Saturday, September 4

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September 4, Saturday - Patty came and took Bud with them to Pomona Lake. He always has a ball with them Feel some better, I think. Feel so guilty about not working.

September 5, Sunday - Marv got Bud a transistor radio for his birthday. Bud is bemoaning going back to school. A whole summer wasted, he says. Kids!

September 6, Monday - Got up and put on clothes. Boss called and said things wold be easier for me. I hate to have special favors, but I do appreciate it.

Mom's still struggling, but improving.

My aunt Patty and my cousin Susan were my favorite relatives, hands down. Funny and smart, they made every day enjoyable. Aunt Patty, however, made me eat cold green beans. I will never forgive her for that. Pomona Lake was in Pomona, Kansas. Go figure. It had a beach. With sand.

It's my 15th Birthday! I remember this conversation with mom. It's a theme I carry with me to this day - the idea that there's really no rush to get anything done, and then, whammo, you're out of time, and it's back to reality. So the summer ends, but at least I got a transistor radio. 

These were the vanguard for the Japanese import market. They were pocket-sized, ran on a single nine-volt "transistor radio battery" (what a coincidence!) had a speaker the size of  a silver dollar and sounded like someone shouting from the basement of a tin outhouse. The dial was marked with the locations of the two Conelrad Stations, in case the Russkies decided to lob a few missiles over the poles. For private listening, it came with a teensy cheap-ass ear-plug that sounded exactly the same as the crappy speaker. It didn't matter, we had portable music, twenty years before the Walkman.

Close your eyes and try to imagine this: 

You're fifteen years old, and your favorite song on the Top 40 is The Beach Boys' "California Girls." It is on regular rotation, but since it's in the bottom third of the chart, it gets less airplay than the Rolling Stones' "(I Cant Get No) Satisfaction." You have to wait until it comes around again on the radio to be able to write down the lyrics.

If you decide to buy the single, you have to also buy the B-Side non-hit, "Let Him Run Wild." If you sink for the entire album, you may have several clinkers to deal with. There were actual times when, after I started driving, I would actually stop the car when a good song came on. The idea of streaming, buy-it-by-the-track music, and anything on demand was as unlikely a concept as a Mars landing.

By the way, the guy on keyboards for "California Girls" was Leon Russell. You're welcome. If you're able to use that at bar trivia, I get a cut of the winnings.

Teenage radio listeners in Kansas City were of one of two radio camps - WHB, AM 710 and KUDL, AM 1380. KUDL was affectionately nicknamed "Cuddle". My aunt Gladys was a KUDL person, as were a few of the kids I knew at Northeast. I and most everyone I knew were WHB fans. The "World's Happiest Broadcasters" were a product of Storz Radio. 

I am told that Todd Storz created the Top 40 format. Starting out at KOWH-AM and KOAD-FM in Omaha, Nebraska, Storz turned the stations around when he realized that people actually enjoyed hearing popular music on the radio.

Over the next ten years or so, Storz acquired stations in New Orleans, Kansas City, The Twin Cities, Miami, Oklahoma City, and St. Louis. Each of them offered the Top 40 hits in rotation. 

All we knew was that WHB played our songs, and had the best on-air personalities. Over the years they were the voices we knew better than we knew our parents - Phil Jay, Johnny Dolan, J. Walter Beethoven, Young Bobby Day, and my drag racing pal, directly from St. Louis and the Alton Illinois Dragway, Richard Ward Fatherly. Late at night Walt Bodine did a call-in talk show called NightBeat. I earned my "Perfessor" nickname by answering obscure trivia questions on Nightbeat.

The WHB studios were at the top of The Pickwick Hotel* at 10th and McGee in downtown Kansas City. On several occasions I had cause to visit the studios, and on one of those trips, my friend Steve  and I sat in the control room, learned to cue up records, and was ultimately interviewed on-air by the late great Richard Ward Fatherly. My fifteen minutes of notoriety at Northeast High School. My fame was as fleeting as it was amazing. Fatherly and I stayed in touch on and off over the years, even after he became a Limbaugh** conservative. Incredible baritone, nice guy, drag racer.

WHB put out a weekly list of all the songs on their Top 40 countdown - their 40-Star Survey, and if you didn't have it as soon as it came out every Friday, you were a social outcast. I was anyway, so it didn't matter. We would hotfoot it down to Katz Drug Store to grab the Survey after school on Fridays. The front of the Survey was the list of that week's chart-toppers, but the back was solid gold - the lyrics to a current hit.

I found out that the lyrics were transcribed by the secretary/receptionist, which also explained why some of the lyrics were, well, a little odd, like this Beach Boys nugget:

"Just a little deuce coupe with a flat end wheel." 

We called and corrected her whenever we could. I'm sure she hated to hear the phone ring when the Survey came out.

WHB 40-Star Survey for April 21, 1967

• *The old Pickwick has been converted to apartments. I have my eye on that place if life takes me back to Kansas City.
• **Rush Limbaugh was on KC radio under the nom de airwaves, "Jeff Christie." He also worked in the promotions office of the Kansas City Royals. Couldn't keep a job in KC. 

You can hear the dulcet tones of my pal Richard Ward Fatherly here: