Records Truly Is My Middle Name

Publishing History

Trade paperback edition/March 2013

Published in the Unites States by

Eckhartz Press

Chicago, Illinois

Cover photos from the personal collections of John Records Landecker, Rick Kaempfer, and John Gehron

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

eISBN: 978-0-9848049-9-3

v1.0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Praise

Dedication

Acknowlegements

Introduction

1 - What’s In A Name?

2 - A Baby Boomer’s Childhood

3 - The High School Years

4 - College

5 - A Philadelphia Story

6 - The Big 89

7 - Star Trippin’

8 - The Beginning Of The End

PHOTO GALLERY

9 - Oh Canada

10 - Descent Into Darkness

11 - The Darkest Days

12 - Officially An Oldie

13 - Star Trippin’ Again

14 - I’m With The Band

15 - An Oldie, But Not A Goodie

16 - Talking The Talk

17 - Closure

Appendix – Hits & Bits

i - Mom And Dad Explain My Middle Name

ii - On The Air In Ann Arbor, 1966

iii - Make A Date With A Watergate

iv - Animal Stories

v - The B.S. Love Counselor

vi - Travolta At Woodfield Mall

vii - Radio Star Wars

viii - Cabrini Green

ix - Mary Tyler Moore

x - Martha Stewart

xi - The Bobbitt Song

xii - The Dahmer Song

xiii - King Of Farts

xiv - Baby Boomer

xv - Why Dna?

xvi - Jay Leno Interview

xvii - Viva Viagra

xviii - Pierzinski At The Bat

About The Authors

Publisher Page

Praise for Records Truly Is My Middle Name

John Landecker’s shows have always been the smartest, most creative, high-energy performances on the dial. He is constantly challenging the listener to keep up, which is why everyone keeps coming back for more. And guess what? He’s just as interesting and entertaining off the air!

— Bob Sirott, nightly news co-anchor, WFLD-TV Chicago

John Records Landecker was my obsession when I was a kid. No matter where I was, I had to hear the start of his show at 6pm. I just had to. I had never heard such crazy energy booming out of such a tiny little radio. I wanted to be John Records. Hell, I actually told people that I was John Records, and when I did, people bought me drinks (for real). I owe Landecker many free drinks and many thanks for getting me so pumped on radio. Someday I will actually read this book!

— Jonathon Brandmeier, WGN Radio morning man

As a child of the 70s, Landecker was my favorite. Through him, I learned the seductive if inscrutable power of the vaguely naughty double entendre. I ended up in media...became a writer who’s done a lot of books and magazine work and TV and radio (thrillingly even a few guest turns with the Great Landecker himself!). But I tell only truth when I say that John Records Landecker was my first media hero.

— Bill Zehme, bestselling author of books about Frank Sinatra (The Way You Wear Your Hat), Johnny Carson (Carson the Magnificent), Hugh Heffner (Hef’s Little Black Book), and Andy Kaufman (Lost in the Funhouse)

I listened to John Landecker every night on the Big 89. I still think he is the best rock jock that ever lived. The best of all-time.

— Spike O’Dell, legendary Chicago radio personality

This book is dedicated to:

My parents, Werner and Marjorie Landecker

My daughters, Tracy and Amy

My brother Tom, his wife Sharon and my nephew Will

My soul mate, Nika

Judy Landecker, the mother of my children, her sister Bambi and their brother Joe

My granddaughter, Lola

Paula and Laura

Grandpa Records and all my relatives in Indiana

Angela and Lyndon Welch, who helped me in more ways than they will ever know

And the three people who helped get my first radio job: Lucy Dobson, Ted Heusel and Tom O’Brien

I love you all,
John

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It took several years to write this book, and it definitely wasn’t done in a traditional way. My co-author and former producer Rick Kaempfer came out to my house in Michigan City, Indiana, and asked me to start telling him stories about my life. He recorded and transcribed them, and then came back out to my house again and again to ask me to tell some more. When we had finally finished, he sent me the transcripts, and I began to write some additional stories myself. Rick then cobbled all of that together into its current narrative form.

