Rock Radio Scrapbook

AIRCHECK OF THE WEEK
For week of March 24, 2013
Edition #725

ALL-NIGHT LEGENDS, PT. #13

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.

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)

More 1964 airchecks here!