Noel Confer reminds me of a reverse--longtime Ok City newsman Dick John....who first started out on WKY-TV as "Charlie Bishop." I also have a "non-pro" (Variety's term) friend named John Dick, Central class of l945.

Names?...names? Pity the poor lad that was a classmate of Jim Ruddle and myself in Tulsa. He was enrolled as, and always called "Dick Head". Sometime in adulthood he started using "Richard". What could have possessed his parents and why would he wait to use Richard???? How would you like to hit that during a cold reading of a newscast???

Rhetorical questions, all.

Obviously, I'm trying to avoid doing anything productive today. So...

I forgot two (three, actually) of my favorite Okie names:

A girl in Tulsa (now an old lady, if she's still around) named Lova Bedwell. SHE claimed it was pronounced "Lo-Vay." Sure.

But the undoubted winners were the twins, born the day Oklahoma became a state. I don't recall the last name--Walters, or something, as I recall. Their first names were--drum roll--Oakley Homer and Homer Oakley. So help me God.

Bartlesville also had a couple of names that would have been interesting for a rip-and-read newscast: There was an old fellow in the late 1930's who ran a filling station, there. His name was Noah Sark. But the one to avoid without woodshedding the copy was Tom Sass.

Random notes...

Mickey Edwards is now at the Kennedy School at Harvard, in response to a previous query...Fred Harris' 2nd fiction book, "Easy Pickin's" has been published...a book about Loretta Young, "Forever Young", confirms that her daughter, Judy Lewis, was fathered by Clark Gable. Her son, Christopher Lewis, was a reporter at KTUL and later a producer/director of direct-to-video movies. More recently, he and his wife Linda produced the video "A Journey Down Route 66", among others on that topic.

Hey, how 'bout that Dick West video and pics on the KTUL page?!

Don't have my Tulsa Worlds in front of me, but I believe Dr. Safety First died last week (or at least recently, aged in the 90s).

Most of you may be too young to remember, but Tulsa used to have a partnership of optometrists d/b/a Seekatz and C. Moore (Seekatz moved on and the firm was then just C. Moore and Adelman).

Deeply regret to report the death yesterday of Frances Wellmon Anderson, longtime organist for Tulsa Central high school (when it was at 6th and Cincinnati), who played that magnificent organ for everything from assemblies to the annual "Daze" talent show. Unfortunately, the youngster (apparent) who listed her at the top of the obituaries (alphabetically) called her a "homemaker"--which at 92, was probably true, but it left out her long service to youth. Maybe there'll be a backlash and the World will print a decent news article about her tomorrow.

Here is her obituary from the World online, listing her as a retired musician. I did not find anything about Dr. Safety First.

I am, sad to say, old enough to remember both the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation and reporters checking out stories before they went on the air. I also remember Western Union Naval Observatory clocks. Tick, tick, tick. Nowadays, all Western Union can do for you is wire money (not that there's anything wrong with that...).

On-screen abbreviations are a bugaboo of mine, and having done 24-hour news as long as there's been 24-hour news, I've had ample opportunity to scream in several jurisdictions. "County" is a particular bane: I've seen it as "Co", "Cty", "Coy", "Cnty", and even "Count" (alas, the county in question was not Monte Cristo).

Back in the bad old days, B.C. (before Chyron) we used to make up lower third supers by using lead type to spell out the names letter by letter, upside down and backwards, heating the type on an electric griddle, then putting them into a press (using an oven mitt burned through over 90% of the surface) and imprinting the names on a black card to be put in front of the camera. While this often resulted in small first-degree burns to fingers, melted lead when the thermostat on the griddle was turned up too high, and frequent misspellings owing to those burns, abbreviations were from either AP or UPI stylebook clip-outs posted over the griddle and reasonably well-enforced.

The question of pimento cheese on white bread (with or without lettuce) is another matter altogether. Though I did not come from an engineering family, I ate enough of the stuff in my youth to have developed an acute distaste for it now. Same with peanut better, though I can occasionally appreciate a peanut butter cracker, particularly vended from a Lance machine or backwoods gas station-general store. It may be a measure of a distorted childhood that I recall thinking that the middle of the alphabet song went, "H-I-J-K-L-Pimento Cheese. Q-R-S..."

Bartlesville was the home of Cities Service (long since moved away and squished down to CITGO) and Phillips 66, and I too remember KWON being a classical FM out on the open plains looong before NPR.

