Enjoy Jerry Kaye on WING (UNSCOPED) here.

Enjoy Jerry Kaye on WING (SCOPED) here.
 

Talent: TED BROWN
Station: WNEW New York
Date: June 10, 1964
Time: 34:25

"Am I blue? No, I'm Brown.
Got a smile on my puss, not a frown
Every morn from seven 'til nine
We play discs and commit general crime."

That ditty - sung to the tune of Am I Blue - was Ted Brown's theme song for part of his legendary four-decade career in radio. Back in the days when what was said between the records mattered as much (or more) than the music itself, Ted Brown was one of the leading deejays in the U.S. As fellow announcer and musician Jim Lowe put it, "he was a major talent, with a keen sense of the ridiculous."

A native of Collingwood, New Jersey, Theodore David Brown got his first experience behind a mike at a dance at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, when he filled in for a master of ceremonies who had failed to show up. After college, he fought for the U.S. in the Second World War as an Air Force tail-gunner in a B-17 bomber. He was shot down over Germany and spent 18 months as a prisoner of war before being released and returning to New York.

Brown's first taste of the big time in radio came in 1950, when he took over the morning show at WMGM from another broadcast legend, Robert Q. Lewis. Teamed with his wife Rhoda Brown and later actress and second wife Sylvia Miles - both of whom were known on-air as The Redhead - Brown delivered a highly-popular show that continued into the station's foray into rock 'n' roll music in the late '50s.

By 1962, he was off to the legendary WNEW, joining a staff that included such broadcast greats as William B. Williams, Gene Klaven and Dee Finch. Brown held down the afternoon drive spot at 'NEW until 1970, when he left for a couple of years at WNBC. He returned to WNEW in 1972 before leaving the station again in 1989. In later years, he worked at WRIV Riverhead, New York, and WVNJ Oakland, New Jersey.

Brown was incapacitated in 1996 from a stroke, complications from which he died March 20, 2005. He was believed to be in his 80s - he never revealed his age.
Ted Brown - described by his newsman Mike Prelee as "a tough guy with a soft heart" - can he heard here.

(Scrapbook archives)

Talent: DICK WILLIAMS
Station: CFPL London, Ontario
Date: July 6, 1964
Time: Part 1 - 42:04 (unscoped)
           Part 2 - 59:35 (unscoped)
           Part 3 - 56:20 (unscoped)

(WSAI chart, March 28, 1960)

Dick Williams chose Canada.

"The Tall One" could have spent his career in the more lucrative U.S. market. In fact, he did a stint in mornings at KDEO in San Diego in the early 1960s and also jocked at WING Dayton, Ohio and WSAI Cincinnati in a career that began in 1956 at CKCR Kitchener, Ontario. But Williams stayed in London, Ontario, after arriving there at CFPL in 1961. He remained on-air in London until 2006, also working in the Forest City at CJBK, Q 97.5 (CIQM) and Oldies 1410 (CKSL).

Williams' clever, fast-paced, humour-driven show on CFPL could easily have been a morning show. But it wasn't - it was at night. At that time, evening shows were prime time in radio and that's where the stars were. And Dick Williams was certainly a star.

Hear Dick Williams from July 6, 1964, Part 1 (UNSCOPED) here. (42:04)

Hear Dick Williams from July 6, 1964, Part 2 (UNSCOPED) here. (59:35)

Hear Dick Williams from July 6, 1964, Part 3 (UNSCOPED) here. (56:20)

(The Dick Williams and Charlie Ritenburg Collections)

RESTORATION by Charlie Ritenburg

Talent: DAVE MICKIE
Station: CHIQ Hamilton, Ontario
Date: July, 1964
Time: 25:23

(Logo courtesy Bill Dulmage)

He was called the Dick Biondi of Canadian radio, "The Fastest Tongue in the North." But above all, he was radio's greatest chameleon.

Dave Mickie earned a legion of fans from his days in the early '60s as an incredibly energetic night-time deejay at CKEY Toronto. By 1964, however, he had moved down the QEW to CHIQ (now CHAM) in Hamilton. He was still screaming and talking faster than most people - especially parents - could listen.

