April 2010 Archives

We had yet another disappointment today in what is becoming a long unbroken string of disappointments, and I just don't have much left in the tank right now. There's a new column -- click here for that.

I could use some good news right about now. It's getting a little ponderous.

As I accumulate more Little Things That Are Individually Insignificant But In Aggregate Are Causing Me Great Distress, I can add another to the pile: The power antenna on my car broke today. It went up, sort of, and before fully extending, it up and quit. The motor seems to be okay, so it's the mast. And that means I have to order one -- nobody carries the right one around here -- and put it in myself. It's a pain in the ass, although better than having to replace the whole thing, but damned if I'm not tired of things falling apart one after the other around here. Meanwhile, my business telephone line was out of service for several hours, and one of our computers is acting like it's coming to End Of Life. One thing's failing after another. A break would be appreciated.

So today was another blizzard of work, bills, minor mishaps, and stress, eased only a little by the Phillies' ninth inning resurrection and the fact that it's 6:33 and sleep is in the offing. I've had more than enough of, um, everything at the moment. I'm going to go watch some reruns until the day's done.

I'm a little busy tonight. So, for historical purposes, here's an early sighting of videotape, from April 16, 1958:

KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh took delivery of an Ampex VR-1000 in early 1958. It wasn't the first, but it was still a novelty. I wonder if they still have that tape of the Pirates arriving to open the 1958 season or whether, like most stuff of the era, they wiped it to reuse the (expensive) tape. I'm guessing the latter.

In the Pittsburgh Press, October 22, 1969:

WJAS was, at the time, talk radio. Talk radio in 1969 wasn't quite what we know as talk radio, or, at least, not always. Sure, you had your angry conservatives, but there were liberals and other flavors of political animals, too. More often, though, you had genial hosts bringing on psychics and shrinks and advice givers and weirdos. That's what we see here, in Pittsburgh, with a guy who was popular on several stations back then.

Dr. Gilbert Holloway would come on as a guest and do his thing, which was to predict your immediate future from just the sound of your voice. He'd have you ask about your future, and he'd tell you. And he'd also predict the future, usually something outlandish.

Oh, wait, you want to hear what he was like? All right, then, how about Dr. Holloway guesting with a young Alex Bennett ("Alexander Bennett!") on KILT in Houston in 1967? Go to this page and you'll find it on the right-hand side, from May 30, 1967. It's what radio was like, complete with interference. Check out the disclaimer and the part about "the man you love to hate!" The explanation of the seven-second delay is also amusing, and the commercials are great -- the Pozo-Seco Singers headlining at the Sam Houston Coliseum, with obscure opening act the Jefferson Airplane.

And what happened to WJAS? It became a top 40 station in 1973, 13Q, and the talent lineup included some familiar Top 40 names like Jackson Armstrong, Don Geronimo, Mark Driscoll, Buzz Brindle, Bob McClain, Bob Shannon, JoJo Kincaid, Dave Mason, Jim Quinn, Bill Tanner, and Don Cox. I'm sure I missed a few. And to bring the whole thing up to date, I've been privileged to make the acquaintance of several of those folks. Small world. It's now an adult standards station.

Dad would have been 79 today, and if he'd made it this far, he'd have gone past 80. That was his goal; he used to see an octogenarian named Hank Beck on the tennis courts at the YMHA in Wayne, New Jersey and tell me how he looked forward to being that old guy still playing tennis in his eighties, just managing to get every volley back over the net while his much younger opponents exhausted themselves. As he looked forward to his golden years, that's pretty much all he wanted, to just keep playing tennis until the end.

He didn't make it, of course, but he played until he couldn't, until about six months before he died. He knew, when he played that last match, that it was going to be his last; he knew that the mesothelioma was advancing and the breathing was getting too difficult and the pain too great, but he was proud that he won that last match. If he was still around today, I like to think that we'd go out and play a little tennis, because I think he saw that as maybe the biggest gift short of life.