Rick also conducted the interviews of the other people quoted in this book. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the kind words from people like Tom O’Brien, Art Vuolo, Joey Reynolds, John Gehron, Jonathon Brandmeier, Bob Sirott, Fred Winston, Alan Rosen, Turi Ryder, Bill Zehme, Jim Martin, Spike O’Dell, Jim Smith, Eddie Webb, Kevin Matthews, Eric Ferguson, Greg Eckler, Catherine Johns, Leslie Keiling, Greg Brown, Len O’Kelly, Vince Argento, Kipper McGee, Mary June Rose, Don Wade, Jan Jeffries, Jim Bohannan, and Rick himself.

Thanks to all the people that helped put this book together, including my publisher David Stern from Eckhartz Press, my editor Bridget Kaempfer, and my excellent book designer Kelly Hyde. Thanks also to the people that provided some of the photos contained in these pages, especially John Gehron, Scott Childers, Tony Lossano, and Paul Natkin.

I would like to thank everyone who listened. I would also like to thank everybody I ever worked with — but if you’re one of those people who made my life a living hell — go fuck yourself.

INTRODUCTION

A few years ago I was at a party and the subject of “John Landecker on WLS” came up in conversation. Someone said to me: “You know, you’re a celebrity on some level.”

I said “A what?”

I guess it’s some kind of semi-compliment. Sort of a “some may know you, but some don’t.” If you are in a certain age group, lived in a certain area of the United States, and listened to radio or worked in the industry, you might know who I am. To others I would ask: Are you a Baby Boomer? Were you around for the birth of rock and roll? Did you ever wonder what was happening behind the scenes at those radio stations you did listen to? Do you remember where you were when JFK was shot, when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, when John Lennon died, when O.J. got off? Did you get married, divorced, have children, face job loss, drugs, alcohol, illness or death? Did you refuse to join AARP because your parents belonged to it?

OK, maybe that last one is just me. But if you answered yes to any of the other questions, maybe I’m not a celebrity on some level, maybe I’m just a guy writing a book about the times we all lived through together.

John Records Landecker.

RECORDS TRULY IS MY MIDDLE NAME

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

A short description of my father Werner Landecker’s life gives you an idea of the truly profound and memorable things he must have experienced between his Berlin birth in 1911 and his Ann Arbor, Michigan death in 2003. He grew up a Jew in Nazi Germany — the last Jew to earn a law degree in Berlin before the war. He eventually escaped and immigrated to the United States, became a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, married a farm girl from Indiana, fathered two boys, and lost his sight early in his adulthood.

Dad obviously had some great stories. I wish I knew more of them.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

WERNER LANDECKER IN HIS OWN WORDS

Shortly before my father died, my brother Tom managed to videotape him telling a few. This is one of my favorites: Family history down the toilet... I was very close to my mother’s family, and especially my grandmother Sophie Kahn. When I was an adolescent and visiting Grandmother in Berlin, my cousin and I became interested in our family history. Nobody seemed to know much about the earlier generations of Kahn’s, but they remembered there was an old abandoned Jewish cemetery in town that might offer a few clues. So, we took along someone that could read Hebrew, and we found several gravestones. My cousin took meticulous notes and wrote down all the names and dates from the gravestones, and he promised to do more research when he got home.

Unfortunately, that cousin lived in Hanover, and had to take a train back to his hometown. The bathrooms in those trains in the Weimar Republic days were notoriously bad, and this one was no exception. When he went into the bathroom stall, he noticed that they didn’t have any toilet paper. Well, this was an emergency, and my cousin had only one piece of paper that would solve the problem; the piece of paper with all the notes about the family’s history.

That Kahn family history was literally flushed down the toilet on a train to Hanover.

A JEW IN NAZI GERMANY

My father didn’t talk about those days in Germany very much, unless we really pulled it out of him. He told us that when he was young, a kid was following him around one day, throwing matches at him. Dad responded by punching him.

Another time when he was a college student, he intentionally visited a library he knew was run by the Nazis. I asked him why in the world he would do that, knowing that as a Jew, he wouldn’t be allowed to study there.

“I just wanted to see what it felt like,” he said.

I think that describes my father perfectly.

He stayed in Germany longer than it was safe for Jews to stay there because he really wanted to finish his doctor of jurisprudence degree at the University of Berlin. He was the last Jew to receive that degree in pre-war Germany, but because he was a Jew, his dissertation was never published.

That 1936 dissertation is a story unto itself.

