The LuLac Edition #152, Feb. 12, 2007

PHOTO INDEX: JIMMIE COLES, TERRI STEVENS AND FRANK E. WARREN FROM THE MID 80s, A PAIRED DOWN WILK TOP 30 SURVEY FROM 1972, THE LATE CONGRESSMAN DANIEL J. FLOOD WITH STATION FOUNDER ROY E. MORGAN. ONE OF THE ORIGINAL PARTNERS OF WILK, ATTY. MITCHELL JENKINS, DEFEATED FLOOD IN AN EARLIER CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION. JENKINS WAS ONLY ONE OF TWO MEN TO BEAT DAN FLOOD IN HIS POLITICAL CAREER, AND A GREAT 98 SURVEY SHEET FIRST RELEASED IN EARLY 1968 WHEN WILK WENT TO A ROCK AND ROLL FORMAT AFTER MORE THAN TWO DECADES AS A POP STANDARDS STATION.

WILK AT SIXTY

I never did anything easy when I was a kid. When my friends dared me to hop a fence, I sprained not one, but two ankles on the way down. In my first sandlot baseball game, I skinned my entire knee, hit the pitcher in the head with a line drive and knocked over the table where all the cold water was.
So it was not surprising that in the spring of 1963, I contracted the triple play of childhood diseases, mumps, measles and chicken pox. All in one month, April. Spring. Our family doctor said I was too well for a hospital stay but too sick to go out of my room on the second floor of our house in Pittston. No TV, no meals with the family, and no sweet spring breezes on the front porch. For all intents and purposes, I was quarantined in my bedroom for three solid weeks. My family took pity on me and provided their oozing, hacking mess of a son with a box of Topps baseball cards and a huge transistor radio that my sister lovingly relinquished. By day I’d listen to WARM, the Mighty 590. But at night, I’d turn the dial and listen to the Phillies games. I had not yet become disillusioned with the Fightin’ Phils just yet, (that happened after the ’64 season) and my batteries became charged listening to those games. There was no curfew, I was sick. No one wanted to gaze at my diseased body so I was left alone to listen to the Phils.
I’d turn the radio on about 6PM and hear a guy named Edward R. Morgan doing a newscast. Then there was this nasal voiced guy named Howard who authoritatively said he was only “speaking of sports”. At 7PM, there was a crack of the bat and a man named Don Bruce came on the radio and told me all the stats and baseball news a 9 year old ever needed in his life. The show was called “The Bullpen” show. Then came the Phils. Sometimes I’d make it through entire game, other times I’d drift off to sleep with the radio on. My father would brave the sick ward and turn off the radio preserving those big “C” batteries.
One night, he forgot to turn the radio off and I awakened to a show called “The Breakfast Club” with Don McNeil. Holy crap, this was being broadcast live from Chicago! He had semi famous guests on at the time and they all sat around eating breakfast and discussing show business, sports and the news of the world. Kind of like our house on Sunday morning but with less chaos.
After “The Breakfast Club”, I napped but was awakened by the Danny Thomas Show theme song. Did someone sneak a TV in my room? No, it was the radio and there was a man named Dan Stenger who played music I saw on the Ed Sullivan show. It wasn’t Chubby Checker, Elvis, the Diamonds, the Five Satins or Fabian. It was different. Smooth. And Stenger loved the stuff, educating his listeners about Lena Horne, Sinatra, Tony Bennett and this young, new broad way talent he was boasting about, a girl named Streisand. Before noon, Stenger took a break and there was another guy out of Chicago named Paul Harvey. He was reading his script, Page 1, then the story, then Page 3. Was he supposed to be doing that? After an hour, Dan came back, then gave way to Guy Randell who played Mitch Miller, Ray Conniff and what for me was the gold standard of this musical genre, Duke Ellington. Then the Phillies came back on. There was other radio in this area, I thought! And while I still enjoyed my top 40 rock and roll, WILK was a nice place to visit. Those three weeks of pestilence gave me a more well rounded perspective on what news, sports, music and pop culture of the time was all about.
1968 was a tumultuous year for the country and for me. In the eight grade now, I was elected thrice President of my class and removed from office twice by a crazed nun. There was Gene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon and Rockefeller running for President. Dr. King was gunned down in Memphis and things just kept moving so fast. One Saturday on a bus trip to Wilkes Barre to the Record Store, we went to pick up our WARM Music survey sheets. The guy behind the counter offered us another survey, this one, for WILK the New 98. Unlike the WARM survey, there were 98 songs on this one. The guy told us to keep the lid on this because the station was set to go rock and roll that Monday. When it did, WILK did once more for me what it did when it was a Standards station, it expanded my horizons, introduced me to something new and different.
