Nat Asch, over a  stretch of years, held a variety of positions at WNEW and WNEW-FM that put him in the NY Giants broadcast booth, a GM’s corner office, the clutches of Klavan and Finch, and in an impressive assortment of  Manhattan saloons where he did meet and greet the great.  He posted a comment on “WBW VIS-A-VIS RNR,” which we intercepted and moved over here into this larger space.   Nat wrote . . . .

William B. Williams,  also known as Velvel B. Velvel, Guillermo B. Guillermo and half a dozen other non de plumes that he employed to identify himself during his extraordinarily successful daily turns on WNEW, was a master of what is known these days as the Great American Songbook.  I need hardly remind one and all that he named Frank Sinatra “the chairman of the board.”  (When Sinatra was informed that Willie had cancer, he invited Willie to his home in Palm Springs where Willie subsequently spent three weeks convalescing.)   Willie was also a great friend and especially was that so when he introduced me (as well as WNEW’s audience) to Buddy Hackett. More about Buddy at another time.

     Willie B, as he was most familiarly known, had a  clearly defined sense  both of humor and subtlety which was accompanied by a laugh that eventuated into a highly infectious cackle. You simply had to laugh when Willie cackled.

      He had little patience with those artists who “covered” other artist’s musical “hits” and had a way of both playing their music and expressing his distaste for their propensity for what he felt was copying. These days it’s called “covering.” By you it’s ‘covering’ and by me it’s ‘covering.’ But by Willie it was plagiarism, larceny! There was, for example, (and he always took advantage of the opportunity to display his language facility by never saying “for example.” He always used the Spanish “por ejemplo.”) the time that a good friend of the station, Buddy Greco, had the hit, “Around the World.”
     Within weeks, the singer Kaye Stevens produced her version of “Around the World” which, it turned out, was exactly the same as Greco’s; tempo, arrangement, exactly the same. (Greco, by the way, never forgave her.) Willie demonstrated his dissatisfaction with Steven’s record by saying at its conclusion, “nice try,”  in an easily identified tone indicating displeasure. 

      I loved Willie B. He, Hackett and I spent a great deal of time together…mostly laughing because Buddy who, in my opinion owned the single most original comedy mind I had ever encountered, never stopped being hilarious and Willie B. loved to laugh.

      They were the best days of my life.

      Nat Asch

Next time you’re in Hollywood, stroll over to the north  side of the 6300 block of Hollywood Blvd., and you’ll come to the spot where they put a star on the Walk of Fame for the ol’ spotted dog, Jim Lowe.  A lifetime devoted to American popular music is what put it there, and for giving radio broadcasting a good name in the years he was on  the air.

You’ll  find, below,  a recorded conversation Jim had with Doug Miles on WSRQ in Sarasota, FL eight years ago,  on  June 4, 2004,  followed by a David Hinkley story in The New York Daily News, from November 10, 2004, about a month after Jim retired, having conceded that “it is,” as he often said,  “later than it’s ever been.” E.B.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXn5JjiWwL4

That said, it was never easy to put the show together or find stations to carry it in a radio world that mostly acts as if music started with the Beatles. But Lowe did it for six years, when he could have been relaxing in retirement at his Long Island home, just because he still liked it. “The show was a labor of love,” he says. “When it became a labor, it was time to end it.”

Born in Springfield, Mo., Lowe didn’t come to New York as a crusader. He came as a songwriter and singer who in late 1955 had a hit with “Close the Door,” then a bigger one – a No. 1, in fact – with “Green Door.” He cut some songs his later fans might think odd, including “Maybelline,” and he had almost as big a hit as Jim Reeves with the melancholy “Four Walls.”

It was also noted that he had a great radio voice, and by 1962 he was doing Saturday nights at NBC Radio’s “Monitor.” A year later he joined WNEW-AM, doing the “Milkman’s Matinee” and “Jim Lowe’s New York,” which featured listener quizzes on esoteric facts. He returned to “Monitor” from 1969 to 1973, then bounced back to WNEW-AM, where he revived “Jim Lowe’s New York,” did a spell on the evening shift and in 1982 became program director.

Neither he nor anyone else could save the station, which finished its own run in 1992. So Lowe, like others, took to focusing on the music.”If all we do is keeping playing ‘In the Mood,’ we’ll end up in a museum,” he said. So he looked for new music that reflected the classic sound and style, and therefore could blend with the old. That’s the music he listens to at home these days, he says, and that’s what “Jim Lowe and Friends” was about. It carried the torch and helped to pass it.