After he left Germany, Dad never gave it another thought. Then, in the mid 1990s, when Dad was in his eighties, an old German colleague of his, Professor Guenther Luschen, called up to say that he really wanted to publish it because he thought it was a historically important document. I can see why Professor Luschen felt that way. 1936 was no ordinary year in German history. It was the first full year the Nuremberg Laws were in effect.

The “Law for Protection of German Blood and Honor,” made it illegal for Jews to marry non-Jews. The “Reich Citizen Law” stripped German citizenship from anyone that had any Jewish blood — they became known as “subjects of the state.” And in 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs once and for all, officially ending any influence they may have had over politics, education, academia, and industry.

And what was my father’s dissertation about? The importance of international law.

I’ll say.

If you go looking for it on the internet, you’ll need to know what it’s called. In German it’s a mouthful. Try this one on for size: “DIE GELTUNG DES VOLKERRECHTS ALS GESELLSCHAFTLISCHES PHANOMEN: EINE RECHTS- UND SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTLICHE ANALYSE AUS DEM JAHR 1936; HERAUSGEGEBEN VON GUNTHER LUSCHEN.”

I put it in capital letters because I can’t picture anyone saying it without shouting. The English version isn’t much better: “The Importance of International Law as a Social Phenomenon: A Judicial and Sociological Analysis from the Year 1936.”

When it was finally published in 1999, 63 years after he originally wrote it, Dad was still alive to hear about it. Alive, but quite frankly not doing too well. He was 88 years old. He had fallen and hit his head and it had a lasting effect.

Plus, becoming published was already old hat to him. To remain a tenured professor at a major institution you had to “publish or perish.” Teaching was not enough. My father had written countless papers for journals, and two textbooks: Class Boundaries and Class Crystallization. The idea that his work as a student in Germany would finally be published did not excite him.

I found it to be a fantastic story. I envision a modern day German classroom referencing this book as part of their course work. Maybe Dad was fine with leaving those things behind in Germany, and grateful those things didn’t make it out.

That’s really all we know about Dad’s time in Germany. Although he did tell my brother Tom another good story on that videotape. Werner Landecker in his own words regarding a family heirloom... When my parents were fleeing the Nazis in 1939, the Nazis were still allowing Jews to ship their belongings — but not anything valuable, like artwork or jewelry.

My mother had a diamond pin that she really loved, and my father decided to take a risk to keep it. He bored a hole in some dining room furniture he was shipping, inserted the pin, and covered it up again. If this had been discovered, he almost certainly would have been imprisoned or killed. But he got lucky, and the furniture was shipped to Newark, New Jersey, and put in storage there.

When Marjorie and I were married, my mother decided she wanted Marjorie to have the pin, so she sent us to Newark to retrieve it. All of the furniture had been left out to rot on a dock somewhere, ruined by water damage, and picked apart by scavengers, but the pin was still there — hidden in the furniture.

So we went out to dinner with the pin to celebrate. We had a nice dinner and were walking away from the restaurant when Marjorie suddenly realized ‘Oh no! I left the pin at the restaurant!’

It was still there when we went back for it, but we found it pretty funny that it got past the Nazis and the New Jersey dock workers, but we had managed to lose it in less than an hour.

HOOSIER MAMA

Mom was an Indiana girl through and through. How stereotypically Hoosier were my mother’s parents William J. Records and Ione Records? William was a farmer, and Ione was a grand champion blue-ribbon winner at the Indiana State Fair. I have an article about my grandmother in the local paper, and the reporter wrote: “If you took all her ribbons and stretched them from end to end, they’d go from here to waaaay out there.” She won ’em all: pies, bread, baking, and sewing. Multiple awards — year after year after.

My mom, Marjorie Victoria Records, grew up on the farm along with her three siblings Marvin, Virginia, and Jeannette. In some ways Mom was a typical Hoosier, but she was also unusual for her era. Mom reached out beyond the agricultural stereotype and went to college at Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana, and then to graduate school at Indiana University.

That was incredibly atypical for her time. Her parents didn’t go to college. The great majority of her Indiana relatives never went to college. (Only one of her sisters, Virginia, did.) The two Records girls that went to college really left the Indiana farmland behind. Virginia married a doctor and moved to South Carolina.

Mom met Dad. And according to urban legend, this is how it happened.

