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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781452594200 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/17/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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ANYBODY SEEN DAN LOVETT?
Memoirs of a media nomad
By DAN LOVETT, K.C. Endsley
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2014 Daniel J. Lovett, Sr.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-9418-7
CHAPTER 1
DAN THE PLATTER MAN
... The D.J. with little to say but lots to play on the big K ...
1959. What to do after school?
Payette, Idaho is a single-stoplight town on the banks of the Snake River. Across the river from Oregon, it is a million miles from New York City as the career flies.
It is the hometown, and will be the resting place of baseball Hall-of-Famer Harmon Killebrew. "Hammerin' Harm," or "The Payette Pounder," as he was known in this small community of the Treasure Valley. The Washington Senators plucked him out of Payette High in 1954 with a $50,000 contract offer. He debuted in the majors, six days shy of his 18th birthday and played for over twenty years in the American League. His bulging forearms, built by Payette County farm work as a child, snapped his bat through the strike zone for 573 career home runs. That was an AL record for right-handed homers set back when a steroid was a misspelled heavenly body. (Suspended juice dispenser Alex Rodriguez later broke the record.)
Payette is also the home of KPID, a 250-watt radio station licensed to broadcast during daylight hours only. That is where I press my nose up against the big glass window to watch the guy inside talk into a microphone and spin 45-RPM records.
That's what I want to do.
I don't want to be a sales clerk at Father's Department Store after graduation. I want to be "Dan the Platter Man, the D.J. with little to say, but lots to play on the Big "K', coming your way, live, the flip side of five."
My passion for radio comes to fruition during my junior year at Payette High, after I beg the station to allow me to do a weekly five-minute show on high school news. My paydays from KPID amount to five bucks a week. It is in cash. Five dollars is a pocketful for a teenager in 1958. A five spot will fill the tank of the 1933 Chevrolet coupe my grandmother had given me, provide for a couple of burgers at the Snack Shack, and make for a sensational evening with my girlfriend in the rumble seat of the Chevy at the Gay Way junction drive-in movie. Five big ones. I am more than thrilled to get it, even though I make more setting pins three nights a week at the Gay Way Bowl near Fruitland, Idaho. (I kid you not. Gay and fruit have no social connotations at the time.)
Shortly after my graduation, my sister Kay and I are off to visit our dad in Missouri, where he is running a Clark gas station in Jefferson City. He moonlights by making and selling homemade sandwiches to support his drinking habit.
During our visit, I stop to check out one of the two local radio stations in Missouri's capital. Curt Brown, the program director of KWOS, could have simply given me a quick tour of the thousand- watt station and sent me on my way. But Brown is looking for an announcer. He offers me an audition. I read a Bayer Aspirin commercial in exactly sixty-seconds, without error. Brown offers me the job for $75 a week. I don't know if there is a lottery in Missouri, but I hit it.
Sister Kay and I are on the Union Pacific train back to Idaho within days. Life begins moving quickly and I marry my high school sweetheart, Roanna Huffman, a week after returning to Idaho. We become Mr. and Mrs. Dan the Platter Man. My mother pays for the rings and puts $200 in my pocket so we can cover the trip to Missouri. I have new wheels to make the journey. It's a 1949 slope backed Chevrolet with vacuum shift.
It is June of 1959. Twelve days after my high school graduation, I am leaving the potato patch in the Gem State for big doings in the Show Me State. I can't wait to put Jerry Lee Lewis on the turntable at K-WOS and tell my listening audience how a "whole lotta shakinis goin"' on.
I don't just spin platters. There is the matter of reading the news, every hour on the hour, throughout my nightly shift. Gathering stories for broadcast requires me to hustle back to the wire room, which is next to the rest room. I can visit both of them with the aid of an appropriately lengthy musical selection; something from the Greatest Hits collection of I.P. Frehley, as it is known in industry lore.
I rip the news copy from the Associated Press machine while Les Elgart and his orchestra cover my absence, bouncing their way through a six-minute set from "My Fair Lady" with a vocal tossed in by Peggy Lee. Good stuff, but not something an 18-year-old will openly admit to. There is something fascinating to me about reading the news, especially when you add a line or two of your own to enhance the wire copy, which is already branded by someone else's bias.
The Missouri capital sure does "show me." It shows me how to improve upon my craft, leading me soon to bigger things where "everything is bigger" Texas.
CHAPTER 2SURVEYING THE WORLD AT NOON
... That's me on the black-and-white TV ...