During the Flood of 1972, I followed the news on the radio like everyone else. David DeCosmo, (who I am proud to say later became a friend through our associations with the Northeastern Pennsylvania News Media Association and a few of my softball teams where he starred as our slow pitch hurler) was an omnipresent voice during the carnage. More importantly, DeCosmo and the WILK news team became the clearinghouse for the vital information of flood recovery and the maze of government red tape listeners needed to recover from this disaster.
After briefly living and working in Washington, D.C. I enrolled at King’s College and became involved with WRKC FM Radio. Besides doing our college radio programs at the station, many of us worked on demo tapes to try to get our big break down the street at 88 North Franklin. Joe Montione, Brian Carey, Andy Panda, Jill Uskrait, Mary Ann Engle, Breon Williams “Brother Breeze” and a few others succeeded. Others, like myself, kept pounding on Don Bruce’s door. He was very kind. Never said we stunk. Even though sometimes we did. We’d try everything to be part time jocks at WILK. My personal favorite was to reverb my voice and use catch phrases like, “Honk With the Yonk” and “That lady gives me a terminal case of the hots” to impress Program Director and then morning man Don Bruce. As I mentioned earlier, the more we tried, the kinder he got.
Finding my broadcast niche at WVIA TV and FM, I trained guys like Eric Thomas and Steve Olshefski. They did their work but in a matter of months, were on the air at WILK. “Take me” I yelled but they never looked back.
In the late seventies, WILK had a guy named Pat Finn doing mornings. He’s a game show host now but I remember him for telling me the news that Pope John Paul I had died after thirty days in office. Eric Thomas and another friend would go out for drinks on some nights hunting down poor unsuspecting women but Eric left before midnight to be the board op for this guy out of Miami named Larry King. It was the harbinger of the talk radio station WILK would become one decade later.
In the eighties, I worked in the Communications Department at United Way of Wyoming Valley. It was there that I truly began to grasp the commitment to the community that WILK demonstrated every day. Jamie Morgan served on the Communications Committee at first, then yielded to his Production Director Stan Neishel. We were never refused any favor that involved radio production, even on short notice.
Another aspect of WILK’s Community support was the WILK softball and basketball teams. Running fundraising events for various agencies I was involved in, I had the pleasure to work and play with Frankie Warren, Jimmy Coles, Terri Stevens, Peter Piper and others. Like Don Bruce, they were kind when it came to my sports abilities. And speaking of sports, if Joe Thomas ever decides to become a national sports talk show host, my buddies and I actually composed lyrics to his Sports Theme opening. They aren’t very good but they do rhyme.
By the early nineties my relationship with WILK was that of an advertiser, a news maker, an adversary (who wasn’t one of Fred William’s foes at one time or another), a fellow radio sales competitor but still a listener. Because Talk Radio is a two way street, I became a caller too. When I published my first book, “A Radio Story”, I became a studio guest. In my literary endeavors, the staff at WILK was generous to a fault in helping me promote it. As my second book, “Rules Of Life” hits the stands, WILK’s support is steadfast.
WILK turns 60 this week. In my life, it has occupied 44 years of my existence. That’s what a true radio station is supposed to do. Be part of your life. A companion. A reference point for times good and bad. My relationship with WILK started when I was a sick nine year old boy who was introduced to a new world via their broadcasts. Despite my verbosity here, my story is not unique. As a matter of fact, it is truly commonplace. But multiply what I wrote here today with the stories of the many hundreds of thousands of listeners whose life was touched by WILK and you have yourself a living, breathing testament to the institution Roy Morgan started in 1947. Simply put, you call it heritage.