I'd have bought him an iPad, too, but the tennis would have been enough for him. And on special occasions like his birthday, I remember taking him out to the grass court in Palm Desert or the concrete court at Palos Verdes High School and knocking the ball around, him shouting encouragement and tips and me just trying to keep up. As memories go, that's a pretty nice one.

This was on the Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA) website the other day:

You MIGHT like that. You're a sick f--k if you do, but you MIGHT like it.

Hey, where's the column?

Why, it's now here.

Yes, the column is now online at AllAccess.com, where you can not only read it but comment on it and post it to Facebook and tweet it and all that kind of stuff. So, since it's there, I'll be sending you there for it. Tell your friends, your neighbors, your sworn enemies. "Page Views" is my middle name.

No, wait, that's Michael. Never mind. Just go read it there. Here, we'll continue to speak of old news clippings and coffee makers.

The column will have to wait until tomorrow. Why? Blame coffee.

Specifically, blame the coffee maker. Now, those who know me are aware that I do not drink coffee. So, how does the coffee maker figure into this? Well, let's just say that I am not the only member of this household. And another member drinks coffee. And that individual had a mishap with the coffee maker this morning that involved grounds getting into the water well. And after the grounds were cleaned out of there, the coffee maker stopped functioning, unless refusing to shut off and having a rapidly advancing clock qualify as "functioning." So, the Black and Decker was dead after about three or four years. Coffee maker, we hardly knew ye.

But that meant that after dinner, we had to go get a new one, preferably a cheap ($30, say) model. Simple, right? Just pop over to Target, grab one off the shelf, done. But Target didn't have any that looked like they'd withstand a week of use, except a few that cost over a hundred bucks. Neither did Sears. Neither did Bed, Bath and Beyond. Fran gave the thumbs down to all of them. So tomorrow morning should be interesting, because after a few hours driving around Torrance looking at coffee makers, we struck out. We'll go back tomorrow, check Best Buy and Kohl's and Wal-Mart and probably end up back at Target because nobody seems to have just the right cheap coffee maker.

And I'll have to finish the column tomorrow, because I was only half done when this odyssey began. See? Like I said, blame the coffee.

We'll take a break from the obscurity for now and just talk, you and me, okay? Great.

I decided this morning to go green. All right, not quite. I mean, we faithfully recycle, we swapped bottled water for Brita filters, we use CFBs instead of incandescents, but we're not Ed Begley Jr. by any means. Still, when I saw that the Los Angeles area's environmental heavies at the South Coast Air Quality Management District would be doing their Lawn Mower swap program again, I decided, well, why not?

The idea is to trade your old un-green gas-powered mower for a clean electric job. The procedure is that you sign up, take your old mower with a check to a designated place on a designated day, and they take your old carbon-spewing monster right out of your trunk and drop a brand-new in-the-box rechargable electric mower in there. You hand over a check for $100 or $160, depending on the model, and you're done. Now, we have a small lawn and we have a gardening service, but we also have a rarely-used old mower that's ridiculously large and noisy and smelly and overkill for the postage-stamp patches of half-dead grass in our yard, so we're ideal candidates for the electric mower. It seemed like a good idea -- the old mower is functional, but it's taking up space -- so I decided to give it a go.

The first step was to research the models being made available. This wasn't easy. Most of what's out there involved reading Amazon reviews, which weren't all that reliable. All four models were rated roughly the same, and the top and bottom reviews were similarly dismissable. I found another site that had a lot of reviews of the Neuton mowers, many of which were fairly savage and warned of service troubles. The Black and Deckers had some similar problems, but slightly less on the negative side.

Okay, so I picked one. The next step was to register, and that was set for 8 am this morning. The procedure was to go to the AQMD website, fill in a form, pick a date, location, and model, and print out the result. Simple, except that at 8 am, I went to the site, clicked the link, and...

And...

And...