Saying it "right" - I remember seeing a NATPE or ProMax demo reel of promo spots from a CA market a few years back. The news anchors were waxing cerebral- they checked facts when they "reported" but also joked in the promo about an unnamed station in their market having an earnest anchor talking about "poloponies" (no not a Greek philosopher). Anyway the story was about POLO ponies!

Seeing it right - to us in the early days of electronic graphics - often Chyron fonts (for names, scores) would have characters that "just didn't look right" in some words. Sometimes we caught spelling errors, other times all WAS spelled correctly but it was an optical illusion I guess.

Abbreviating it right - WUSA here in DC for years was notorious for abbreviating titles, agencies on fonting news stories - you have to realize depending on font sizes used, some stuff can't physically fit! The AP has a list of approved abbreviations which we used at 5 in OKC religiously - it was funny to come here 15 years ago and see made-up abbreviations on-air in the then country's 9th largest TV market that we would have never seen in OKC! For instance "Committee" was seen on WUSA abbreviated as Com, Comm, Cmte, Ct, and Cte as I recall...Often 2 different ones in a newscast!

You've gotta watch those fonts on web sites, too.

I was talking with our p.a. today about folks with "weird" names - she is from TX and TN so she remembered an OB/GYN doc in TX - Dr. Hyman. But we were saying ya hafta wonder what folks were thinking when they named their kids!

Unusual names - Okieland is famous for them. We ran across many in the media on the news side.

Former 8/6 Lighting Director Edwin Fincher's nephew was called Beaudreu but his reel name was Glen Glenn. Nope - no relation to the Glen Glenn of Glen Glenn Sound credited on the end of so many Hollywood based action tv shows...

How many of you in the news media remember Dr. Safety First (that phrase was drilled into me by signs posted by the CB&Q railroad in Chicago growing up - cautioning folks crossing tracks!) or the famous Osage County doc (and maybe his father with the same name) Dr. Orange Star (or was it Starr)?

I love the name of former DC CNN bureau chief of 10+ years back - Bill Headline. I am sure he was ragged many times for answering his phone, "Bill Headline - CNN Headline News"...

John Darling was a salesman at ch. 34 in OKC 17-18 years ago and he too took a lot of ribbing. But think he also told us there was another John Darling in OKC - not in the media - whom he was constantly confused with....

Whom else - in your travels in OK and away - can you remember with an unusual name?

Dr. Safety First's son is a doctor, too, but less colorfully named: Dr. Jerry First. How about E. Z. Million?

Before Dumit, there was Henneke with his "Radio Announcer's Handbook." That's seems as out of date as a text on how to edit optical track b&w film. Preceding that was the "NBC Pronounciation Guide," which listed the correct way of referring to "argyle" as "AR-jile." This would have greatly amused the Duke of Argyle whom I introduced at a St. Andrew's Day dinner, in Chicago, a few years back. Fortunately, I had learned by then that NBC was wrong (NBC making a mistake? Really? How odd.) and that it was pronounced "ar-GYLE."

How strange that people actually cared about such matters in those days. Of course, there was a time when reporters checked facts before putting them on the air, but you probably won't believe that, either.

No, John Hillis - believe the Price Tower was named for the Prices of Price's Pimento Spread - an all time staple in TV engineers' lunch boxes (on white bread with lettuce, please)....har har

Last time I said a variation on that was to (then doctoral candidate) Susan Haggerty at VA Tech. We were joking about salsa coming from New Jersey, not TX. I did not know that her cousins are/were the PACE in Pace Picante sauce outta San Antone...Them Texans are everywhere!

2 more ramblings - didn't Ed Dumit write "Say It Right" or something like that? A book on pronounciation for announcers in the 60's? Someone said there may have been a record, too.

Need to dig thru my archives for my announcer's handbook and a great workbook we had 30 years ago on radio production.

KWON - don't know about the Price Tower thang but when we visited Dave DeForest at KWON in about '70 or '71 the studios were in a new pre-fab concrete building on stilts or columns out by the transmitter. You had to climb up 12-14 outside stairs to the studios - Dave said it was because a neighboring creek had a bad habit of flooding and several times the station used their standby john boat to ferry staff to work! I think the stick was above water though. At KWON was the first time I ever saw the then new CBS radio NetAlert system that alerted stations of breaking news from CBS.

Didn't KWON in B'ville used to have studios in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building (I think it was called the Price Petroleum Tower)?

Re: Frank's story about Claude Hill made me wonder what ever happened to his album. I think I mentioned this about a year ago. Claude who was chief engineer at KWGS-FM at the time, told our TU class (in the late '50s) that he had just recorded an LP especially for future radio announcers. Claude proudly told us the title: "Correct Pro-NOUN-ciation."

