Category Archives: Music

Listener Comments, Music, Staff

The Stickball Kid From Bay Ridge

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 Most of you will recognize the studio in the picture on the front of my new book, “Staying Happy, Healthy, And Hot.” Some of you will remember when the guy in the picture looked like that. But only if you remember WNEW from when “head shots” were all black and white, 8 x 10 glossies. It was an appropriate picture for the front of a fun book about being happy, because there was never a happier time in my life than the night that picture was taken.

Let me explain: I’m from Bay Ridge. My folks gave me a “portable” radio for Christmas when I was about 8. I don’t think I turned it off ‘till Easter. It was a magic box full of music and voices. The music was made by people with names like Frank, and Ella, and “The Count,” and “The Singing Rage.” The voices belonged to people named Gene Klavan, Dee Finch, William B. Williams, Ted Brown, Al Collins, and Art Ford.

The magic box immediately spoke to me. “Shazam!” it said. And instantly, I changed from a stickball kid dreaming of playing in Dodger Blue, to a disc jockey in training. The training went on for quite a while. About 30 years to be fairly exact.

WBZ BOSTON

I was on the air at one of America’s premier radio stations, WBZ in Boston, when the studio phone lit, and the station’s receptionist said, “Somebody by the name of Nat Asch wants to talk to you.” Nat was the Program Director at WNEW-FM. I heard him say, “George Duncan and I would like you to come down and do an audition for us.” I grabbed both eyelids and finally got them pulled down, forced my voice down an octave, and with my most professional diction, I think I said something like, “Gezornenplatz.”

 

Gene Klavan & Dee Finch
photo: Radio/TV Magazine

The audition must have gone well, because I became the first morning man on WNEW-FM. And I will never forget that first morning. 6:30 AM – the studio door opens, and Gene Klavan walks in. “Welcome to the staff” he says. I find myself shaking the hand of one of the guys who shook me out of bed each morning since I was a kid. 7:00 AM – the studio door opens, and Dee Finch walks in. “Welcome and lots of luck, kid” he says. I am semi ready for that, and I manage to say something terribly clever : “Thank you Sir…Mr. Finch… Dee… lighted to meet you.”

WBW
photo: WNEW

At 9:30 AM – the studio door opens, a bright golden light shines down from heaven, a Norman Luboff choir sings, the tectonic plate under Fifth Avenue shifts, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a vision that looks exactly like what God would look like if he were a disc jockey. William B. Williams. He strides in, sticks out his hand to shake mine, and in that crackly bass-baritone rumble that he uses all the time except when he’s doing national TV commercials, he says, “Hi kid. Welcome to the staff. You sound fine.” I am not ready for that. But I am determined that I’m not going to fall back on my Gezornenplatz again either. I immediately engage my sub-conscious editor, which is able to make some kind of actual human verbal response the substance of which has, in the intervening decades, faded quietly into literary oblivion.

It really was a reasonable response, although I must admit that I was momentarily confused at the time as to whether the appropriate ritual was to shake Willie’s hand, or just kiss his ring. As I recall I said something like “Thank you.” But then my sub-conscious editor went into shock and off line, and I think I kept saying, “Oh thank you. Oh thank you” for the next five or six minutes.

I don’t know when the all female lineup ended. When I got to WNEW-FM the station had been into the “Classic Rock” format for a while. All except for Klavan and Finch. I suspect the all female cast went out. . . except for Alison, who moved from mornings to all nights. . .and then they got around to hiring me to do mornings.  I only did the morning show for a few months.  Zacherly replaced me.