And nothing. Couldn't get through. I tried the phone number offered as an alternative. Nothing there but a fast busy signal. I tried for about a half hour before giving up and going for a run. When I got back, I tried again. Still nothing. And then a message: The servers aren't working. They're preventing everyone from signing up. Come back later in the morning.

I came back at 10:30. Still not working. No luck. And then, suddenly, miraculously, paydirt. I got through, filled out the form, picked a location and model, and...

And I don't know. I'll do it -- I'll load my old mower into the car, haul it to the Coliseum, make the trade, charge the new thing up, and give that new sucker a try. Will it cut the lawn well enough? Will the battery last more than a few months? Will I regret trading raw power for something that looks like it should have "Fisher-Price" emblazoned on the side? I'll know in about a month's time. I don't feel all that green yet, but I'm leaving the possibility open.

Damned if I knew what this one is:

I found it in the Miami News, circa 1970. As best as I can piece together, it was a strip that was syndicated as part of the NEA package in 1969-1976, drawn by Larry Lewis. I've seen a couple of other samples online, and it seems like a standard, lame gag-a-day strip set in a college, but I don't recall it at all, and I was a voracious comic strip reader in those years. Apparently, a decent number of people do remember it, because I've seen a couple of references to it, but nothing with much information, like characters or other identifying material.

A search turned up that Lewis was also a freelance editorial cartoonist and an instructor at Jackson Community College. So there's that.

But say you're a newspaper editor in 1970 and a salesman from a new syndicate comes to you with samples of a strip based at a college, and you say, nah, we take the NEA package and there's a college strip in there already. And the salesman goes to the competing newspaper and sells them "Doonesbury." In a couple of years, that had to hurt.

I have a tendency, as you may have noticed, to remember stuff vividly that nobody else does. (I also have a tendency to forget important stuff, but bear with me) But this comic ran from 1958 through 1985, and there's practically nothing about it on the Internet:

"Carmichael" was a panel from the Los Angeles Times that ran in many newspapers across the country. It was simple: A miserable guy, a dead ringer for Rodney Dangerfield (predating Rodney's rise to fame), just stood there in a sad-sack stance while "saying" (no speech balloons, just text under the picture) stuff in the very same "I don't get no respect" vein as Rodney. I used to wonder if Rodney ever saw the panel; the resemblance and similarity of act were uncanny.

The panel was drawn by a guy named Dave Eastman, and it launched in 1958:

That's how the Pittsburgh Press introduced the feature. If he was 34 in 1958, he's around 86 now. I couldn't locate any information about him, though.

A month earlier, the panel launched in the Milwaukee Journal, too:

I guess "Mr. Everyman... generally smiling, even if it's through his tears" was part of the syndicate press kit.

I didn't say it was funny.

Yes, it went on for almost 30 years. I didn't read it, because as a kid I didn't like that creepy closed-mouth, furrowed-brow look. But someone did, because it ran for a long time. And it's weird that there's practically nothing about it anymore.

Until now.

From the Pittsburgh Press, April 11, 1958:

It's interesting that they didn't seem to realize exactly how ridiculous the Coliseum was going to be for baseball until 7 days before the 1958 season was to start. I would have thought that the moment they decided on using the Coliseum and not, say, Wrigley Field (the one the Angels used, also a home run paradise), or Gilmore Field, they'd have laid things out and seen that the left field line wouldn't go more than 250 feet. It didn't take actually building the "Chinese Wall" to know that, did it?

But that's history. The Dodgers did play there, it was a home run haven, they survived four seasons in the place (if "survival" is the right word for a World Championship and four years of record attendance), and went on to Chavez Ravine and great success. You knew that part.

