HAPPY Thursday BIRTHDAYS



 Vic "The Brick" Jacobs
Liz Kiley
Pat Maestro
Ron Price

The most comprehensive listing of 6,000 Los Angeles Radio People, spanning the last 50 years, is now available just by clicking on your favorite personality. The listings provide a colorful snapshot of where they came from, where and when they worked, and what they’re doing now. Enjoy!    

A\B\C\D\E\F\G\H\I\J\K\L\M\N\O\P\Q\R\S\T-Z\W      

(David G. Hall, Nathan Baker, Paul Olden, Chuck Rowe, Mark & Brian, George Lopez, Peter Tilden, John Phillips and Ken Levine)    

New Music Jock Changes at MY/fm and KIIS/fm

(December 12, 2013) MY/fm, the Clear Channel Hot AC station that has battling sister station KIIS/fm for top spot in the ratings, gets a new afternooners drive host. Dave Styles joins the lineup of MY/fm, effective January 6. Dave has also worked at some of the top radio stations in Seattle and Portland.

For the past 10 years Styles has been working overnights and weekends at KIIS.  He also co-hosts a syndicated music and pop-culture show, The Hot Hits: Live From LA, which airs on over 60 stations across Australia. In addition to radio, Styles is also in the in-stadium Entertainment Host for the LA Dodgers and produces background-score music for tv.

“What can I say, I’m pumped to be doing afternoons on an incredible station that has Los Angeles buzzing,” said Styles.  “The opportunity to continue working amongst friends I've made over my 10 years here, makes it that much sweeter.”

Current afternooner Damien Fahey will continue until January 6. The station teased about Fahey: "More great news to come about him later."
New to KIIS. With Styles moving to sister station 104.3, Alex Gervasi will join KIIS/fm to do overnights and weekends. She joins KIIS from KHFI 96.7 KISS/fm in Austin, where she currently hosts middays.

She began her radio career during college with Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, working in the Lexington, Philadelphia and Allentown markets.  

After college Gervasi began hosting on Now 105.3 in Norfolk, Va., and was later added to Kiss 107 in Cincinnati and 105.7 Now in Greensboro, N.C.

“It’s so exciting to be building the KIIS of the future with a young star like Alex,” said John Ivey, KIIS program director. “She is the same type of hard working, aggressive talent looking to get better each day – just like Sisanie and BoyToy Jesse were when I brought them here at the same points in their careers. I look forward to having Alex on the KIIS staff.”

“The evolution of both KIIS and MY/fm continues,” said Andrew Jeffries, vp of programming, CC/LA and pd of MY/fm. “Dave and Alex fit seamlessly into our world, they’re great talents – it’s their time to shine.”

Hear Ache. Is it true that another KFIer is about to join KABC? … WOR-New York tried to hire Don Imus for mornings. “They could have hired us but you know how that goes,” said Imus. WOR instead hired Elliot Segal, a personality in Washington, DC radio ... TMZ recently reported that Rick Dees' home was burglarized and $100,000 in jewelry was taken. Isn't the actual loss close to $500,000? 

Slight of Hand. Milt Larsen, owner of the Magic Castle and former part-owner of an area radio station, will be the key speaker at tonight’s dinner sponsored by Irwin Zucker’s Book Publicists of Southern California organization.

Tickets for the dinner at the Sportsmen’s Lodge are still available at $40. Give Irwin a call at 310.497.4001 if want to attend.

KDAY Hip-Hops to Meruelo Media. KDAY (93.5/fm) has been acquired by Meruelo Media. Executives of Meruelo claim they will keep the old-school hip-hop format, according to a story in the LA Times.  

Suits Start. Bryan Suits, former KFI Talker, goes live and local on KABC beginning December 16, according to the KABC listener newsletter. Bryan will work the 9 a.m. to noon shift.  

Suits is a decorated military veteran having served three tours of duty overseas including Desert Storm and in Bosnia. He got his start on KROQ, working with the Kevin & Bean morning show. Suits was awarded a Bronze Star for his service as an infantry officer in Baghdad in 2005. He was awarded a Purple Heart for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, also in Baghdad. He also served in the National Guard during the LA riots.