Art Ford
photo: WNEW

Dave Croniger had asked me if I wanted to move over to AM and do the Milkman’s Matinee. Me…the Bay Ridge Stick Ball Kid, was going to try to follow the vocal chords of the smoothest ad lib air personality on the planet. . . Art Ford. . . I don’t remember him ever bruising his phrasing. It was amazing phrasing.  (Editor’s note: Art Ford hosted the Matinee between 1942 and 1954.  Dick Summer’s immediate predecessor in 1968 was Marty O’Hara.)  It was shortly after that when Newsday sent a reporter and photographer to do a story on me, and the picture on the front of the book was taken. So now you know why an old black and white picture is on the front cover of my new book, called “Staying Happy, Healthy And Hot.” There was never a happier time in my life than the night that picture was taken.

About three weeks after the article was published, Billboard Magazine reported that I had “resigned.” I didn’t resign. Julius LaRosa was hired to do afternoons, and the station moved the entire lineup back one shift. There wasn’t any place to move me, except to weekends. And I had a family to support. That wasn’t going to work financially.

I had a good reputation in Boston from my time at WBZ, so Mac Richmond hired me to program his station, WMEX.  That lasted two years. I’m not an office/executive kind of guy. And I wanted to come home to New York again. The morning show at WPLJ opened up, and they were kind enough to hire me. Some folks at NBC Network took an interest, and offered me a slot on Monitor. Another offer I couldn’t refuse. But WPLJ was owned by ABC, and they weren’t having any of it. NBC understood the financial problem, and gave me the overnight slot on WNBC to go along with Monitor.

 I was fired from WNBC in a purge that replaced the entire staff.  I did a few years as the morning drive guy at WPIX during the “Love Songs” era. Then they went fake jazz, and they told me they “didn’t want any Dick Summer radio.” I don’t know how to do any other kind of radio. So when Harry and Charles Binder offered me the Communications Director job with their Social Security Disability practice, I signed up. It has been a hugely successful venture.

Along with the 9 to 5, I’ve been producing spoken word CD’s, doing a weekly blog and podcast and now we’ve got the book. It has been a wonderful run…this radio thing…a long and very satisfying  career.  WNEW was probably the shortest part of it. But WNEW was my station growing up in Bay Ridge. And having the honor of saying those call letters on the air was, as the song says, “The thrill of it all.”

                                                                              Dick Summer

www.dicksummer.com  

www.dicksummer.com/podcast 

Editor’s Note: wnew1130.com is not affiliated with other websites whose links may appear here.

Gallery, History

Civil Rights Jazz P.S.

 The photo above was inscribed by Gene Klavan and Dee Finch “To the great dane, Chris ” Albertson who worked in promotion and as continuity director while with WNEW between 1961 and 1964. Albertson was born in Reykyavik, Iceland and attended schools there and in England and Denmark. It was while in Denmark in 1947, Albertson says, that he heard a recording on radio by Bessie Smith that changed his life, for it led to a life-long devotion to jazz and blues music.

In case you missed it, “Civil Rights Jazz” was posted here on March 12, 2012.

Publicity photo by James J. Kreigsman

History, Music, Perspective

WBW VIS-A-VIS RNR

WBW vis-a-vis RNR

William B. Williams is pictured above in a late 50’s  newspaper ad.  His opinions about rock ‘n’ roll  were evidently expressed in a more courtly manner during a TV appearance in 1963, according to listeners who wrote to him after the show.  Those listener comments were included in one of   WNEW’s  column-like promotional ads, What’sNEW, (see below) placed in New York’s major dailies in 1963 /64. This is the  5th edition we’ve reconstructed from original clips collected by Bill Diehl. 

Footnote: From the mid 1960’s to the early 80’s, WNEW tried to acknowledge top pop music  to no one’s satisfaction. The station’s return in the early 80’s to the style of programming that had long sustained it, was undone by a  succession of owners whose  starvation budgets and programming bludegons rendered the WNEW of times past unrecognizable and without immediate value except for one more sale.   E.B.WBW RNR

History, Music, Perspective

Bang! They’re Off!

“. . .news on  the hour and half-hour, Nat Asch Sports Reports . . .part of Klavan In the Morning  once upon a time.  An e-mail and a photo from Stuart Zuckerman appear below.