Also, did you notice that it was April 11th and the season hadn't started yet? Granted, they only played 154 games back then, but they waited until the snow was gone to head north, I guess. No more. Oh, and in the other story, the Reds' triple A farm team was in Havana, the Sugar Kings. That lasted until mid-1960, when, after one game where a coach and a player were shot in 1959 (just wounded) and after Castro announced he would nationalize all American-owned businesses, the Sugar Kings became, no joke, the Jersey City Jerseys. They folded after the 1961 season. I would love a Jersey City Jerseys jersey.

More about our favorite weird creepy old guy

From the Miami News, October 21, 1961:

Ol' Larry got off on this one; he gave a gas station guy a $50 check and allegedly told him to hold it until he could cover it. He said his wife had cleaned out his account. The check bounced, the judge let him off, but check the last paragraph: his wife was facing charges, too. That would have been Annette, his second wife. The pregnancy mentioned in the article resulted in Larry Jr., who...

Okay, here's what's creepy about this. This is what King told Anderson Cooper on May 21, 2009:

COOPER: You write in the book about meeting your son, Larry Jr., for the first time in his 30s.

KING: He's over here now, yes. He was on with us. That was extraordinary. Let me tell you. To sort of know I had a child. Probably I did. But I wasn't sure. And then to get the realization that I did. And then he turns out to be one of the great people -- one of the great people I know.

The article references his wife's pregnancy. And he "sort of" knew that he "probably" had a child? All he had to do is read the paper.

Just three years later, from the Miami News, December 31, 1964:

He and Hartack WERE longtime friends, so, well, maybe it WAS inadvertent. But ol' Larry kept busy in those days.

Still, we know about the many marriages, the questions about the veracity of his childhood stories, the ridiculous softball questions, his total lack of preparation and tenuous grasp on topics. So... how does this guy become, you know, Larry King, National Celebrity? Peabody Award winner? Who made that decision? When and why did THAT Larry King become THIS Larry King?

And if you figure it out, can you tell me how? I could use some tips.

It's been a long week. Executive decision: I'm taking the evening off.

If you peer closely, you'll see Larry King in this one:

WKAT Miami Beach, October 18, 1967.

Time for the annual Spring NAB Convention All Access newsletter. There was a lot more, but I can't write all night, so...:

This year's NAB Show convention included seemingly unlimited displays of cutting-edge equipment and panels of brainstorming that left attendees energized and ready to create amazing and exciting... 3-D video. Maybe web video, too.

It's almost time for the Revlon Run/Walk for Women 2010 on May 8th in Los Angeles, so please donate if you can. We (my wife Fran and I) are once again raising money for women's cancer research and treatment and celebrating another year of survival. Your help is greatly appreciated (and needed), especially in these tough times; just go to https://www.revlonrunwalk.com/la/secure/MyWebPage.cfm?pID=533458 and enter your donation. Thank you!

The drive home always takes a lot out of me. I always do it in one shot, no stops, and that's fine for making good time, but it leaves me a little staggering once I get home. The drive today was uneventful; I hit the road early and encountered smooth sailing from Vegas to the 210, where there was a little volume, and the 605, where there was a LOT of volume. But I just listened to some podcasts and enjoyed the scenery and ignored the insistence of the Garmin Nuvi that I get off the freeway and take local roads. Really, there's no reason that I need to get off a wide-open freeway to drive on dusty, stop-sign-studded roads for any length of time, yet it wanted me to do it several times in Barstow and Victorville, again in the San Gabriel Valley, and again on the 605, where it wanted me to get off the freeway, wait at a light, turn left, wait at another light, then get back on the same freeway.

Technology doesn't always know best.

Anyway, I'm back and I'll have a wrap of the convention tomorrow. I'm too exhausted for much more than this at the moment.

Oh, I do have more about the NAB Show 2010. Plenty to say. But I got back late, I'm exhausted, and there's a column in it for later this week.

I know, the suspense... You'll be able to handle it. In the meantime, I have to beg off tonight. Just too tired.