They were driving in separate cars in Brown County, which is in downstate Indiana — a beautiful vacation area about thirty miles from Bloomington. He was in one car, and she was in another. They came to a stop at an intersection, gazed into each other’s eyes, and decided to go for coffee. The rest, as they say, is history. They were married for fifty years.

I can only imagine what it must have been like when my mom brought my father (a liberal, intellectual, German Jew and member of the NAACP and ACLU) to her farm in the heartland of conservative, Christian, rural Indiana, but if there were any stories of the Records clan not accepting Dad, I never heard one. In all the times we came to Indiana, there was nary a peep, hint, innuendo, or aside from anybody.

AND BABY MAKES THREE

There’s an old expression about the month of March; in like a lion and out like a lamb. Not necessarily. At 5:14 pm on March 28, 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the lion was roaring.

Outside their small apartment on Washington Heights in Ann Arbor there was a white-out blizzard accompanied by sub-zero temperatures. Inside, Werner & Marjorie contemplated their situation. Marjorie’s water had broken.

After clearing a path and walking very cautiously, Werner got Marjorie safely into the front seat and then prayed to the ignition gods that the car would start. It did. Since the weather was so bad, traffic was extremely light. That gave Werner the luxury of using the entire road to travel the relatively short distance to St. Joseph Hospital. With his right hand on the wheel, he used his left to open the window and reach out to help the overburdened windshield wipers keep the snow off the windshield so he could see where he was going.

Even though the temperature was below zero and the wind was howling, a small line of perspiration formed on Werner’s forehead. As was her way, Marjorie was calm and reassured her husband that he was doing a great job getting them to the hospital and all would be well. When the car finally came to a stop at the entrance to the hospital, things began to move rather quickly. At approximately 7:40 pm on the evening of March 28, 1947, Werner Sigmund Landecker and Marjorie Victoria Landecker had a son.

That son was me.

I came out face first; a metaphor for how I would live the rest of my life. My face was covered with deep bruises, and my neck was grotesquely out of alignment. The bruises would fade, but the neck treatment required me to be placed between two sandbags until the neck and head assumed the proper position.

When they were sure I was healthy, they realized I needed a name. John was their choice for the first name and obviously Landecker for the last. In a nod to my mother’s upbringing, they chose her maiden name, Records, as my middle name.

They had no way of knowing that their son would become a radio disc jockey, or that this name they had chosen would become my unlikely calling card.

But it is an absolutely true story. One that I have had to tell many, many times. One that my mother and father had to tell many, many times. (The full transcript of Mom and Dad telling it on WLS Radio is in the appendix.)

Even though nobody believes it: Records Truly is My Middle Name.

A BABY BOOMER’S CHILDHOOD

In the 1950s, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the U.S. President, and Elizabeth was the brand new Queen of England. The Cold War was at its nadir, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was conducting anti-American hearings in Washington, exposing alleged Communists. Even though Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus, and schools were ordered to integrate, America was still a very segregated country. The average American family earned about $5,000 a year. Most historians consider the official beginning of the rock and roll era the release of Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” in 1955. The next year, Elvis Presley became the biggest star in the world, Alan Freed became the first famous rock and roll disc jockey in America, and every parent in the country was against everything all of that stood for.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If the stories I’ve been told about my childhood are true, some of my strengths and weaknesses were there from the very beginning. For instance, I had an aversion to taking responsibility for my actions. When I was very little, whenever I was going to be confronted or scolded for something I shouldn’t have done, my immediate reaction was to say: “Look at the birdie! Look at the birdie!” As in, let’s take our mind off our problems. (Years later my mother was diagnosed with cancer and I purchased a small wooden bird and gave it to her so that she could “look at the birdie.” It was still on the kitchen table when she died.)

My poor mother also tried to teach me math, which is another of my lifelong weaknesses. She had to get creative to get through to me. Across the street from my school, Bach Elementary, there was a neighborhood store that sold penny candy and was run by a guy we called Johnny Gyp. He didn’t really gyp people, but I suppose if you have an onslaught of elementary school people descend on your store after school every day, five days a week, you might turn into a “Johnny Gyp” too.

My mother would try to teach me how to add and subtract by telling me to go to the store and get penny candy. She would say, “let’s say you have five pieces of penny candy, and three pieces that cost a nickel, how would you know how much to spend?”

My answer was: “Ask the man.”