Did anyone listen to this recording?

The stories about the KWGS transmitter reminded me of a story that Claude Hill told me when he was in the KWGS control room in the early ‘50s. At that time the transmitter tower was on top of the studios which were next to Kendall Hall. Claude was chief engineer at the time.

A thunderstorm was in progress when lightning struck the antenna. Ducking his head at the sound of the strike, Claude just missed being hit by the fireball that came down the tower, into the control room, flew across the room, and hit the wall on the opposite side.

I would have thought that there would have been some type of guards to prevent this kind of thing, but Claude swore it really happened. Knowing him well (he had been an engineer at KTUL where I was working), I tended to believe him...although he could be a jokester at times.

Keyrection! That's uh correction. KWGS had a ITA not ITE transmitter when under the stick on campus. I think when they went to Sand Springs they may have bought a Collins Stereo transmiter to replace it. As I recall the stick seemed to be in an empty field with the obligatory xmitr shed. THE BIG DEAL was it could be operated by remote via telephone wire - hot diggedy!

Hi from Australia.

I produce a radio nostalgia program in Melbourne, Australia and we are replaying a series called "The Passing Parade" that was recorded by a "John Doremus".

From what I can gather about the series "The Passing Parade", it was recorded in the USA and the Australian broadcast rights were purchased by a company called "Grace Gibson Productions".

The series was 3-4 minute "strange but true" type stories, narrated by John with no accompaniment (not that he needed any with that voice).

I believe the series didn't take off in the USA and was cancelled not long after its inception. However, it became very popular in Australia and Grace Gibson's then contracted the writers and John to keep producing the series for Australian audiences only.

The result is that Grace Gibson Pty Ltd (operating out of Sydney Australia) have over 1000 episodes of the Passing Parade in their possession and so John's voice continues to boom out on many radio stations across the country.

Hello, Simon! There is a good bit of comment about John Doremus in Guestbooks 22, 39, and 40. Looks like it might be time for a separate Doremus page.

Between the 8's The Place girls and Shannen D.'s picture on the front of the FHM mag, I won't need my fireplace to warm me up! My wife will never believe I bought FHM to read the Busey article.

My reason for writing is to say that I had a crystal set when I was a kid. It was an ancient radio even back then. I didn't have much success with it but, forty years later, I still remember how much I liked messing with it. I may try to locate another sometime.

Here is a good site about crystal and transistor radios: galaxyM31.com, which was previously mentioned in Guestbook 37. You will also find lots of crystal radios in this eBay search.

To: Jim Ruddle

Realize now folks must think we are Martians - talking about crystal radios that had NO power supply but worked because of simple science. It IS still amazing. Though I think crystal radio STEREO will be the next big thing after Quad or AM Stereo!

Think of all neat, fun and cheap science kits and gizmos kids of our generations had!

Now just give a kid a $2000 PC or $200 Play Station with $900 of game cartridges, let him zone alone for hours inside the house till he looks like a pasty-faced vampire and ignore him.

Something wrong with this picture....

The "new" KWGS xmitr can't be that old! The ITE mono FM xmitr - serial number 14 I think - that only we had and KWON-FM in Bartlesville had a model of locally - were twins.

As mentioned here before - the crystal "oven" was erratic and we had to periodically stick a sunlight on the back of the transmitter to stay on frequency. Yet the studio blockhouse often froze. The legendary and cranky but good Lloyd Draheim kept KWGS going. Need to ask Mike Miller if the ITE was the same in his days - but it looked 60-ish in '69 and low tech.

The transmitter shack studio under the tower behind old Kendall Hall with the ITE lasted I believe thru the Summer of '73 when creaky, leaky but beloved old Kendall Hall came down. The stick came first then the xmitr and new stick were up in Sand Springs close to KOTV.

Walter Powers or Lee Ready may remember more on the move - I was Summer Station Manager in 72 or 73 because I was working at 8 but living in a dorm at TU.

Dr. Larry Elwell had his coup d'etat and replaced Ed Dumit as station manager but I always felt someone at TU in the upper ranks hated underground music and that Ed had allowed the staff too much creative freedom. Weird time in Tulsey. Larry was good intentioned but knocked heads with a lot of folks - KWGS had 2 kinds of programming acid rock and classical - throw in a very small amount of campus recording of concerts and news. A little backlash I remember in '73 - folks felt no one wanted a radioperson with only classical or acid rock training so students wanted country, MOR, more news on air and I think Elwell wanted to try to steer some that way.