Overheard.

Ad in Wall Street Journal

Handelisms. Yesterday morning Bill Handel took the listener behind the commercial curtain at KFI.

“The Sleep Number people want to know how many people are coming because of me. So when I do a Sleep Number commercial I tell you to tell them Bill Handel sent you, so I get credit for Sleep Number overpaying for these commercials, which are hideously expensive,” said Bill.

Bill described the advertising agency buyers as “20-somethings who never, ever listen to talk radio. They listen to KIIS/fm or Metallica on whatever radio station. The actual time buying is formulaic and it all depends on how many people are listening and they pay X number of dollars for how many people are listening.”

“The KFI talk radio listeners are very different," Handel continued. "Advertisers are people paying more attention but they don’t know what they’re doing. The buyers just don’t know. After I did one of these commercials, one of these 23-year-old time buyers panicked and sent emails saying I couldn’t say that and we tell her to go pound sand. That’s it. Go screw yourself. And then the emails started. And, of course, we won that one because she has no idea what she’s talking about.”  

Funnie. The 2008 World Submarine Racing Championships (from Cameron Ward)

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**Forget Politics … Radio Has to be Entertainment  

“Stephanie Miller said, ‘Liberals have to buy radio stations if they want to compete.’  

Actually -- no Stephanie -- if you want to succeed you need to be entertaining, have some talent, some success and a track record of winning.  I can't remember the name of the liberal talk network but they tried for three years and went out of business because they were just not entertaining.” – Jack Hayes

**All That Jazz

“That picture of Zan Stewart brought back memories, as some of his early radio work was at KOVA in Ojai during part of my stay there. In fact, when he succeeded his father, Lyn Stewart, as host of KOVA’s Saturday afternoon jazz program, it allowed me to move to Sunday mornings as much of my Saturday shift had been acting as Lyn’s engineer.  

I remember that I thought Zan actually did a better show than Lyn had. [They both had encyclopedic knowledge of that genre.]  He’s only 12 years older than I but even then he had the on-air presence of someone with many years of experience.  

I believe he also worked for Saul Levine when KKGO had a jazz format. He went on to be a jazz critic at the Los Angeles Times for many years in the 1980s and 1990s. I found a recent picture of him at the Berkeleyside website ( http://www.berkeleyside.com/2012/06/14/zan-stewart/ ). He looks very much like I remember his father looking back then. Nice to see he is still with us.” – K.M. Richards

** Setting KRKD History Straight

“Bob Fox, thank you very much for telling about your group's ownership of KRKD. I did not know about it! Now I do, so thank you for telling that part of the 1150 AM history.  

My research and writing about Los Angeles radio history is fairly narrow and selective, I suppose.  My main goal since about 1982 has been to try and document what L.A. radio was all about in the 1920s and ’30s and I also dig a bit into the 1940-’45 era. Since I haven't done much research into 1950s radio in Southern California, I am more comfortable having people who were around back then and working in L.A. radio at the time to tell their own stories about their own station's histories from the 1950s through today.  

I did not mean to intentionally gloss over Bob's part of the 1150 AM story. When I began to research early Los Angeles radio history, I found that about 80-90% of the first 10-15 years of Los Angeles radio broadcasting was poorly documented or not documented at all, or in some cases, station histories written by certain stations were inaccurate and filled with mistakes. So, I try to get the history right and correct the mistakes.  

So, it was a great pleasure to read about that slice of the 1150 AM history from Bob Fox, a person with first-hand knowledge of what happened before and up to the time KRKD was sold to the Foursquare Church. 

 My goal is to continue to preserve what little is left of the stories from the first two decades of Los Angeles radio, especially since the 100th anniversary of radio in the Southland is coming up in the next decade.” – Jim Hilliker, Monterey    

“Do you want fries with your God?” – Joe Crummey

(December 11, 2013) When Joe Crummey sent his book, Planking on Headstones: Your Future Outside of Time, I was expecting a book filled with radio stories. After all, Joe has been heard across the dial on KFI, KMPC, KABC, KLSX, and KTZN as a Talk show host in L.A., as well as in other cities. Well, there are some radio stories, but the book is oh so much more. He sets out on a journey attempting to wrestle with some very heady questions, like, what happens when we die and where do we stand in this universe? The book is filled with interesting questions and propositions.