The first thing that struck me about this year's NAB Show is that if it were not for the debate over paying artists royalties for playing their songs, there would be no presence for radio at all in this convention. That may be an overstatement, but not by much. The theme of this year's show, as it was last year, involved "content," which seems to translate to "web video." Radio? Since the twin debacles of HD Radio and the "Radio Heard Here" PR campaign, it's receded into the background. Radio's the "uncool" part of this convention, populated by stragglers and "old media" types.

(Interesting: I haven't seen a single "Radio Heard Here" logo anywhere this year. New boss comes in, old boss' initiatives become "non-persons." Same as ever)

Maybe it's that I started on a bad note. The day started on a good note with an appearance on Heidi Harris' show on KDWN here in Vegas. Heidi's a bud, we chatted about talk radio and the NAB and stuff, and I'm sure I baffled the audience while they waited for the next guest, who was going to talk about immigration. I finished up, drove back to the hotel, did more work, and then hopped in the car and headed to the Convention Center.

Have I mentioned the traffic here?

The drive from my hotel to the Convention Center's Gold Lot shouldn't take more than ten minutes. Really, it should be five minutes, but I'm being generous. It took me a half hour. Every light was red (and long). A million cabs and shuttle buses queued up along Paradise to clog traffic. The left turn to get to the lot entrance was jammed, and once I negotiated that, the queue to enter the lot stretched forever. Once I got into the lot, there was plenty of room; what was the holdup? After racing across eight lanes of traffic, I scrambled into a seat in the Hilton's ballroom just in time to hear the President and CEO of the NAB, Gordon Smith, tell us a) the "performance tax" is bad, and b) broadcasters shouldn't have to give up spectrum for broadband, because broadband has LEWD, DISGUSTING SEX on it and broadcasters are chaste and pure as the regulated snow. No, really, that's his argument.

Oy.

Oh, did I mention, no Wi-Fi available in the ballroom? Balky, expensive Wi-Fi in the panel rooms? This convention is supposed to be all about new media and a wireless world, and there's no easy Internet access in huge portions of the convention center? Really?

Really. This group pays lip service to content and new media, but this show is basically the same old blather, plus a sea of equipment. All anyone cares about here is 3-D television, the Savior Of The Industry. I haven't gone down to look (I missed a demonstration at the opening session while sitting in the left-turn queue on Paradise), but I'm not all that excited about it. I'm more interested in the content as, you know, stories and information, not as vessels for special effects. Other than a panel with Matt Weiner of "Mad Men" and an award to Jim Parsons for, um, it's not clear -- I guess they just like "Big Bang Theory," and if so, where's Kaley Cuoco? -- it's all about making everything "Avatar." Great.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of people with press badges here, as always. Judging by their activity in the press room, their primary writing is to compose e-mail and Facebook posts, because that's all anyone seems to be doing. In panels, the only other people with laptops out, like the guy to my right at this very moment, are checking their iCal schedules. I think most reporters here just cruise the halls, grab the free food when it gets set out, glom onto the free Internet access in the press room, and wait for press releases or coverage written by some poor fool who actually sat through the boring panels. Some poor fool like me. No, I'm not bitter.

That's where I am at the moment, by the way, in a gray, dark room, listening to a panel explain things I already know. I'm in Las Vegas and I'm having no fun at all. For me and, apparently, only me, what happens in Vegas... sucks.

The thing I've been noticing the most since arriving in Las Vegas is the beer. Specifically, I've been seeing people lugging cases of Bud Light all over the place. I saw more than one guy toting Bud Light across Tropicana Boulevard and up the Strip. There were a couple of clusters of people at my hotel polishing off cases of Bud Light by the pool. The trash bags waiting for pickup out back were filled with Bud Light. I don't know why there's so much Bud Light out here. I have, admittedly, been spending time in the lower-rent district -- including a stop at the Wal-Mart Supercenter -- but, still, that's a lot of low-rent beer. Times are tough.