KWGS was then the ONLY classical outlet in Tulsa as KORU and KAKC-FM stopped playing it and KCMA was not built yet. KORU was sold and KWON may have played it on weekends in B'ville.

Sidebar note - I believe the guy that sold ITE transmitters was from Claremore or somewhere. One night at NAB in Las Vegas in the late '70s or '80's I was by the Las Vegas Hilton at night and heard a screeching of brakes. Someone was hit and killed by a car while trying to cross Convention Blvd. I heard later it was an Okie and someone told me after NAB - it was the guy that sold the ITE transmitters to KWGS and KWON....

For Mike Bruchas and other Luddites: My older brother was a radio technut and built all manner of Heathkit equipment, but not a crystal set. For that, he burned flowers of sulfur on a buffalo head nickel, then coiled a small piece of copper wire for a cat's whisker. For some amazing reason, the burned sulfur acted like a galena crystal and you could hear musing through attached headphones. I have trouble dialing up stations digitally on a Sony.

There's a four-page article/interview in the latest issue of FHM magazine (www.fhmus.com) on Teddy Jack Busey. Has some interesting pics and comments from TJE himself. I didn't realize he had done 87 movies in 30 years. Not bad for a guy that's died 5 times. By my calculations he only has 4 lives left. He better save a few for the next couple of marriages and the new millennium designer drugs that will be out soon. Ouch!

ST

This is the TJE issue, but the article is not in the online version of the magazine. You'll have to visit your nearby U-Tote-M.

To answer Mike Bruchas' question, yes, we are still running BBC overnight. When we're on the air, that is, which we aren't currently and don't expect to be until late this afternoon. I'm grumpy as hell about us being off, because, besides just the normal aspect of annoying and disappointing our listeners (good thing there isn't any IMPORTANT breaking news today, eh?), we're having to spend time and money to fix our forty year old transmitter, which we're replacing in TWO WEEKS. Arrrgh!

In other news, due to the strange weather patterns in Tulsa this fall and our freeze/snow of a week or so ago, there was an early occurence of my favorite yearly crisis here: wet snow froze in our downlink dish and the general manager and engineer had to climb a twelve foot ladder and clean out the dish with a janitor's push broom. Everything here is so high-tech that it always amuses me to see us put back on the air through the application of simple housecleaning skills.

Does anyone remember an Oklahoma congressional election years ago involving Victor Wickersham? A clever Tulsa newspaper headlined the results of a close recount: “Wickersham Victor”

Hopefully, one day before Super Bowl Sunday, we will have some idea just who will be the next President of the United States. It might be easier (and better) to simply start over from scratch and nominate two new candidates. This would be a popular idea, but somewhat unlikely. And so we are left spending endless days and nights watching the same talking heads, making the same political arguments to the same television reporters and anchors, again and again. This is a hyperbolized overdose of sagacious babble even for a political junkie like me.

Bush is counting on Sec. of State Tammy Faye Bakker to win the election. And isn’t having William Daley argue for a fair election a little like asking the Boston Strangler for a neck massage? I’m writing a song about this mess in Florida titled: “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Chad.”

This isn't the exact newspaper you mentioned, but close: read a story about Nov. 7, 1962 at the Tulsa World online. The entire front page is with the story.

Check out the KVOO Photo Album...just added a bio of Forrest Brokaw!

I think KLAC carries most LA pro sports teams as special programming and is big band the rest of the time.

Radio ramblings - KLAC is I believe AM SPORTS ONLY - they do the LA Lakers games and that's Larry Burnett's turf. Thought they were all sports talk like WFAN in NYC or WTEM here - or (the "new" Non-WMAQ) in Chicago WSCR.

If you surf you probably shopped amazon.com - they show a Kerbango internet radio in their new Xmas snail mail flyer that I just got. Earlier on this page we ruminated over NEW radio transmission formats.

It looks like a Remco radio set I had as a kid - sans telegraph key and "microphone". A great '50's toy that I am sure is worth $500 now if pristeen. I bet my Dad paid $29.95 or less for it - the Kerbango is about $299 I think. Yeah, but it ain't portable. The Remco ran on 4-6 D cells and amazingly 40 years later the Remco is gone but my folks still have Xmas decorations in the multi-hued box it came in, sitting in their basement in Chicago!

Internet/world radio vendor C. Crane & Company - mentioned here before - sells a make-it yourself crystal radio kit for $34.95 - the assembled one I had 45 years ago I think my Dad paid $3.00 for. But fear not Crane also sells the legendary "Rocket" AM crystal radio (assembled) for $10 - this was often a "premium" with 10 Bazooka bubble gum wrappers and minimal shipping & handling ($1? $2??)in days of yore....Gimme that batteryless technology any day!

