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An excerpt from the
long-awaited book that Chuck Blore has almost finished writing ... OKAY, OKAY, I WROTE THE BOOK CALLER You can achieve
The things
you believe.
Just keep
on believing it’s true
And keep on believing in you.
Of course,
the really interesting books are the ones in which the hero has
great endeavors to undertake, painful struggles and all sorts of
heartbreak, or at least bad guys, to overcome. Well, I certainly
have no problem with the hero role, but looking back, the successes
I’ve had have come from just doing what seemed like a good thing to
do at the time. At this point I don’t know how to make this
chronicle anything more than a happy tale of a guy who had
spectacular success in radio, and then again in advertising.
So, how am I
gonna make this into a best seller? I mean, if you’re gonna write a
book, you want it to be a best seller, right? Absolutely. But it
has to have some kind of fresh twist or trick, some inventive
gimmick.
Ah, I got
it. Truth.
Sometimes
truth can be the best trick of all. So, here goes.
I know a lot
of this success, probably most of it, had to do with that being in
the right place at the right time thing, but today, proud to say,
I’m in two different broadcasting Halls Of Fame. I have been given
a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Broadcast Promotion Industry,
two Professional Achievement Awards from the radio industry, I’ve
spoken to advertising and/or broadcast groups in every English
speaking country in the world where there is commercial
broadcasting, I’ve taught at UCLA and I’m quoted in several other
college textbooks, there have been feature articles about me and my
company in every major broadcasting and advertising publication I
can think of and, The National Association of Broadcasters has
recently, designated me, a legend. All from just doing what seemed
like a good thing to do.
And of
course, that right place at the right time thing.
Looking back
at it, the only problem is that I’m looking back at it.
So, I guess
it’s time to write the book.
Damn.
The first guy
to tell me I should write a book was Al Jarvis. Al was America’s
first deejay. I don’t mean first, as in he was Number One (although
he certainly was that,) he was the first one to do it
... to play records on the radio.
Without
knowing it, Al had been a huge influence on my life. It began when I
was about ten years old, or whatever age it is when your mother
first asks you, “Chuckie. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“What? Mom,
I’m ten years old.” I had never given the slightest thought to what
I wanted to be, that is, if you don’t count wanting to be a cowboy
and/or Tarzan.
At ten years
old you don’t really have much of a past, but my future was about to
be sealed. I swear to God, that moment was traumatic and my memory
of it, indelible.
I was
sweeping leaves off the porch of our house in East L.A.. This was
when East L.A. was one of the poorer sections of the city. The
radio was on and Al Jarvis was on it. He sounded like he was having
a pretty nice time, so I answered, “I want to talk on the radio.”
My Mother was
a kind and gentle lady and I’m sure what she said then was meant to
protect her little boy from being cruelly buffeted about by an
unkind society. She said, “Chuckie. People like us don’t do that.”
Whoa! Something snapped inside my young little
soul and I swore to myself, “I am not people like us. I am me_ And
me is gonna talk on the radio_” From that moment on, talking on the
radio was everything I ever wanted to do. Boy_ You talk about
determination. The radio in my room was never off. I had a
constantly changing chart on which I kept track of my favorite
programs with little pluses and minuses indicating what I liked best
and least about each of them; Norman Nesbitt’s Passing Parade, I
Love A Mystery, Jack Armstrong, The Shadow, Witches’ Tales, and of
course, The Lone Ranger, Lux Radio Theater and Your Hit Parade, on
which Frank Sinatra was a featured performer. Even though this is
stuff I haven’t thought of in a hundred years, I do remember giving
Frank Sinatra lotsa pluses for “The slow stuff” but many minuses
for things like The Chatanooga Choo Choo and Rag Mop.
On my
seventeenth birthday , I convinced my father that the only way I
could ever afford to go to radio school was to drop out of high
school and join the Navy. Somehow, the government had never gotten
around to ending The G.I. Bill which allowed anyone who had served
in the armed forces, any time, even peacetime, to go to school and
be paid to do it. Eighteen months in the peacetime Navy went flying
by and by and by --- I was in radio school.
While I was learning about microphones and vacuum tubes and how to pronounce Paderefsky, I was an actor. Kind of. I don’t remember how I got involved in it, but for over a year I appeared in a semi-professional live stage play called, “Curse You, Jack Dalton_” It was an old fashioned melodrama complete with booing the villain and cheering the hero. I was Jack Dalton. I was the hero. People liked me and I discovered the first rule in successful communication. Get people to like you.
Get your
target audience, whether you’re asking a girl for a first date, or
asking a potential investor for big bucks, get them to like what you
say and how you get it said. That’s when meaningful communication
can begin.
That’s really
the heart and soul of everything I believe in, from a ten second
radio ad to a ninety minute TV special, even writing a book, it
needs to be meaningful, to be honest and be good enough to elicit an
affirmative emotional response from the audience. Get people
to like you.
I got paid
twelve dollars a week to play Jack Dalton 6 times; one performance a
day Tuesday thru Friday and two on Saturday. At each performance,
after the melodrama, were the olios; a bunch of funny little skits
in which everyone in the cast got to play several different parts.
The emcee of all of this was a very nice guy by the name of Dick
Curtis. Dick and I shared an apartment, and the rent, fifty dollars
a month, which was just about half of our total income. We lived
mostly on Post Toasties which made a very fine breakfast and at
night wasn’t a bad New York Steak. The apartment was in a place
called Normandy Village on The Sunset Strip in Hollywood, right
across from where Ciro’s used to be.
Playing Jack,
the hero meant I got to kiss the heroine every night. The heroine
was a pretty little girl named Catherine. We both liked the kissing
part a lot and before I graduated from radio school, we were
married. Also, before I graduated, Catherine began suffering from
almost unmanageable asthma attacks. The doctor told her she would
be a lot more able to control the asthma if she were living in a
drier climate, preferably the desert.
I applied to
the school job placement service and was told there was one job
opening in the desert, in Kingman, Arizona. I called the station
owner to ask what qualifications the job applicants would have to
have and he said, “Can you read?”
I said, “Yessir.”
He said,
“Okay.”
That was it.
I was in radio. Or, something like it.
...
next week, the story continues -- More from Blore!
Below is a tasty teaser ...
Wrap every
dream
In
self-esteem
And keep on believing in you
We arrived in
Kingman to find that the radio station was nothing more than a
transmitter site with a microphone, plunked down in the middle of
the desert. Actually Kingman itself was little more than a
construction site for Boulder Dam, which was being rebuilt into
what would become Hoover Dam, plunked down in the middle of the
desert.
The station
owner was the publisher of the local newspaper and knew nothing
about radio ... (to be continued next week)
In the meantime, visit Chuck at the Chuck Blore Company, online at www.chuckblore.com and send him an e-mail at bloregroup@aol.com |