Who says a half-Jew needs to haggle?

Just as my weaknesses were there from the beginning, so were some of my strengths. I had a very early interest in performing. When I was really young I was in a play called The Ugly Duckling. I still have the program from that performance: It was Sunday, December 6, 1953, at 2pm. General admission was sixty-three cents plus tax, for a total of seventy-five cents. In a really strange twist of fate, the two ladies who put that play on were later married to two men that would have a very big impact on my radio career: Ted Heusel and Joel Sebastian.

It was also very important to me when I was in elementary school to be part of the cool crowd. There were a few fashion trends that came and went, and I had to be part of them. One of the odder ones was when all of the boys wore white nylon jackets, or windbreakers. I have no idea why those were considered cool, but they were, and I had to have one. We also wore these shirts that were designed to look like a shirt with a sweater over it, like a cardigan. They were actually just sewn that way. I have no idea why. They say that everything eventually becomes cool again, but we’re still waiting for that white nylon jacket and fake cardigan look to come back in style.

1950s Ann Arbor was a very typical American experience in a lot of ways. The first time McDonald’s came to town, it was a huge deal. Everybody had to ride their bikes over there to see this cool new hamburger place. I remember the menu distinctly. A hamburger was fifteen cents, French fries were ten cents, and a chocolate shake was twenty cents. I don’t want to say this was very early in the McDonald’s dynasty, but if you had a photograph of the McDonald’s sign when it first debuted in Ann Arbor, it probably said: “150 sold.”

INDIANA MEMORIES

Because we lived in Ann Arbor, and Mom’s family was in Indiana, we spent every vacation of my childhood in the Hoosier state. I loved going to Indiana, I loved going to my grandparents’ farm, I loved going to the Indiana State Fair. It’s where I discovered bumper cars and snow cones. But my favorite moments came when my blue-ribbon winning grandmother was baking at the farmhouse. Everything was made from scratch, no mixes. That meant homemade icing. I still love icing, probably because my grandmother always left a little bit in the bowl for young Johnny to scrape up with a spatula.

My grandparents’ farm house didn’t have central heating. In the winter, the upstairs was closed off and everyone slept on the first floor, which had a large gas furnace in the living room. When we visited for Christmas, my mom would sleep on the couch, and Grandpa Records set up three cots in the front room for Tom, Dad and me. On Christmas Day my grandmother would have to make a huge turkey for the all the relatives. You can imagine how big of a bird that required and how long it took to cook it. One year I woke up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, and saw my grandmother passing in front of that huge gas heater as she was making her way from the bedroom to the kitchen. I can still smell that delicious warm turkey.

The animals on the farm were just a part of life, although sometimes that wasn’t quite so pleasant. I had to hold the male pigs while they were neutered by a vet. If you’ve never seen it done, it’s pretty quick. You prop up the pig’s legs, the vet comes in, and zip zap, off they go. The pigs don’t even seem fazed by it. I watched my Aunt Jeannette kill a chicken too. She put her foot on the chicken’s head and yanked. The head came off, but the rest of the body ran around the yard for a while before flopping down. Of course that’s the origin of the expression “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

There was also one really mean rooster on Grandpa Records’ farm that would run after my brother and me and peck at our legs. So, I devised a plan. I convinced my brother to be my bait, and I got a good hiding place. Tom came running down the driveway with this rooster in full pursuit. I waited until Tom passed me and then I made my move, hurling rocks at the angry bird. It was all very dramatic and exciting. I hit the little bastard a few times, and he never bothered me or my brother again.

THE SILVER SCREEN

We were visiting my grandparents in 1959 when Ben Hur came out. It was showing at this huge ornate movie palace in downtown Indianapolis. One day the whole family got in the car to drive the thirty five miles from Grandpa’s farm. I was just enthralled by that whole experience; the theater, the city, the surroundings. It was just the best.

If you’ve seen the movie, you probably remember that lepers are a side story — and if you’re anything like me, you remember that as the really scary part. It was creepy. You could feel the tension building in the theater. It was ramping up and up, and suddenly as the music swelled, one person stood up in the middle of the movie theater and screamed.

“I can’t take it. I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore!”

And he ran out of the theater.

I thought “WOW! This movie is really something!”

Every time I’ve watched it since, I’ve watched to see if that leprosy scene has the same effect on me, and it still does.