Is KWGS still running the BBC overnight? WAMU here in DC does and I am getting addicted to it late night - it ain't Koppel but some nights it'll do. Much easier to hear than on my SW radio though that is the "keyrect" format to hear the BEEB midst the ozone....

See if you can find your old radio on this search at eBay.

I think Jim Millaway hangs around town a lot. My brother sees him on occasions. He was standing next to him at the counter in the Sears garage and the counter help asked Jim for his name. "Glenn", he replied. My brother laughed and asked him if he had changed his name. "Nah," Jim answered, "I'm just trying to teach these young guys how to spell two syllable names." Classic Millaway.

Larry Burnett is on KLAC Radio in L.A. doing basketball (or is that bassetball or baseketball) play by play after anchoring on several sports nets - several of my friends here worked with him at ESPN. Search his name here on TTM and find out more. E-mail me off line and I can give you his e-mail at KLAC or surf their webpage.

KLAC Radio bills itself as "the place to be when sports rule the airwaves and you're in the mood for KLAC music." Is this the same KLAC-L.A.?

Re: Guestbook 10, Larry Burnett who worked at 8 as a reporter/sports, maybe also a stint at 6, then ESPN - was last heard of in L.A. at a west coast sports channel. At TU - he and Bill Teegins both seemed most likely to succeed in sportscasting and I think both may have done TU games on KWGS as undergrads.

When Larry was working in either Denton or Sherman-Denison - they had only 1 portable ENG (video) camera to shoot all news and sports stories in town with. When it would break down - he said they ran LOTS of on camera "readers" and did studio interviews till it was back in service. Heaven help you if a really big story "broke" when it was dead..... I can confirm Burnett's stories about Sherman/Denison, TX, as we worked together back then. Lots of memories, and stories we could tell.

Hey - where is Jim "Buck" Millaway - different stories I have heard over the years were radio personality/DJ, gag writer in Hollywood, TV sitcom writer, serious writer, ad agency creative director....What's the story on him now?

Judy Judy - Lyle Owens' daughter we lusted after when at TU in the late 60's - but did not realize how much younger she was nor how brainy she was. She was always with some guy I can't remember or seemingly with "Mr." Millaway. She was a great ensemble cast member on G.Ailard's show and we would hoot when she spoke in Okie "dialect". You have to admit G.Ailard's ad hoc cast is still memorable to us of that era though sometimes his "bits" weren't Oscar-winning while others are "classic" - we will always remember the wacky characters. They WERE "TOO TULSA"! He had a great thing going at 6 - when we got production of the show at 8 for that short while - things were better done technically but maybe not as funny as what he had created at 6. It still was a gas to watch them try to tape the bits....

Tough call...the KTUL sketches were better planned and directed, and there were some classic, unforgettable bits. This material can be seen on the Lost Tapes of Mazeppa. Word has it that there may be a Tape 3 soon!

The earlier KOTV shows were rougher, but perhaps more spontaneous. The only known recordings from this period are audio-only and represented in the sound files on this site (recorded by the webmaster, and Ellen Morelock back in 1971).

Mazeppa was unpredictable, Mr. Mystery/Sherman Oaks/Jim Millaway's writing was sharp, Lazlo and Yahootie were weird, Judi Judy was cute and very Okie...it was startling to see local personalities and peccadillos refracted back to us through these talented people. You just did not want to miss it!

(And let's not forget the dynamic and explosive Teddy Jack Eddy...)

Marna Bryant McKinney, former KOTV music director, remembered here previously by Jim Ruddle and Bill Hyden in Guestbook 23, passed away on Saturday. Here is the Tulsa World story.

In Guestbook 61, just archived, we heard that Josef (Peter) Hardt has been ailing, but thankfully, he is on the mend. We got a not unwelcome eyeful of pics illustrating Carl (Uncle Zeb) Bartholomew's comments about his "8's The Place" promotion of the late 70s. Mazeppa contributed a bit of info about Judi Judy's dad. King Lionel had a few words for us. Regulars Jim Ruddle, Frank Morrow, Noel Confer, Mike Miller, Don Norton, Jim Back, John Hillis, Sonny Hollingshead, Lowell Burch, Erick Church and Mike Bruchas graced the page as well.

We received promise of a Dick West video (Dick West was a Native American who signed out KTUL every night with a sign language version of the Lord's Prayer). The presidential election was still undecided a week after Election Day; lots of Oklahoma and other political talk, punctuated by some oddball pictures.

Check it out, then add your comments!