1960. I dip my toe into the wading pool of TV news. No sharks ... yet.
I am restless when the summer of 1960 rolls around. I am already looking for a bigger station to further my career after only one year in the business. Youth must be served. Rather than spinning my way through endless years at KWOS radio in Jefferson City, where morning personality Johnny Music is the station's biggest star, I want a shot at the big time.
Radio Park in St. Louis is my goal. KXOK, 630 AM, blankets eastern Missouri and southern Illinois with 5,000 watts of power. With such popular Top 40 jocks as Danny Dark and Johnny Rabbitt, KXOK is the runaway ratings leader these days. KXOK is so successful that its top competitor, WIL radio, dropped its pop music format in favor of country music. The newscasters on KXOK are also popular voices on the station. Robert R. Lynn and Steven B. Stevens generate gigantic ratings. I will be Daniel B. Daniels when I join the news staff.
Before I can pack for the move, though, I would need to send KXOK an audition tape to see if I could even score such a job.
Management at KWOS gets wind of my intentions. I have been spouting off about how I want to get out of Jeff City, plus I am reading the "Help Wanted" ads in Broadcasting magazine every week. My conspicuous restlessness prompts KWOS to offer a plan to keep me right where I'm at.
William Weldon is the owner of KWOS radio. He also has the keys to the Jefferson City News and Tribune, plus the local TV outlet, which is located in a cow pasture about ten miles out of town.
KWOS management, with Weldon's sanction, not only expands my radio gig, but also puts me in the news anchor chair for the TV station's first mid-day newscast.
Does this mean that I am destined to become the Walter Cronkite of Central Missouri? That's not the way it is. Not even close.
The idea of appearing before a camera and reading news copy from the Associated Press and United Press International has some appeal to me, as long as it doesn't interfere with my radio career. Coupled with my radio salary, the additional $50 bucks a week makes it worth my time. I am now one of the early faces in a business just getting its wings, on what would eventually become a great flight into the lives of millions of Americans. Heck, back in 1960 there is an afternoon game show coming out of California, Who Can You Trust, hosted by Omaha transplant Johnny Carson. Two years from now he will become the 30-year host of the Tonight Show on NBC.
My dream of meeting my fate in St. Louis is over. I'm now driving my 1949 Chevy across the Missouri River Bridge to the studios of Channel 13, KRCG-TV, to read the news before a camera each weekday.
Dan Lovett Surveys the World at Noon for Safeway is my television debut. I sit behind an old wooden desk reading copy I had ripped off the AP wire machine only 15 minutes before going on the air.
This is the black-and-white era; no colorcast yet in Central Missouri. There is but one camera in the studio. There are no chroma-key effects like those that will bring showbiz glitz to the local news of the future. I have never heard the word "teleprompter." It is just me, sitting at the old wooden desk, my hair in a crew cut, still dark brown and standing stiff with butch wax.
The moment arrives for the commercial break in my fifteen-minute newscast, and the control room fades the lone studio camera to black. It is my cue to get up from the desk and walk to another area of the studio, with the lumbering camera following me. There, standing before a shelf filled with Safeway applesauce and canned corn, I make my pitch for the sponsor.
"Today at Safeway, two number-ten tins of Dole applesauce for only twenty-five cents," I blurt into the camera.
My commercial pitch complete, we fade to black again as the camera operator pushes the unwieldy camera to its original position in the studio to finish off the mid-day newscast.
"In Washington today, President Dwight David Eisenhower held a press conference in the White House," I announce to my viewing audience, which probably amounts to no more than a few hundred folks, if that. It is big time TV, though, for the kid from Idaho.
Once this daily routine is complete, I hit the parking lot, jump into my banged up Chevy, and drive back to the radio station. There I will slip out of my twenty-dollar J.C. Penney sports coat and become "Dan the Platter Man" again.
I always had more fun on the radio but certainly wasn't complaining about the newfound dollars I was receiving from my first exposure on the tube.
CHAPTER 3STAN THE MAN'S LAST AT BAT
... He will always be "The Man" ...
September 29, 1963. He goes out with a bang, the last of his 3,630.
I am among the working press at the old Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Stan Musial, at age 42, is going to step up to the plate for the last time.
The drive to St. Louis is 105 miles from Jefferson City. I have convinced Curt Brown, KWOS radio program manager, that I should cover Musial's farewell. I will record an interview to be aired the next morning. Never mind the distance to St. Louis from the Missouri capital. I would have walked the route in order to link the beginning of my radio career with the ending of Musial's in baseball.