I was Promotion Manager of WNEW-AM for less than a year (June 1974-March 1975) but have fond memories of the great on-air talent I worked with, particularly Gene Klavan and Julius La Rosa.

 It was a stressful time in the station’s history. A new Program Manager had arrived from the Cleveland station where Don Imus was the morning man. The program manager, John Lund, had been brought in to make the music more contemporary, but not be rock’n’roll. (Think pop Top 40). The on-air talent was not happy. Imagine Willliam B. Williams being told to mix “Baby I’m-A Want You” by Bread in the same set as something by Sinatra.

 I’m most proud of an ad campaign I created for the morning drive program with the somewhat risqué headline. “Klavan gets you off in the morning”.  (The runners L-R: Sales reps. Ed Mohr, Dick Barry, Nick O’Neill, PD John Lund.) Hope this brings back some fond memories to some of the gang that was at Eleven-Three-Oh back then.

klavan gets you off

History, Music

Pete Fornatale

 Update — Saturday, April. 28, 2012 — Bill Diehl (WNEW/ABC) spoke with Pete Fornatale a couple of years ago on ABC radio, after Fornatale released his ode to the Woodstock era entitled “Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQSS1UNuJg

 New York Times feature story by Douglas Martin, published: April 27, 2012, appears  below the following item.

 Pete Fornatale, pioneering NYC rock radio deejay and writer, dead at 66

Bronx native was one of first free-form deejays on early FM rock radio

By David Hinkley –  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Thursday, April 26, 2012, 4:07 PM

 Pete Fornatelle, a New York deejay, historian and writer who for almost 50 years championed the spirit of musical freedom on the radio airwaves, died Pete Fornatale Thursday at Beth Israel Medical Center. He was 66.

He suffered a brain hemorrhage on April 15 and been in intensive care for the last week.

A native of the Bronx and a graduate of Fordham, Fornatale started his deejay career Nov. 21, 1964, hosting “Campus Caravan” on Fordham’s WFUV.

He continued “Campus Caravan” until 1970, by which time he was also working at WNEW-FM as one of the pioneer free-form deejays on early FM rock radio.

“For the first time, we could play music on the radio the way we played it in our lives,” he said last year. “It wasn’t just the top 40 played over and over. You could play longer tracks, you could play older tracks, you could make the music fit together.

“It was magical.”

“My fondest memory of Pete,” said his long-time radio colleague Pat St. John, “was listening to him one Sunday morning when he was doing a show on different songs about life.

“A particular favorite of mine is a very little-known song by Rick Nelson simply called ‘Life.’ After about an hour, I called Pete and suggested this tune, and he told me he’d just cued it up and it’d be the next song he was going to play.

“It goes, ‘Life, what are we here for? / I want to know more.’”

 

Fornatale worked at WNEW-FM until 1989, when he moved to WXRK. He briefly moved back to WNEW-FM a few years later.

But as commercial radio moved further away from the free-form spirit, he and other free-form advocates became increasingly disenchanted.

In 2001, he returned to non-commercial WFUV, where he hosted a free-form show he had started in 1982 called “Mixed Bag.” He also hosted a weekly in-depth interview show, and he frequently tied both shows to historic or contemporary themes.

His last “Mixed Bag” show on April 14, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

“This is just the right amount of radio to be doing,” he said last year. “I have this show every week where I can say what I want, but I don’t have to be scrambling to fill four hours every day. That gets harder as you get older.”

He developed close relationships with artists like Paul Simon over the years and was also active in several charity organizations.

That included World Hunger Year, which was co-founded by his friend Harry Chapin in 1975 and is now run by cofounder Bill Ayres as WhyHunger.

Fornatale raised money and hosted WHY events for many years.

He also wrote a number of books on music, including a history of Woodstock and a biography of Simon and Garfunkel. He often hosted shows on WNET and was a consultant on music projects for MTV and VH1.

He said last year he was always fascinated by “the real stories of what happened with music and songs. So much gets mythologized, but to me the real story is almost always better.”

Pete Fornatale attends the AFTRA Foundation’s 2012 AFTRA Media and Entertainment Excellence Awards in February. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

He won the Armstrong Excellence in Broadcasting Award in 1983 and received AFTRA’s Media and Entertainment Excellence Award in February at the Plaza.

Fornatale was born and raised in the Belmont section of the Bronx, known as Little Italy.

He was just a few years behind Dion and the Belmonts, who were one of his favorite artists, and he recalled growing up to the sound of vocal harmony groups, as well as Elvis and early rockers.

The first record he bought, he said, was Elvis’s “Hound Dog.”

He graduated from Fordham Prep before he attended Fordham, and after he graduated he spent two years as a teacher before going into radio full-time.

“Pete was always teaching us,” said folksinger and friend Christine Lavin, “even when we thought we were just being entertained.”

Fornatale is survived by his ex-wife Susan and their three sons, Peter, Mark and Steven.

Click on link for New York Daily News http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Pete%20Fornatale

Pete Fornatale thumbnail photo and WNEW-FM promotion publication added by WNEW1130.com

  

NEW YORK TIMES FEATURE STORY By

Published: April 27, 2012

 Pete Fornatale, a disc jockey who helped usher in a musical alternative to Top 40 AM radio in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, presenting progressive rock and long album tracks that AM stations wouldn’t touch and helping to give WNEW a major presence on the still-young FM dial, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 66. The cause was complications of a stroke, his son Mark said.
 
Pete Fornatale in 2002 at WFUV at Fordham University, where he first hosted a radio program as a sophomore there.Photo by Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times
 
 
FM radio had been around for a while but did not come of age until the 1960s, when, amid the whirlwind of a growing counterculture, the federal government mandated that FM stations carry different programming from that of their sister AM bands. Enterprising D.J.’s grasped the chance to play longer, fresher, rarer music and give voice to the roiling political and social issues of the day.
 
Mr. Fornatale was at the forefront of the FM revolution, along with WNEW-FM colleagues like Scott Muni, Rosko, Vin Scelsa, Dennis Elsas, Jonathan Schwartz and Alison Steele (who called herself “the Nightbird”). They played long versions of songs, and sometimes entire albums, and talked to their audiences in a conversational tone very different from the hard-sell approach of their AM counterparts.
 
WNEW-FM may have been the most influential experimenter. When the station dropped rock music for talk radio in 1999, Billboard called it “a legend, affecting and inspiring people throughout the industry.”
 
Mr. Fornatale (pronounced forn-a-TELL) had actually beaten WNEW to the punch. As a sophomore at Fordham University  in 1964, he persuaded the school’s Jesuit leaders to let him do a free-form rock show on what was officially an educational station. He continued that show for a few years after he graduated, and for a while could be heard on both WFUV and WNEW.
WOR-FM became the first commercial station in New York to adopt the format, in 1966, but abandoned it after about a year. WNEW, with the slogan “Where Rock Lives,” adopted it in 1967.
Mr. Fornatale came on board in 1969 and quickly moved to the center of New York’s music scene. He gave early exposure to country-rock bands like Buffalo Springfield and Poco. He did one of the first American interviews with Elton John, and got a rousing ovation when he brought a rented surfboard to Carnegie Hall for a Beach Boys show. He introduced Curtis Mayfield to Bob Dylan at a Muhammad Ali fight.
In 1982 he started “Mixed Bag,” a program that emphasized singer-songwriters, on Sunday mornings. His regular guests included Suzanne Vega, who introduced herself to him by sending a fan letter.
One of Mr. Fornatale’s signatures was playing songs that followed a theme. It might be colors, with a playlist including the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.” Or it might be great inventions, as when he celebrated the 214th anniversary of the United States Patent Office. Or the theme might simply be radio.
Peter Fornatale was born in the Bronx on Aug. 23, 1945, and graduated from Fordham Preparatory School, on the campus of Fordham University. His introduction to rock ’n’ roll came in 1956 when his father summoned him to the television to see “this crazy guy” — Elvis Presley. The first record he bought was Presley’s “Hound Dog.”
Mr. Fornatale graduated from Fordham with a degree in communications in 1967 and taught English at a Roman Catholic high school before joining WNEW. His voice drew praise for its mellow, almost professorial tone, although some listeners may have chosen to describe it as nasal.
By the early 1980s, stations specializing in what had been known as free-form radio were bringing in business consultants who urged less variety in records and more control over the disc jockeys. Mr. Fornatale later complained that he and his colleagues had been demoted from chefs into waiters, “and fast-food waiters at that,” as he told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., in 1999.
He left WNEW in 1989 to follow the station’s program director to WXRK-FM (K-Rock), which followed a more conventional approach to pop music. Mr. Fornatale’s show came on after Howard Stern’s. Mr. Stern, whose shock-jock format was becoming radio’s new wave, called Mr. Fornatale the “anti-Stern.”
In 1997 Mr. Fornatale returned to WNEW-FM, which had decided to go back to album-oriented rock after a succession of owners and formats. But within a year the station had changed formats again, to talk. In 2001, Mr. Fornatale returned to where he had started: WFUV. “I love the idea I’ve come full circle,” he said.
Mr. Fornatale wrote several books, including one on the making of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 album “Bookends,” and one on the Woodstock music festival. He was also the main writer for a series of 600 trading cards on the life of Elvis Presley.
He had lived for six years in Rockaway, Queens, and the previous four decades in Port Washington, N.Y.
Mr. Fornatale’s marriage to Susan Kay Flynn ended in divorce several years ago. He is survived by his sons, Peter, Mark and Steven, and his brother, Robert.
His WFUV show, which like his earlier WNEW singer-songwriter show was called “Mixed Bag,” ran from 4 to 8 p.m. on Saturdays.
“If you give me the right idea for a program,” Mr. Fornatale said in 2004, “I can give back to you a three-hour journey where, if you tune in at any time, you’re likely to hear something that will entertain you. But if you take the ride with me, when we get to the end, you’ll say, ‘Wow, what a long, strange trip it’s been.’ ”
Archive, History

Civil Rights Jazz

1 Comment

As a jazz DJ/journalist, Chris      Albertson arrived  in New York in 1960  from Philadelphia radio stations WCAU and WHAT-FM.  While employed as WNEW’s Continuity Director, he was also producing  jazz recordings   and working nights as a volunteer at leftist, avante garde WBAI-FM. He left WNEW in 1964 to work at WBAI full time, eventually becoming General Manager.

From his WNEW files, he sent us captioned website photos from a 1963 special event MC’d by William B. Williams at  the North Stamford, Conn. home of Jackie Robinson.  Albertson was there to record the event. 

On his website, Albertson wrote, “I made a stop at one of my favorite blogs, Villes Ville and learned the sad news that Joya Sherrill left us on June 28, 2010. You may recall that Joya sang with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra off and on between 1942 and 1959. I took this photo of her in 1963, at a summer afternoon lawn party thrown by Jackie Robinson and his wife as a benefit to raise bail money for SNCC. (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee).

Many performers were there, including Quincy Jones and Billy Taylor, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, and the Ellington Alumni Orchestra, led by Mercer Ellington. . . I was there with William B. Williams and a WNEW crew. “

 

 “Here are  more photos from that afternoon. Willie B was the MC and you’ll spot our host behind him.”

 

More later from Chris Albertson’s Klavan and Finch file.  His web biography:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Albertson

Music, Staff

A “Milkman” Returns

MARTY WILSON  

(WNEW 1981-1986)

Marty wilson Marty became interested in broadcasting at a very young age.  His parents surprised with him with tickets to be in the Peanut Gallery on the “Howdy Doody Show.”  He spent more time looking at the cameras, mike booms, and production staff than he did at Buffalo Bob and the puppets!