He ponders the story of Noah’s Ark, a four-story boat the length of a football field, armed with only a hammer and a hand saw. And the logistics of corralling two of every living thing seems overwhelming. Joe checked with the Smithsonian Museum and discovered they listed 4,629 species of mammals, resulting in 9,258 mammals. Plus all the birds and the insects. And the elephants alone drank 50 gallons of fresh water each day times 40 days. Quite a challenge just to store water for everything and everyone onboard.

What was Joe’s motivation in writing the book that deals more with science and religion than it does with radio? “I was always curious about the physical world and the spiritual one as well. My first home was adjacent to the church and school, so we would play there as kids. By 14 or 15, Christian theology made no sense to me but I always intended on doubling back at a later date for a second look.”

In college, Joe liked astrophysics. “My college roommate was a geek. The nexus of Science & Theology has always interested me,” said Joe. “I was an English major at University of New Hampshire, and I always wanted to be a writer. I would definitely like to do more.”

Joe doesn’t think traditional theology does a particularly good job in the 21st century. He thinks a lot of people could benefit from a fresh look. “Most ‘new’ thinking seems to be psychics doing cold reads, and Physics books are great, but most of them seem to be written for other eggheads,” continued Joe. “The intersection of Science and Philosophy seemed to be wide open.”

Over Joe’s quarter of a century in Talk Radio, he’s worked on some legendary radio stations. How does he size up today’s Talk Radio? “Talk Radio's slightly different, where there are 1,000 guys criticizing Obamacare. Homogenization comes hand in hand with deregulation and corporate consolidation, so if you want my opinion, I suppose my wish is for more diversity, and more people talking about their own lives, and not so much about what some politician is going to do for us.”

Joe believes the success of Talk Radio in particular and communications in general ultimately lies in the strength of the content. “There are so many more platforms to receive entertainment these days. It's up to the radio industry to determine just how much it wants to participate. It's all about content.”  

Joe started his radio career at WAAF-Worcester and moved on to WCOZ-Boston and WNBC-New York. When he first started on KFI, he worked weekends. In the early 1990s Joe worked live tv talk in San Diego.

In 1994 he lost the hearing in his left ear when the removal of a benign brain tumor required severing the auditory nerve. "Sometimes it's like being in the middle of a very bad drunk that won't go away.  I was looking up at one of those kites at Huntington Beach and almost passed out. This totally destroys your notion of invincibility. You think you've got so much time, when in fact every day you're alive you're damn lucky." You can purchase Joe’s book, Planking on Headstones: Your Future Outside of Time, at Amazon.com.

Miller Time. Last week, there was some big news happening with talk radio. Among other changes, Stephanie Miller learned her current L.A. outlet, KTLK, owned by Clear Channel, would be dropping her show as part of the station’s rebranding as “The Patriot,” with an all-conservative host lineup.  The Liberal morning host seemed philosophical on her first day back on the air after learning the fate of her program. Her show is being dropped in L.A., however, Clear Channel will continue to air her show in other markets.  Stephanie added that fans could also listen on the iHeart Radio app, which is owned by Clear Channel.

There are other changes afoot for Stephanie. As KTLK prepares to drop her program, Stephanie learned she would no longer be able to use the station’s facilities located in Burbank. “I have to pay for the studios being built in my house.”

Stephanie seems to be up for the reality of the business today. “Clear Channel is a huge corporation and they own a lot of these right wing shows, like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush. They also own this station and they own those shows and that’s how they make money. It has nothing to do with ratings. No offense, but they put Glenn Beck in my timeslot in San Francisco and he has zero ratings. It doesn’t matter. They own the shows. All the radio companies are owned by Conservatives and that’s America. They get to do what they want. Liberals have to buy radio stations if they want to compete.”

