It was in August 1981 when I visited the Bach branch of the public library, generally picking up whatever free newspapers I could find, which in those days was plenty. Among these papers was a KLON program guide, which I still possess – it’s around here somewhere – with a message from Dave Creagh, the newly appointed general manager about how the station had been acquired by the CSULB Foundation from the LBUSD and would be dropping an eclectic/educational format and going with a jazz and blues format… called American Music.
Fine. I’d been collecting American Music for years – never called it that – mainly R&B 45s, so I called Creagh up and asked him, would there be room for an R&B show in this new format?
I had no background for this idea. Never been in a radio studio in my life, but I was young. Sort of.
To my surprise, Creagh mentioned the name Chubby Checker and that when he lived in Washington D.C., he enjoyed the R&B show on the local jazz station, and if I could do that same thing, then yeah, there’d be room in the format.
Now Chubby Checker wasn’t my thing, still isn’t, but I didn’t argue.
We made an appointment for me to come in to cut an audition tape.
Though I had lived in Long Beach since 1953 – or thereabouts, complete records of my arrival were destroyed when the keys to the city archives were replaced by a memorial to the Autoette, but that’s a different tale – I hadn’t known that KLON signed on the air in 1950 and had been churning out a wide variety of shows to school district classrooms for those 30 years (I guess my classrooms weren’t connected or maybe I was gazing out a window or was preoccupied with defacing school property or drawing cartoons of the teacher on the cover of my notebook).
Despite my lack of familiarity of all that was KLON, I managed to find the station and loaded down with the records I thought would work – including a Savoy label roots of R&B LP – I was introduced to program director Ken Borgers, who had brain-stormed the American Music concept based on his devotion to jazz music. Apart from the current high school oriented programming on the station supplemented with a polka show and the Navy Hour, Bob Epstein and Borgers hosted several jazz shifts and there was a blues show hosted by Bernie Pearl, who later told me when he went to the station at the city college campus on PCH, he had to throw pebbles at the window to get the attention of the board operator to let him in. Security improved after the move.
Into a production studio Ken and I went and I did a clumsy show, with Ken running the board and cueing the records. I recall I tapped my pencil on a desk out of nervousness, as I stumbled over my naming the records, but Creagh listened to the tape in his home and/or in his car as if he were listening the station, and I passed the audition, though I’m sure only barely.
Next time, the audition playlist and other stuff, including bomb threats.