There was another movie memory from that year that wasn’t quite as grand, but it also left a lasting impression on me. One day, for reasons I still don’t understand all these years later, my mom decided to take me out of elementary school to go to the movies. I don’t remember why, but I remember the movie: John Paul Jones starring Robert Stack. John Paul Jones was the great naval hero from the Revolutionary War, and this was one of those old fashioned “could have been done by Walt Disney himself” interpretations of the American Revolution.

Fast forward fifty two years later. It was 10am on the 4th of July, and Turner Classic Movies was showing patriotic films in honor of Independence Day, and I just happened to stumble onto the channel just as they were showing John Paul Jones. I hadn’t seen that film since 1959, the day my mom took me out of school, and I have to admit, I got a little emotional as the memory came flooding back to me.

FUN WITH BLINDNESS

But as typical as some elements of my childhood were, there was one thing that was totally different. My father was blind. He wasn’t blind yet when I was born, but I don’t have any memory of him being able to see. Maybe it was just because it was all I knew, or maybe it was because he handled it so well, but it was never a problem for us — never an issue. He still managed to support the family as a professor of sociology. Granted, it would have been extremely difficult for him to do it without the help of my mother, who handled absolutely everything else — if anything needed to be taken care of, she took care of it — but there were never any stories of strife in dealing with being blind.

I never heard a hint of “boo hoo, woe is me.” Never. When I was a little kid I asked my father why he wore glasses if he couldn’t see anything, and that was the last time he ever wore glasses.

“You’re right! I don’t know why I wear them. Why, thank you, John.”

He had a great sense of humor about it. Occasionally my brother and I would pump whip cream from a can onto his cake, and pile it up a little higher than usual, because we knew that when he bent down to eat, he would stick his face right in it. (Of course, he knew it was coming — he just played along.)

We weren’t shy about ribbing him, and he wasn’t shy about ribbing himself if the subject came up. Years later a rock club opened up in Ann Arbor called “The Blind Pig.” One day I came home and checked my answering machine for messages. I heard my Dad’s voice with a bunch of noise in the background. He said: “John, I don’t know if you can hear me. I’m at The Blind Pig, and I’m having a great time. I just wanted to let you know where I am.”

My parents were not above turning the tables on Tom and myself. At one point Tom decided to get his ears pierced. He was an adult, he was married, he had a kid, and he lived in California, yet he still had some reservations about how his parents would react. Tom, his wife Sharon, and my nephew Will came home for Christmas. My father took two of my mother’s gaudiest earrings and put one on each ear. He then greeted Tom at the door like everything was totally normal.

TOM LANDECKER remembers

This vision issue did affect my brother Tom... Sometime in the mid ’80s I noticed that I had a dark spot dead center in my left eye’s field of vision. I went to see a specialist in Berkeley who injected me with a dye and then looked into my eye with a scope and saw there was a leak in the back of the retina. He told me this was technically a detached retina. Given how much this affected me (I’m a photographer), it was decided to treat it with a laser. They took a detailed medical history from me in preparation for the laser surgery, asking if I had experienced anything such as stroke, heart disease, previous vision problems, etc., which I told them I hadn’t. Then they asked about my family history, wondering if there were any vision problems.

I said no.

All of a sudden I realized what they meant by vision "problems,” a term that really didn’t fit in Dad’s case, because by no stretch of the imagination did he have a problem. He had been blind all of my life, and for most of it he walked to work with a series of leader dogs at a pace that required me to do a light jog to keep up. Nonetheless, I decided to mention his retinal detachment and blindness. The doctor just looked at me for a long time.

He clearly thought I was out of my mind.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

The day my father told me the facts of life is a story right out of a 1950s Norman Rockwell painting. Imagine if you will, a professor/father with his pipe, wearing his suit coat and tie in his study at home. He calls for his boy to join him.

“Young John, come in and sit down.”

Then he explained to me in clinical detail about the penis and the vagina, and exactly how sexual intercourse worked. Direct, and to the point, without any embellishment. No vernacular, no slang.

“This is how it works — the man inserts the penis into the woman’s vagina.”

OK, thanks Dad. Sounds good. I think I’ll give it a try.

By then, I had definitely already taken note of the opposite sex. Watching television had a lot to do with that because The Mickey Mouse Club was on every day after school. One Mouseketeer in particular had an impact on me; Annette Funicello. Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she was talented. But more importantly, as time went on she developed breasts right before our very eyes. The Mouseketeers wore sweaters with their names spelled out, and as the years progressed, Annette’s “A” and “E” grew farther and farther apart. I’m telling you, it was a sensation. I finally got to interview the girl of my childhood dreams when I was working in Toronto in the ’80s. It was fabulous. If you can believe it, she told me that she felt very self-conscious when she was on The Mickey Mouse Club because she was the only “ethnic” one, and how did she put it? I believe she said she looked a little bit different than the others. Yeah Annette, I think we know what you mean.

So first there was Annette, but then there was Nancy. Nancy March was my first girlfriend in elementary school, and it was all very innocent. I literally carried her books home from school. When I had a birthday party at the local YMCA, she gave me a 45 RPM record of the Fleetwoods song “Come Softly to Me.” Many years later, the subject of first girlfriends came up during a radio show I was hosting, and I told that story, and brought up the name of Nancy March. Wouldn’t you know it? Somebody listening to the show knew Nancy. That led to a telephone conversation with her, and a lunch in Chicago with Nancy and her husband. It was great reconnecting with her all those years later. I’m happy to report that she went on to live happily ever after. Nancy was, and always will be for me, part of the holy trinity of girls that sparked my discovery of human sexuality.

Who is the third part of the holy trinity of girls, you ask? Well, for this young American lad, no female represented sexuality more than Ann Margret. I still have my Bye Bye Birdie soundtrack, and if you know anything about me, you know I don’t normally go for musicals. But if it had Ann Margret in it, that was good enough for me. In one movie called The Swinger (with Tony Franciosa), she played a writer who had to prove to a publisher that she was sexy by writhing around the floor covered in paint. Oh boy. Still, the quintessential all-time Ann Margret experience as far as I’m concerned is in the rock opera Tommy. So what if she plays Tommy’s mother? In one scene Ann Margret slid around the floor as baked beans washed all over her, and then the baked beans turned to chocolate, and chocolate was spewing all over Ann Margret’s body, and she was writhing and grinding all over the floor. That’s how I’ll always remember her — rolling around the floor covered in various liquids. It sure works for me. Years later I was able to have a brief telephone interview with her and the first thing I did was thank her for that.

NOT EXACTLY NORMAN ROCKWELL

After Bach Elementary School, I went to Slauson Junior High School. At those schools I was hanging out with typical blue-collar kids whose parents were milkmen and plumbers, even though we were in a university town.

Slauson was an integrated school, but there were very few instances of racial tension. I moved well in every circle because we all played football together, and that was an equalizer. But there was one occasion where I was accused of stealing a nickel from an African-American kid in the locker room. I didn’t do it, but the kid didn’t believe me and said “I’ll meet you after school.”

I have to admit, I was nervous about it, but I showed up in the alley on the side of school. I showed up alone, and he showed up with thirty of his friends. I knew a lot of these guys from football, so I said: “I’ll fight him, but I won’t fight all of you.”

The guys I knew from football agreed that was fair, and they formed a circle around us. We were just about to start the fight when the athletic director of the school poked his head out of the window, saw what was going on, and broke it up.

This athletic director is another story. I didn’t know anything about pedophiles or molestation when I was in junior high, but this guy was a pedophile. I didn’t have the slightest idea at the time, but looking back, there were a few clues. For instance, he made us swim nude in swimming class, which was a little odd. I also have a memory of him sitting with a few of his favorites surrounding him during recess. Years later when I heard what he had been doing, that image immediately came to mind. Our very own Jerry Sandusky.

SCOUTING A CAREER

Other than my brief acting gig as a boy, I got my first real taste of performing in scouts. We did skits at potluck dinners and things like that. I got a lot of my material from a comedy team that was on Ed Sullivan all the time, Wayne and Shuster. I also got a lot of material from Bob Newhart. I remember at one point I had literally memorized most of The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart comedy album, and I would do his routines to entertain my fellow scouts.