One of those who picked it up, Jonathan Schwartz of WNYC and XM Satellite Radio, has known Lowe since the ’60s and says Lowe’s retirement, while well-earned, saddens him. “Jim Lowe, or ‘Mr. Broadway,’ is one of the passionate champions of the American Songbook,” says Schwartz. “He is a dedicated friend of craft: He was born with the knowledge that ‘home’ does not rhyme with ‘alone.’ ”                                             photos added by WNEW1130

Jim Lowe wrote and recorded “Gambler’s Guitar” for Mercury Records in 1953.

WNEW  30th Anniversary promotions in 1963, included a series of column-like promos, What’sNEW, placed in New York’s major dailies. The item below, which appeared in the Times and Tribune in September, 1963, is the  4th edition we’ve reconstructed from original clips collected by Bill Diehl.

VARIETY’S   banner headline of July 24, 1963, WNEW TOASTS 30^TH WITH GALA! spanned five columns of stories about the big “W’ including the big show at Madison Square Garden as the start of six months of promotion leading up to WNEW’s 30^th anniversary, February 13, 1964.  In its issue of August 3^rd, a Billboard front page story reported that 15,000 people attended the event. On the bill were Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Vic Damone, Della Reese, The Si Zentner and Tommy Dorsey Bands, Jerry Vale, Frank Sinatra Jr., Peter Nero, Dave Brubeck Quartet, Jack Jones, Gene Klavan, Dee Finch, William B. Williams, Bob Landers, Ted Brown, Wally King, Fred Robbins, Billy Taylor, Marty O-Hara.

 Station promotions in the months that followed, included column-like promos What’sNEW, placed in New York’s major dailies. Below is the  3rd edition we’ve reconstructed from original clips collected by Bill Diehl.

“How I Got This Way”  by Regis Philbin

Chapter I  Bing Crosby

It all began with Bing Crosby during the Depression of the thirties. I must have been six or seven years old at the time. My family lived on the bottom floor of a two-story house on Cruger Avenue in the Bronx, and every night at 9:30, I sat by my little radio in our kitchen and listened to a half hour of Bing’s records regularly spilling out over WNEW. His voice was so clear, so pure and so warm that after awhile I thought of him as my good friend. Even though he was out in faraway, glamorous Hollywood and I was in the humble old Bronx, in my mind we truly were friends and would always spend that special half hour together, just the two of us.

I listened to those songs of the Depression era and, even as a kid, I understood that the songwriters were trying to give hope to a struggling and downtrodden public. I grew to love those lyrics and what they said to me. I swear to you that those same songs have stayed with me for the rest of my life, and during various dark periods when I hit those inevitable bumps along the way, I would actually sing them to myself. Like “When skies are cloudy and gray, they’re only gray for a day. So wrap your troubles in dreams, and dream your troubles away.”

John Crosby, was a  columnist for The New York Herald Tribune from 1935 to 1941 and, after WWII military service, from 1946 to 1965.  

He continued newspaper and novel writing into  the mid-seventies, but is remembered best  as the Tribune’s chief radio/TV critic during the 1950’s.  This line of his about CBS-TV cancelling Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now,” helps explain why Crosby was so well regarded: “See it Now… is by every criterion television’s most brilliant, most decorated, most imaginative, most courageous and most important program. The fact that CBS cannot afford it but can afford “Beat The Clock,”is shocking.”  Another worthy observation of his concerned WNEW’s new, (1958) full-time news department and its “brash young news staff” whose news coverage was “busting out all over.”  Read on.  

The image above is a recreation of a 1959 John Crosby column as published in the New York Herald Tribune.  Thanks to Bill Diehl for finding a copy of the original column. E.B.

 Art Ford and the Night Visitor

The watercolor (above) by Tom Saunders is based on the  photo (below) published in Arnie Passman’s book, “The Deejays,”* But, the woman in the painting is not the woman in the photo.  Explanation, below.

 As WNEW’s first Station Manager, Bernice Judis often dropped in on shows at any time of the day or night. In the photo above, she is seen during an after-midnight visit to “The Milkman’s Matinee” when it was hosted by Art Ford. (1942-1954) In an e-mail to long-time friend, and ‘NEW alum, ABC’s Bill Diehl, Saunders explained: “I read that Bernice Judis was the manager who fired Art Ford for playing too much ‘jazz and international’ music, so I purposely eliminated her and put in a blond groupie instead.” Saunders identified correctly the cause of Ford’s firing, but not his executioner. Judis retired from WNEW in 1954 after 20 years with the station, and about four years before Ford got word while in Europe in April, 1958, that his services were no longer desired.

Continue reading Art Ford And The Night Visitor →