It was an entirely different Mickie that Toronto listeners would hear in the 1970s. First, he was now known as Dave Marsden. After a stop at Montreal's CHOM-FM in the late '60s, Marsden joined CHUM-FM in Toronto in the early '70s and if anything was the SLOWEST talker in the North.

In six years at CHUM-FM, Marsden established himself as one of the country's top FM rock announcers. In 1977, he brought his considerable talents to what was the new CFNY-FM in Brampton, Ontario, which had just changed its call letters from CHIC-FM. With Marsden as PD and program host, CFNY became a force to be reckoned with in Toronto radio.

Marsden left the station in the late '80s for the Vancouver radio scene. After blazing a trail with the then-new medium of Internet radio in the '90s, Marsden returned to the terrestrial airwaves at The Rock in Oshawa, Ontario, in the 2000s. He left The Rock in 2014 to focus on his Internet venture NYTheSpirit.com.

Enjoy Dave Mickie on CHIQ here.


(Scrapbook archives)

Talent: DICK SUMMER
Station: WBZ Boston
Date: August, 1964
Time: 23:21

Attention program directors: There is an audience after midnight.

All-night shows nowadays are mostly the preserve of syndicated programming, voice-tracking or just wall-to-wall music. Anything but a live person! But there are people listening - shift workers, truckers, college students, insomniacs and people who just like to stay up late and listen to the radio. And at one time the late night day part was taken seriously by radio stations.

Dick Summer hosted the "Night Light" all-night show on WBZ in the mid-60s*. Summer had a little bit of everything during his 11:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift: he read poetry, told stories, played a few tunes and occasionally welcomed one of his mythical characters, like Irving the Venus Fly Trap, Earl of Sandwich and Theopolous Q. Waterhouse. The "format" was whatever Summer decided on - he would play a hour's worth of comedy cuts at 3 a.m. for example. If he didn't like a song, he wouldn't play it.

One of Summer's best remembered bits was the Nightlighters Password, also known as the Tibetan Memory Trick:

"One hen, two ducks, 3 squawking geese, 4 limerick oysters, 5 corpulent porpoises, 6 pair of Don Alverso's tweezers, seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array, 8 brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt, 9 apathetic sympathetic diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity to procrastination and sloth... (deep breath!) TENNNN lyrical spherical diabolical denizens of the deep who haul stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the queasy at the very same time (toot toot)."

Summer had an intelligent, humorous and personable approach to radio, qualities so often lacking in the bland "here's another 12 in a row!" world of the medium today. It's the type of radio we celebrate at Rock Radio Scrapbook, and we're thrilled to have an aircheck of one of Dick's shows.

Dick Summer died May 14, 2024 at the age of 89.

Enjoy Dick Summer from August, 1964 on WBZ here.
 

*Summer started in the all-night show at WBZ in 1963, and left in 1968. By November 1967 he was doing evenings. We are not sure just when he left the all-night show but would have been sometime between August 1966 and November 1967.

(The Bill Dulmage Collection)

Talent: BILL STURRUP
Station: CHML Hamilton, Ontario
Date: September 7, 1964
Time: 1:34

Long-time CHML morning man Paul Hanover called Bill Sturrup Mr. Everywhere and Mr. Everything. Said Hanover, "There wasn't a job he couldn't do or didn't want to do at the station or in the community."

Sturrup left us a legacy that included 45 years at Hamilton's CHML - reporting on virtually every major news event in the city - a half-century of public address announcing at Hamilton sporting events and too many friends and admirers to count. A lifelong Hamiltonian, Sturrup joined Hanover, Tom Darling, Lee Dunbar and others in the CHML Hall of Fame in 2004. He died January 16, 2007, aged 68.

One of the many events Sturrup covered was the Beatles arrival in Toronto in September, 1964.
Hear Bill Sturrup cover Beatlemania here.
 

(The Mark Panopoulos Collection)