Celebrities, over the years, looked forward to vacations taken by WNEW personalities, because it often meant a chance for them to sit in and spin a few records.  Buddy Hackett, for one,  once worked a week for William B. Williams. Other celebrity DJ’s included Dinah Shore, Milton Berle, Mitch Miller and Sarah Vaughn.  Listed below are  celebs who got up in the middle of the night for a couple of weeks in 1969 to work a shift for the vacationing Gene Klavan.  WNEW’s PD Dom Quinn, whose memo  announced the lineup of  replacements was, himself, replaced permanently just two months later.  (See Billboard item beneath list.)

  Thanks to Bill Diehl for digging out the Quinn memo.

 

 

April 12, 1969

 The big surprise of the industry was the shifting of Dom Quinn from his job as program director to be just-a-deejay on the talk side of WMCA: Jack Thayer is consulting WMCA and the indication is that he may swing the former all rock station all the way to talk.  Jack Spector and Ed Baer were the first deejays to go. Thayer, incidentally, knew Quinn from several frequencies ago.

 Dave Pounds, who’d been assistant program director of WNEW in New York, has been upped to program director, and singer Julius LaRosa has been hired as 1-4 p.m. air personality.  Dick Summers has resigned. . . No sooner than the strike is over at WNEW and WNEW-FM, than the Los Angeles Metromedia station gets its turn with executives flying in to handle the air personalities chores from all other stations, same as they did in New York.

Jack Thayer, who joined WNEW sales in 1959, and years later moved away, retuned in 1979 as GM.