 A few years later he took the tour of NBC Radio and was hooked.  In junior high school he became a member of the Cousin Brucie Fan Club and would visit the WABC studios on West 66th Street.  He then worked for Bruce backstage at Palisades Amusement Park.

 After enrolling at City College he majored in cutting class to work at the college radio station where he became Assistant Station Manager and hosted a number of shifts.

symphony sid 1909-1984
Symphony Sid (early 1970's)

 In 1968 he got a job at WEVD as a summer and part time engineer. In addition to learning how to understand commercials in 16 languages, he met Symphony Sid.  One night at a remote from the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, Sid became a little “under the weather.”  He turned to Marty and said, “You finish the show, I’m going home.”  Marty then moved to the other side of the glass.  He became a staff announcer, and when Sid retired, Sid gave him his record collection and later Marty hosted his own show, “Jazz Through The Night,” at times broadcasting from his Upper East Side apartment in a studio he built.

 After leaving WEVD, he worked briefly at WHLI with the “Music Of Your Life” format.

 During the “Jazz Through The Night” years he met Bob Jones, who was on the air at WNEW.  Bob convinced PD Jim Lowe to give him an audition.  The audition consisted of, “Here’s a reel of tape, there’s the studio, there’s the record library, do an hour.”

 He was hired as the weekend host of the ”Milkman’s Matinee” and shortly thereafter became the full time Milkman following in the footsteps of a number of great hosts.  He introduced a number of features during that time including an audience participation novelty called “It Could Be Verse” where listeners would try to guess what song was playing just by listening to the verse. Ted Brown enjoyed his style and insisted that Marty be his vacation substitute. 

 In 1987 Marty also conceived the idea for a syndicated program, “A Moment Of Musical History”, a daily feature, that was heard nationally and is still on the air as of this writing in 2012!

 After leaving WNEW, he and a college buddy of his bought a station in New Haven, Connecticut, which he ran for nine years. After selling the station he joined the staff of “Jukebox Radio,” doing afternoons and then middays.

 Now he concentrates on doing voice-overs and producing commercials for a variety of clients and agencies from his own studio in sunny South Florida.

Editor’s Note: Symphony Sid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_Sid

Chronoliogy, Gallery, History

WNEW AM/FM

10 Comments

All these entertaining personalities . . .all the best popular music . . .all the up-to-the-minute news . . .in fact everything that makes WNEW New York’s favorite radio station–now on FM too–at 102.7 mc. Now it’s WNEW AM &: FM bringing you the wonderful sound of “Music Round The Clock” . . .the complete coverage of “News Around The Clocks” . . .weather . . .time . . .traffic reports–enjoyable listening, worthwhile listening, 24 hours every day. Hear the Best your radio has to offer — am & pm, AM & FM — THE WNEW SOUND.

On your radio dial at 1130 & 102.7
Klavan & Finch
6-10 am Mon thru Sat		 William B. WIlliams
Make Believe Ballroom
10 am & 6pm Mon thru Sat		 Lonny Starr
Starr, Sinatra & Strings
11:35 am Mon thru Fri – 10am Sun
The Music Hall 2-4 pm daily
Bob Landers
12 – 2 pm daily		 Dick Partridge
4 – 6pm daily		 Jack Lazare
8 – 10PM nightly
Al “Jazzbo” Collins
10 – Midnight nightly		 Dick Shepard
Milkman’s Matinee
12 Midnight – 6am nightly
 Bob Howard
8am & 6pm Sun
(The photo and text above are reproduced from a 1958 newspaper ad. The ID overlays were added by this site’s editor.) Display Ad 60 — No Title New York Times (1857-Current file) Sept 3, 1958; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times pg.68