera studios, and an elaborate set-up for a Barbra Streisand special. The center core of the Broadcast Center was a circular ramp, loaded with props and sets.

One Saturday we came in to see Eartha Kitt. I knew the name and recognized the voice, but wasn’t a fan. Her core audience was around my parent’s age.

Before the show started, the director (as I remember a laid back man with a Southern accent) came and gave us the drill. Don’t look at the cameras. Applaud with your hands cupped to sound a little louder. Pay attention to the artists.

So as Eartha Kitt started to sing, I watched with rapt attention. The studio was small and there weren’t more than 15 or 16 of us in the audience, sitting on low stools.

Eartha looked at me. She looked at me deeply.

The more she sang, the more intently she looked into my eyes. I was 16 – and a young 16 at that – what did I know? But she was mentally undressing me! Though it may have been enjoyable for her, it was unnerving to me.

I remember her performance was great. I also remember being as uncomfortable as is humanly possible. I should have been flattered, but it totally weirded me out.

If she’s 77 now, she was about 40 then and overtly sexy. She was a catwoman before she played Catwoman on TV. I’d like to think I helped her performance.

She probably forgot about me as she left the studio. I’ll never forget her.

Radio Is In My Blood

I am not really in television – it’s more radio with pictures. Radio was always my first love. As a kid, I knew I’d go into radio (and I did). TV was an afterthought. Other than the actual skill of forecasting the weather, there’s nothing I do on TV that I didn’t do on radio first.

This is going to make me sound old.

I went to high school in the same building that housed the New York City Board of Education’s radio station. We were FM back when no one listened to FM. That was mainly because no one owned an FM radio!

WNYE-FM had an eclectic mix of educational programs. It’s tough to visualize today, but teachers in NYC would bring clunky Granco FM radios into their classrooms so the students could listen to, “Let’s Look at the News” or “Young Heroes.” There’s little in the way of TV today that’s equivalent.

Looking for a way to get out of conventional English classes, I became a radio actor for English class credit. I was cast in dozens and dozens of morality plays and historical recreations. I was young Orville Wright, Thomas Jefferson, Jackie Robinson (in that less politically correct time) and lots of kids named Billy.

In the morality plays, I often had lines like, “If I ride my bike over the hill, mom will never know.” By the second act, my arm was in a cast and I was sorry. In these shows, no transgression went unpunished.

All through high school, I listened to radio – listening to the disk jockeys more than the music. The disk jockeys were cool and hip and in control. They talked back to the boss with impunity, or so it seemed to me. They were quick and witty and sarcastic. I wanted to be a disk jockey.

Though I grew up in New York City, my favorite radio station was WKBW in Buffalo. You could only hear “KB” from dusk ’til dawn, but it boomed in like a local at our apartment in Queens.

The nighttime jocks on “KB” were unbelievable. Over time, there were Joey Reynolds, Bud Ballou, Jack Armstrong and others. KB Pulse Beat news with Irv Weinstein, who I’d later know personally, was a tabloid newscast, back when rock stations had to have newscasts.

This is not to say I didn’t listen to WABC in NYC, because I did. There’s little doubt that Dan Ingram is the best disk jockey to ever point a finger at a board operator. He was all the things that the “KB” guys were, but he operated within the more heavily produced WABC universe. At WABC there was a jingle for everything except going to the bathroom… and maybe there was a jingle for that too.

Back on track… must get back on track… where is this going?

In college, I knew I wanted to be like them. I wasn’t as cool as they were. I certainly didn’t have ‘pipes’ (the euphemism for a deep, throaty voice). Still, I wanted to be on the air.

At home, or in the car, I’d practice ‘talking up records.’ That means talking over the instrumental bridge that opens songs before the singing begins, and stopping on a dime, effortlessly, as the singing began. That’s called “hitting vocal,” and I was very good at that.

I started in radio at WSAR in Fall River, MA. I was part time, making $2.50 an hour. Before long, the company I was working for, Knight Quality Stations (some of which weren’t on at night, and none of which had quality), sent me to Florida to be program director at WMUM, aka – “Mother.” I was still making $2.50 an hour or $130 for a 6 day, 48 hour week.

WMUM was an “underground station.” Again, it’s a concept tough to understand today. We played everything without resorting to a playlist. It was some sort of misguided Utopian programming concept that never really took hold anywhere for long. But in 1969, at age 19, “Mother” was an unreal place to be.

We were hip and cool and broadcast from a building located adjacent to the parking lot for Lake Worth, Florida’s beach. From our studio, through the soundproof glass, you could watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean. The beach was always filled with girls in bathing suits.

“Mother” didn’t hold its allure for long. Within 18 months, I had moved on to our sister AM station and then two other stations in the West Palm Beach market.

At age 21, I went to Charlotte, NC. There I did nights on a station that truly was heard from Canada to Florida. During my tenure, we even got mail from Cuba and Scandinavia. WBT was a classic radio station with good facilities, excellent promotion and nurturing management. I didn’t know how good I had it until I left.

I became a radio gypsy, moving to Cleveland and Phoenix and finally Philadelphia. I moved enough to qualify for the U-Haul Gold Card. I worked nights at WPEN in Philadelphia for a few years before moving to mornings.

We were a good AM station, playing oldies, at about the time music on AM was dying… rapidly.

I think I was pretty good at WPEN. If you’ll remember that this aircheck is over 25 years old, and I was more than 25 years younger than I am now, you can listen to it by clicking here. I really enjoyed what I was doing.

After a while we could see things weren’t going well in the ratings. A new program director was brought in to change things. Brandon Brooks, my friend and newsman on the show, came to me. Things were going to change but, “Don’t worry Geoff. They can’t fire you.”

I was gone within two hours.

My radio career never got back to that place. I continued to work, but it wasn’t the same. I finally ended up at WIFI, a top-40 FM station where I constantly worried that I, personally, was leading to the degradation of youth and society.

The scene played over and over again as I answered the hitline. I’d say, “Hello, WIFI.” On the other end, a young voice would respond, “Play, ‘We Don’t Need No Education.'” To me, it was like screeching chalk on a blackboard.

WIFI was my last stop before getting into TV. Still I miss radio nearly each and every day.

This is not to say I want to leave TV. I don’t. But, I do have this fantasy where I do radio in the morning and TV in the evening. That’s why, whenever someone from radio calls and asks me to fill-in or come on the air, I jump at the chance. It’s really an involuntary response.

It’s still in my blood.

The reason I’m writing all of this is because of someone I saw today at a charity event. I was helping present a check and toys to support shelters for abused women at the Verizon Wireless store in North Haven. A man walked up to me and said hello. It was Pete Salant.

I know Pete, though not that well. My sense is, Pete could go one-on-one with me with any bit of radio minutiae. It runs through his blood as well. In fact, with him broadcasting is an inbred thing, as his dad&#185 was a giant when CBS was the “Tiffany Network.”

Pete was known mostly as a radio programmer – and a damned good one. It’s probable, though I really don’t remember anymore, that within Pete’s career, he turned me down for a job… maybe more than once. I know he ran places where I wanted to work. Today, he creates commercials for radio station that run on TV.

It was good to see him. It’s always good to think about radio.

&#185 Pete tells me it was actually his cousin… and not a very close one… who was with CBS: “Dick Salant was my cousin twice-removed (grandfather’s first cousin), not my dad.” I’m going to leave the original posting as is, because I want to try and keep this blog as a contemporaneous record, but add the correction here.