Hear Ache. KLAC’s Jay Mohr is launching Jay Mohr Sports, a live digital station on iHeartRadio. Fans will now have 24/7 access to Jay Mohr.

Our Mister Brooks. The Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists will honor John Brooks, former reporter and anchor at KNX and KFWB, at its 38th annual awards banquet next spring.

 John is a native of New York, where he first went on the radio at WARC at Allegheny College. He moved to Los Angeles in 1970, with his wife and daughter, and by 1974, he returned to radio at KVEN/KHAY in Ventura. After becoming a news director there, he began a 34-year career in Los Angeles radio at KFWB in 1979. Brooks covered the news either on the scene as a reporter or presented it from the studio as an anchor.  

Some of the notable stories he covered include the first nine space shuttle landings, The Hillside Strangler trial, 1988 Republican Convention, 2008 Democratic Convention, and the L.A. riots. Brooks served as a morning drive anchor at KFWB for eight years and as a reporter at KNX until his retirement in March 2012. He began working for KNX after the two CBS stations moved into the same building in 2005 and finished his career as a morning news reporter for both stations. Since retirement, Brooks helped found and was elected president of a non-profit environmental group, Citizens For Responsible Oil & Gas, in Ventura County.  

Now And Then
Kenny Noble (Cortes) is an anchor/reporter for the K-LOVE and Air1 Radio Networks, owned by the Education Media Foundation, based in Denver. “And you get a lot more respect filling out a loan modification app when your job description is ‘News reporter’ as opposed to ‘disc jockey,’” notes Kenny. Kenny Noble was active in LA radio for two decades (1976-96) as a dj working at KZLA, KFOX, KWST, KHTZ, KFI/KOST, KLSX, and KACD.

 Job Opening. ABC7 Los Angeles is looking for a creative storyteller to cover both news and sports as a multi-media journalist. This job will entail daily reporting and require shooting, editing, writing and producing news and sports content for on-air, on-line and in social media. Must have great writing and strong live presentation skills  Must be technically savvy and able to work independently. Must possess good news judgment and work well under deadline pressure.  Previous experience as a Multi-Media Journalist in news or sports preferred. Previous news or sports anchoring a plus. At least three years experience as a multi-media journalist preferred. Must be able to demonstrate social media fluency.  Please apply online at www.abc7jobs.com.   

Overheard.

Every morning, Carson Daly attempts to be in two places at the same time - morning drive at AMP Radio in Los Angeles and host of the Orange Room on the Today Show in New York.
He did a Today Show segment the other morning while doing his AMP show. Multi-tasking at its high profile best.

Funnie. An older man, not in the best physical condition, asked the trainer in the gym, "I want to impress that beautiful girl over there. Which machine should I use?" 

 The trainer replied, "the ATM machine outside the gym!" (Thanks to Jerry Barber)  

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** Appreciate Hilliker’s History

“It was very interesting to read Jim Hilliker’s history of 1150 AM. Jim is the only one I know who can write a detailed, yet succinct, story about something like the convoluted, decades-long sharing of the 1150 AM frequency.  His work is often based upon primary research – hours spent laboriously grinding through old reels of microfilm to uncover L.A. radio’s long-forgotten past. I had completely forgotten about the Temple’s early experiment on 97.1. 

Thanks to Jim for providing us with another interesting chapter of L.A. radio’s history.” – Stan Kelton

** Radio Students

“I found the Ken Levine Radio Today in the classroom of real interest. As a teacher, I really back that up as I did that same format year after year when I was in the classroom. I always walked away with a nod. 

Bottom line is that radio is more than just music, it’s daily life in the times. I recall when I wrote curriculum on ‘How to Program a Station,’ I was sold out in my classroom. It was the hottest course in the high school. The students did airchecks, music, news, sales and commercials. They created their own call letters and format. Then it was presented in an hour long sounds and format. I could go on and on regarding their presentations. Then again, I was a butt on teaching them how to do it. I loved it. They were so creative and live.” – Stan White, Seattle    

   Orange County Register

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