KWOS is one of the hundreds of stations spanning the Midwest that carry the Cardinals Radio Network. That relationship will allow me to also interview Harry Caray, Jack Buck and Jerry Gross, who share the microphone on the network's flagship station, KMOX in St. Louis. Joe Garagiola is also here, and he is gracious enough to speak with me about Stan's career. Garagiola had been part of the Cardinals' radio triumvirate through the 1962 season before going fulltime with NBC-TV that year. (Hmmm ... three men in a booth. Somewhere out there, a guy named Roone Arledge is taking notes.)
I can hear Caray to this day calling Musial's final career at-bat; I made sure KWOS was recording the broadcast for my audio library.
"Take a good look fans, take a good look. This might be his last time at bat in the Major Leagues. Remember the stance ... and the swing ... you are not likely to see his likes again ... Here's the 2 and 1 pitch to Musial ... a hot shot on the ground, into right field, a base hit."
Musial got the game's first hit in the fourth inning off Cincinnati Reds ace Jim Maloney, who is gunning for his 24th win in the season finale. In the sixth inning, Musial sends another Maloney fastball searing past diving second baseman Pete Rose.
Rose cuts off the throw from the outfield, too late to gun down the fleet Curt Flood, who crosses the plate to break a scoreless tie. Musial stands awkwardly at first base. The shy, unassuming giant of the game would rather ignore, than to acknowledge, a swelling standing ovation. Manager Johnny Keane slowly makes the move to send in pinch runner Gary Kolb. The roar rekindles as Kolb takes the field and Stan The Man steps outside the lines and trots to the dugout for the final time.
Musial leaves baseball just as he had entered it in 1941. In his first game, he smacked two hits and drove in the tying and winning runs for St. Louis in a 3-2 triumph over Casey Stengel and his Boston Braves. He has two hits and the first RBI in this, his final game, which the Cardinals will win by the same score, 3-2.
This is the first of the many goose-bump moments I am to experience at a sporting event. I'm a lucky guy.
Legend has it that, after snagging the relay throw from right field, Reds rookie Pete Rose took the ball over to Musial and handed it to him as he stood on first base. Sportscaster Bob Costas, who was to deliver Musial's eulogy in 2013, would almost tearfully recount this reverse passing of the torch moment in subsequent interviews. What a great legend it is. A wonderful story.
Rose was born in 1941, less than five months after I came onto this earth. That was the year that Joe Dimaggio achieved his record 56-game hitting streak; the year Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, hit .406 – the last major leaguer to bat over .400; the year that Stan Musial broke in to the major leagues.
Now, on the final day of the 1963 season, Musial walks off the field with a National League career record of 3,630 hits. Rose will get three hits on this day to finish his rookie season with 170. Eighteen years later, Rose will become the only National Leaguer to exceed Musial's total. Stan the Man will be in the stands that night to see it happen.
The words "legend" and "legendary" are too often used for occurrences and people that verifiably existed. The true meaning of the word is more along the lines of a fable or myth. The legend of the Musial ball is truly legendary. A great story that adds a heightened spiritual aura to an event that already had plenty of it.
Another verifiable "legend:" Musial's final two hits that day gave him a total of 1,815 at home; the exact same number of hits he pounded out on the road.
After the game I got my interview with Stanislaw Franciszek Musial, "Stan the Man," one of the most congenial athletes I have interviewed in my long career.
Musial died at age 93 in 2013.
CHAPTER 4THE OLD SCOTSMAN
... Word imagery was his gift ...
1964. I get called up from the minors.
In the mid-1950s I would often listen to the radio out on the porch of my Grandma Anderson's home in Idaho. She would dial in the most popular radio programs of the day, like Gang Busters, a cops-versus-robbers show, which was first broadcast on NBC Radio in 1935. By 1956, when I started listening with Granny, it was on the Mutual Broadcasting System and nearing the end of its 21-year run.
Gang Busters wasn't the only radio program I listened to in those days. On the Liberty Radio Network, there was an announcer calling baseball games who wasn't even in the ballpark where the pitching and hitting was taking place!
His name is Gordon McLendon. As Bill Young points out in his book, Dead Air: The Rise and Demise of Music Radio, to McLendon, no canvas was as large as the imagination.
McLendon was a word master of the highest degree. He would recreate major league games, almost daily, from his radio studio in Texas. Taking the first-hand account of a game from a Western Union ticker wire, McLendon would describe the action as he saw it in his mind, adding sound effects, and leaving the listener in awe of the play that had taken place. In his mind.
McLendon was actually at the ballpark on October 3, 1951 when he called "the shot heard 'round the world" from the Polo Grounds in New York City.
"Bobby swings, there's a long one out there, out to left. Going, going, GONE and the Giants win the Pennant!"
