NYC fans the best. Had a great country music audience in Brooklyn on WTHE. The cold
weather was just too much for this Fort Worth kid!
Boy all those little stations when I started. Actually "Little Texas radio" was great.
That's where I learned my style.
At KBEL since we didn't have any "echo" I would put a garbage can over my head when doing
a commercial to give me that "echo" effect!
I have a couple of "claims to fame." I was the first COUNTRY jock that I know of to adapt
the Rock format of a musical bed. That is always having music under your voice as you
intro and back announce a record. This I started at KBUY in Fort Worth. I decided to do
that while listening to KLIF in Dallas and wondered if it would work with country music.
Country jocks at that time were mostly old "hillbilly" jocks and would wait for the music
to end before talking and intro a record and then begin to play it.
The other claim to fame was an innovation I did at KPRC in Houston in 1968 and that was
taking a request to play off the air on a recording device, looking the record up and
getting it qued up then playing the recorded request on the air followed immediately by
the record. Sounded like I was super jock finding and playing that record so quickly.
Jocks at that time were taking the request on the air, looking up the record while another
was playing and play the request later in the show. Might have been a tease but since my
philiosophy has always been to deliver and not to tease I found the audience liked how I
did it. In fact, I have an air check from KPRC with that feature on it.
In 1968, friend of mine (Bo Powell) was PD at KPCN, Grand Prairie, Texas -- between Dallas
and Fort Worth. He asked me to record some "Hello, this is Charlie Brown and you're
listening to Sunday morning music on KPCN, etc", mix it up a little as he had an engineer
who would play the music and my recorded spots. I was then doing fill in and production
on KBOX in Dallas and Jack Gardner, the KBOX PD, had me do Sunday mornings for a while.
So there I was playing country as a live DJ on KBOX opposing myself as Charlie Brown
on KPCN.