I don’t think the Boy Scouts would have advertised my troop as a good example for Boy Scouting in America. Our troop leader bought us cigarettes, which I’m guessing most troop leaders didn’t do for their scouts. We also went on a campout at Point Pelee National Park that wouldn’t have made the Boy Scout brochures. It was a peninsula with a beach that was reputed to be big make-out area for local teens. So, one night we hid in the bushes, and sure enough, there were couples on the beach doing their thing. In the morning we found used condoms where they had been the night before. We put those used condoms on the end of sticks and went to campsites that were going to be used that day, and placed them amongst the burnt embers of previous night’s charcoal briquettes and burned twigs. When the next unknowing victims would come and cook their wieners over the fire, we would wait in the bushes and watch them, and giggle about the special seasonings they were getting from what we had planted in their ashes.

Were we not the poster children for Boy Scouting in America?

Something else we did as Boy Scouts was a Christmas wreath fundraiser. I believe I ended up with $15, and let me tell you, I had to sell a lot of wreaths to end up with $15 in those days. I credit my mother for her help — she drove me all over the city so I could sell them door-to-door. She knew I was highly motivated to earn that money. I wanted an upgrade for my first radio, a crystal diode radio in a cigar box with copper wiring wrapped around a toilet roll. It had no tuner. It had no on-off switch. It had no battery. And whatever it was you faintly picked up in your headphones, you faintly picked up in your headphones.

My plan was to go down to the store and buy a fancier crystal diode radio, but my parents — exhibiting one of the traits that remained consistent throughout their lives — always consulted the experts before making any decision about anything. Doing the research, they found out that crystal radios were basically toys, so they surprised me by saying they would match my money (and then some), and buy a $36 transistor radio. At the time, that was a huge amount of money. It got a six-transistor Channel Master AM radio. I brought that Channel Master home and my father listened to all of his newscasts that night, and that was a big deal for all of us. I don’t think he realized at the time just how big of a deal it was for me. It was instrumental in directing me into my career.

The other thing that did it for me was my father’s Dictaphone, which was a very elementary device used to record the human voice. Because he was blind, Dad used the Dictaphone to take notes. I remember being allowed to play with it a little bit. I pushed the buttons, and recorded my voice. The first time I heard my voice come back out of that tiny speaker, I experienced an epiphany or revelation of some kind.

After that, I went to the library and took out books about announcing. I remember one was called This is Your Announcer. (I looked for that book again while I was writing this book. I’m not 100% sure, but I think it was written by Henry B. Lent in 1945, and the full title of the book is This is Your Announcer: Ted Lane Breaks into Radio.)

I really got into this. I set up a fake little radio station in my closet. I think I called it WXXV. When I finally got a tape recorder of my own, I would start up a record, and talk over the intro just like the real DJs. I also got sound effect records including sound effects of a screaming crowd, and would pretend to be a sports play-by-play guy. Can you picture it? A youngster sitting all by himself in his bedroom closet, pretending to be on the air on a completely fake radio station? Now that I’ve admitted that to you, I can claim to be a lot of things, but I can never again pretend that I wasn’t an absolute radio geek.

ROCK AND ROLL

Anyone that was there in the early days of rock and roll will tell you that it had two sides; the Elvis side and the Pat Boone side. Ed Sullivan wouldn’t show Elvis’ lower body on TV because it was too suggestive. Pat Boone was the preppy all-American boy. Elvis’ trademark was his greased-back hair. Pat Boone’s was his white bucks. (Those are shoes, by the way.) I suppose it was a little bit like the difference between the Beatles and the Stones. If you asked me, I was an Elvis guy. On the other hand, I also knew the lyrics to “Love Letters in the Sand.”

At that time I would visit my father on campus, go up to his office, and spend the day reading my Hardy Boy books and drinking a couple of Coca Colas as he went about his business of being a college professor. He always loved the academic life, but there was one thing he couldn’t stand: rock and roll music.

He didn’t consider rock and roll to be a legitimate art form, or even legitimate music. That’s probably why I have such a vivid memory of the one time he managed to put that aside, at least for one night. I had written away for an album that had all the hits on it (remember those ads — “The original hits with the original artists!”) Unfortunately, on this album they weren’t done by the original artists. Oh well; they were still the hits, and as far as I was concerned, there was no reason to send it back. On New Year’s Eve, my parents were having a party, and even though they supposedly hated my music, they actually borrowed my record player, and borrowed my records, and played them downstairs for the grownups. That was a big deal to me. It showed that my music wasn’t so illegitimate after all.