Tom Betz wrote:
Without a doubt, WJR Detroit, "From the Golden Tower of the Fisher
Building, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes". I heard it nearly
every day from the 1960's through the early 1970's. It was a true
full-service station, on the CBS radio network, when a radio
network still meant something. As a kid, I preferred listening to
Richard C. Hotelett's "The World Today" on WJR to watching any of
the nightly news programs on TV, and Arthur Godfrey remained a
staple there until 1972.

Local personalities J.P. McCarthy, Jimmy Lantz, Bud Guest, Karl
Hass (now syndicated by WCLV in Cleveland, his "Adventures in
Music" program is largely unchanged from those days), gave WJR's
programming a variety that just doesn't exist in radio today.

WJR went downhill fast in the late 80s, when some manager failed to notice
that you need some intelligence to host a show, and started putting on
lightweights and displacing the good guys.

Simultaneously, McCarthy lost it, coinciding with a Marconi award or
whatever it was, so even that attraction was lost. The WTF moment
for me was his noontime interview with the airline pilot that landed
the DC-10 without hydraulic systems on throttle alone, and the pilot was
building up to his crisis moment practiced in countless interviews, and
J.P. intervened with the remark that he himself used to fly a Piper
Cherokee, at which point the pilot lost interest in everything, saying
in effect yeah whatever, and that ended that.

So J.P. stopped thinking or seeing his job or something around then, or maybe
coasting, or maybe he had a stroke, who knows. That cost WJR huge.
Miss Pennypacker from the Blue Star Home supplied the only edge to his
morning show at that point.

So anyway, okay, people get old, but management has to know enough to
replace them with actual talent, which they don't and didn't.

I got a nice reply once from Jimmy Launce when I asked what the peaceful-
moment music was he used to play once a month or so (Kiri Te Kanawa
``O mio babbino caro''), asked from a distance of more than a decade.

They moved Launce from a great show in the evening to a morning show
playing ``guess what I'm holding in my hand'' to hold the attention of
droolers, which in fact is their audience today, long after the good
guys are gone.

I guess Clear Channel didn't help either, but they didn't start the decline.
--
Ron Hardin


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.