You wouldn't know it on the surface, though. City Center, the new development on the Strip, is open and glistening. The casinos are still blazing with video boards, and the roads are clogged with traffic, same as always. I've seen a lot of new developments I hadn't noticed before on the south side of town, but you can't tell whether they're full or empty or, as I've read countless times in the Review-Journal and Sun, foreclosed upon. We know things have been bad here, but it's hard to tell whether bottom has been hit. I'll have to ask around.

I'll have a chance to do that; I'm planning to talk to some of my local radio friends while I'm at the NAB Show convention. I'll start my tour Monday morning at 6:30 am, appearing on Heidi Harris' show on KDWN. And then I'll be doing the convention thing. You know how much I love the convention thing.

It's been a very busy day, so I have nothing for you today. Sorry. The next few days should be interesting, though, so come on back for that.

This week's All Access newsletter is about cutting back frivolity in favor of the essentials. Or something like that:

As it turns out, I didn't rush out to buy an iPad this week. After careful consideration, I decided I would buy a new radiator for my car instead. The radiator cost more after labor and taxes, but what's another hundred or so here and there?

Hey, have you donated yet in support of my participation in the Revlon Run/Walk for Women 2010 on May 8th in Los Angeles? We (my wife Fran and I) are once again raising money for women's cancer research and treatment and celebrating another year of survival. Your help is greatly appreciated (and needed!), especially in these tough times; just go to https://www.revlonrunwalk.com/la/secure/MyWebPage.cfm?pID=533458 and enter your donation. Thank you!

I'm calling another audible and delaying this week's column to Friday because I got halfway through and realized I didn't really have the right path to a salient point. It was fine up to then, and I hate to throw it out, so I'm going to sleep on it and see if I can come up with the rest.

So... sorry.

You know this song:

That was in the August 15, 1964 Billboard. Interesting: I would swear that the song came BEFORE the Beatles invasion, regardless of the group's name. It has that 1963 sound. But it was squarely in the middle of Beatlemania.

"Bread and Butter," of course, was an idiotic and infectious ditty, and you remember it as an upbeat, childlike tune. "I like bread and butter, I like toast and jam, That's what my baby feeds me, I'm her loving man."

But it was darker than that. The final verses find his "baby" "eating some chicken and dumplings with some other guy." In fact, he found his "baby eating with some other man," which is only marginally better than "eating some other man" or "some other man eating her."

I preferred the 1981 version used by Sunbeam bread for the Philadelphia market. As a matter of fact, the same spot, with the same tune, was used by the same baker to sell Sunbeam in Philadelphia and Schmidt Blue Ribbon in Baltimore and Washington. Strangely, I can't find it anywhere on the Net. I'm thinking that it might be on one of the VHS tapes on my shelf somewhere, but I don't have the time or energy to look. As I recall from seeing the spot about a million times, the lyrics went "I like bread and butter, I like toast and jam, I like the taste of Sunbeam bread, it's my favorite brand." I bought Stroehmann's.

"Bread and Butter" -- the non-bread version -- hit number 2 on the charts. The Newbeats had a few more minor hits you won't remember, and the lead singer, Larry Henley, had another moment in the sun. He co-wrote this:

I know, I should have warned you.

All right, so, at a friend's urging, I read Gary Vaynerchuk's book "Crush It," which is a (short) book-length pep talk to people like me to "create a brand" online and crank out niche content related to your passion and make it your livelihood. Sounds great, but I've been doing stuff like that for, what, seven years now, and the monetization possibilities are, at best, limited. More like nonexistent.

But the other thing is that I've never concentrated on one area, perhaps because my "day job" (my ALL-day job) is so constricted to radio. I cover a few different niches here, all under the general pop-culture and historical-pop-culture umbrellla. And sports. And occasionally politics, and radio, and... well, there it is again, too scattered.

So, maybe you can help me out here. Do I concentrate on one niche? Do I spread these out into separate blogs and brands? Is there any interest in old TV shows, old newspaper ads, old baseball cards, old anything? Should I focus on new media, cognizant that there are only about 6 zillion tech blogs out there? Do I convert this to podcasts, video, something else? In which direction should I take this?