McLendon was broadcasting live when Bobby Thomson came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with a pair of Giants teammates on base. Thomson lofted Ralph Branca's 0-1 pitch over the left field wall to finish off the powerful Brooklyn Dodgers and send the Giants on to the World Series in one of the most electrifying events in the history of sports, and of sports radio broadcasting.
Oh, I know, it is Russ Hodges' ubiquitous call of that home run that accompanies video highlight clips to this day. The equally stirring description Hodges made was limited to WMCA Radio in New York City and the handful of stations on the Giants radio network. Dodgers' announcer Red Barber was also describing the game on WMGM radio in Brooklyn.
At the time, McLendon's was "the call heard 'round the world," booming across the landscapes of big cities and small towns throughout America on his own Liberty Broadcasting System network of 450 stations.
Little did I know then that thirteen years after the "shot heard 'round the world," I would be on McLendon's payroll.
I had discovered an ad in Broadcasting magazine. A radio station in Houston, Texas was looking for an announcer, making it clear they wanted a voice that could excite listeners, even if it required adding some sound effects – a McLendon trademark.
I sent my tape to KILT in Houston, one of several stations around the country owned by McLendon, the "Old Scotsman." Within a week I receive a phone call from a man named Richard Dobbyn, who says he is the news director of KILT.
News Director? I'm a sports guy! Why would they have the news director call me? Dobbyn proceeds to tell me that the opening is for a
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ANYBODY SEEN DAN LOVETT? by DAN LOVETT, K.C. Endsley. Copyright © 2014 Daniel J. Lovett, Sr.. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Chapter 1 Dan the Platter Man, 1,Chapter 2 Surveying the World at Noon, 6,
Chapter 3 Stan The Man's Last At Bat, 10,
Chapter 4 The Old Scotsman, 14,
Chapter 5 Most Fun on the Radio, 22,
Chapter 6 Baseball Under Glass, 28,
Chapter 7 The Beatles Have Landed, 32,
Chapter 8 Dee Jay, 40,
Chapter 9 First 12-Bagger on TV, 45,
Chapter 10 The Little Lord, 51,
Chapter 11 Ali, The VC and Me, 56,
Chapter 12 Prelude to March Madness, 72,
Chapter 13 By The Numbers, 77,
Chapter 14 The Baseball Graveyard, 81,
Chapter 15 The Face of Houston, 90,
Chapter 16 Dressed For The Arrest, 108,
Chapter 17 Four for Foyt, 114,
Chapter 18 A Houston Faceoff, 129,
Chapter 19 The Battle of the Sexes, 134,
Chapter 20 Strippers on the Sidelines, 137,
Chapter 21 Dante and Dickey, 143,
Chapter 22 Houston to NYC, 155,
Chapter 23 Jerry Rivers, 165,
Chapter 24 Evil Evel Event, 168,
Chapter 25 Get Your Kicks With Pele, 176,
Chapter 26 The Frightful Five, 180,
Chapter 27 Cock A Doodle Doo, 189,
Chapter 28 Ringmaster Roone, 201,
Chapter 29 Shuttle Sam Off to D.C, 213,
Chapter 30 A Plug in the Post, 216,
Chapter 31 The Cost of Being a Loud Mouth, 219,
Chapter 32 Cosell, 222,
Chapter 33 David Hartman, David Hartman, 233,
Chapter 34 Miracle on Ice, 237,
Chapter 35 The Thrill of Victory, 244,
Chapter 36 No Mas, 248,
Chapter 37 The Shoe Knew, 253,
Chapter 38 The Golden Boy Is Back, 260,
Chapter 39 The Golden Girl Is Gone, 268,
Chapter 40 First All Sports Talker, 281,
Chapter 41 A Gorilla in the Weather Office, 290,
Chapter 42 Shake the Stick, 303,
Chapter 43 Montana Is Naked, 319,
Chapter 44 Fumble, 325,
Chapter 45 D.C. and Me, 334,
Chapter 46 Joltin' Joe, 345,
Chapter 47 The Honolulu Hotshot, 349,
Chapter 48 The King and I, 353,
Chapter 49 The City of Roman Numerals, 359,
Chapter 50 Donna 'D' and Mary 'C', 366,
Chapter 51 Holy Toledo, 370,
Chapter 52 Big Bad Boss, 375,
Chapter 53 The Second Coming of John Glenn, 384,
Chapter 54 Short Takes, 388,
Chapter 55 Oops! The Bloops, 392,
Chapter 56 The Producers, 396,
Chapter 57 Doctors of Weather, 400,
Chapter 58 News to Amuse and Abuse, 404,
Chapter 59 Sir David the Lion King, 415,