Or is it best just to leave it be, to keep everything as is, knowing that it means it remains the hobby it's been for seven years? As I've noted here before, this site started as an exercise, someplace to stretch out my writing and try different things. It morphed into... I'm not sure what it morphed into, but this is it. I'm not sure it's enough.

What do you think? Let me know. A few extra bucks wouldn't hurt.

Caught this in the June 6, 1951 Long Beach Press-Telegram:

The ad is for KMPC, the original KMPC on 710 AM here in Los Angeles, and they carried, as did stations all over the western U.S. at the time, the "Lucky Lager Dance Time." What that was, was, essentially, top 40 radio before there WAS Top 40 radio. It predated Todd Storz, it predated Alan Freed, it predated, for the most part, rock 'n' roll. At the time of this ad, the show was decentralized, and playlists were based locally. A few years after this ad ran, Bill Gavin became the programmer of the show, working for the beer's ad agency; affiliates would get a playlist and format and started to exchange playlist tips, which led to Gavin starting The Gavin Report, a trade tip sheet that pretty much established a formula used by several radio trades and eventually led to the folks for whom I work.

From the same paper:

Just because I like the cheesy fish clip art. Action deep-sea fishing on TV? On a low-definition black-and-white TV station in 1951? That must have been fascinating.

For the record, KLAC Channel 13, "Lucky 13," later became KCOP, which it remains to this day as the My Network TV affiliate in Los Angeles, owned by Fox. Okay, we're complete.

While it's still up:

Hilarious, and it includes so many Warner Bros. classic touches, including a variation on a common musical theme, Bugs as carny, "Of course you know this means war" (a variation on "Of course you realize..."), "It's the sus-PENSE that gets me," and many more, topped off by the time-honored catchphrase, "I wanna Easter egg! I wanna Easter egg!" McKimson was decidedly a second-string Warner Bros. director, but this one was a keeper. It IS Easter for so many kids.

From Billboard, June 30, 1962:

Classic. (Even though they misspelled her name)

Listen here.

Still around, too.

Well, it's always nice to look in old newspapers and find something like this:

So true. And Perry likes them. But not in THAT way.

Hey, look, I got quoted in today's L.A. Times! I bloviated for a solid half-hour to Steve and he was able to salvage one sentence out of it. Click here for that.

And while we're on "hey, I know that guy in the paper!," here's a clip from the February 8, 1964 Billboard Vox Jox column about a guy whose name they misspelled:

Jim Gearhart went on to be one of the last personalities on WCBS in New York before it went all-News, and served as the voice of the CBS TV network ("THIS... is CBS"). Much later, he ended up working for me as morning man at New Jersey 101.5, and he remains there today, solidly the highest-rated morning man in the state and a major figure in state politics. I had nothing to do with that; he was, and is, his own man, and an unsung radio legend. Go here for more about him.

This week's All Access newsletter really did come about the way I wrote it below. I threw away an entire column. You COULD say it was about self-doubt, but that would be for another column:

I was halfway through this week's column when I stopped writing it and walked away from the computer for a few minutes. The column just wasn't coming out the way I had in mind when I started it, and I tried to figure out why. After thinking about it for a while, the reason it wasn't working became clear, and it turned out to be the same problem I've heard in countless radio shows over the years: I hadn't committed to one opinion and stuck to it.

Finally, if you're looking to do a good deed today, why not donate in support of my participation in the Revlon Run/Walk for Women 2010 on May 8th in Los Angeles? We (my wife Fran and I) are once again raising money for women's cancer research and treatment and celebrating another year of survival. Your help is greatly appreciated, especially in these tough times; just go to https://www.revlonrunwalk.com/la/secure/MyWebPage.cfm?pID=533458 and enter your donation. Thank you!