Excerpt #6 from the long-awaited book that Chuck Blore has almost finished writing ...

www.chuckblore.com

OKAY, OKAY, I WROTE THE BOOK

I think there comes a time in the life of every “Big fish in a pint-size pool” when you get slapped across the ego with the realization that “Mr Big Fish don’t amount to diddly squat! Now, I could have just said, “... don’t amount to diddly.” and the message would have been clear. It’s when you add that “Squat!” that you realize how far down you are on the scale of professional broadcasters. This happened to me when I first became aware of Gordon McLendon.

I first heard of Gordon when Mr. Wallace decided that KTKT could do a huge service to Tucsonians by making available to them, The Liberty Network. This was the network that Gordon and his father Barton put together so that Gordon could recreate the major league baseball games and Barton, who owned a chain of theaters in Texas, could advertise his movies. And advertise them they did, with three and four minute spectacularly produced commercials produced and voiced by Gordon. Commercials which make The Creature From The Lost Lagoon sound like a combination of Orson Welles’ The War Of The Worlds, and CB DeMille’s Ben Hur played out against the theme from Gone With The Wind. And they’d air these spots every ninety minutes or so. But most of all, it was about recreating baseball games and, oh my, was Gordon good at it. I could not believe he wasn’t in the stands right next to NBC and Mutual, except that Gordon’s description of the games was a hellova lot more exciting, reeking of suspense and drama. Of course these were afternoon games, which meant that all this reeking took place in my time slot.

One day, Mr. Wallace who was ordinarily a very cool and collected gentleman came into the studio while I was on the air and just stood there with a huge smile
stretching across his face. He said nothing for a few minutes so I just kept showing Tucson what a wonderful radio personality I was. He just stood there, beaming away. Finally, I said, “You look like something really wonderful has just happened, or is about to.”

“We have to get a ticker tape machine.” He grinned.

“We do? Are we gonna have a parade?” I grinned back, like I was in on the joke.

“We should have a parade.” He was really beaming now. “Gordon McLendon is coming to our station. He’s going to do a ball game right here. Right in our studio.”

“You talked to him?”

“Five minutes ago. He said he was going to be in town Thursday and he asked if he could do the ball game from here. We would have to be the flagship station for the whole Liberty Network.

He’s gonna broadcast from here? Wow! Do I get to do the station breaks and stuff?” I suddenly realized I was doing some pretty good beaming of my own.

It was magical. Thursday came, and so did Gordon. Mr. Wallace took him into the studio and I watched through the glass as he hung a baseball bat from a mike boom and pushed it over next to a small chair he had set up next to our newly installed ticker tape machine. Then, Mr Wallace brought him into the booth. Gordon handed me two tapes. “These are the sound effects.” he said and though he spoke in a normal tone I would have sworn his voice rattled the windows. “This tape is a crowd in a baseball stadium. That just runs all the time. You can re-cue it when I’m doing a commercial. The other one has some screaming crowds. You have to watch me the whole time. I have a mallet in my hand and when I raise it up it means someone is about to get a hit. If I raise it way up, like this,” he held the mallet high in the sky, “It means it’s gonna be a home run. If I raise it about here, it’s a triple and down here, it’s just a base hit. When I bring my hand down I’ll whack that bat and if it’s a home run, you kick that crowd in the ass. Way up! If it’s a triple, not quite so loud and for a single, they’re still excited but you don’t want to have them screaming like it was a grand slam, you know what I mean? You have to watch me, every minute and I’ll indicate how loud the crowd should be. You got all that?”

“Yessir. Do you want to rehearse?” Oh, please God, make him say yes.

“No.”

“Oh. Okay. It’ll be good. It’ll be perfect. I promise.”

Gordon wasn’t very tall but when he looked at you in a certain way, you thought he was a giant. It was the giant who said, “Perfect is a very big word.”

Well, even if he hadn’t told me to watch him every minute. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He had another little play back machine which he set on the floor about six feet away from where he was broadcasting. It was just what seemed to be a random collection of baseball sounds coming atcha at random times ... “Popcorn here. Popcorn’ Popcorn. Cotton Candy” “Programs! Who wants a program?” “Hot dogs. Get ‘em while they’re hot.” With that as background and my perfect playing a the crowd tape, it really sounded like you were there in the middle of it. But it was Gordon who made it a ball game.

The ticker tape looked like this ...
__________________________________________________________________
BATTER:JONES. BALL BALL. STRIKE __________________________________________________________________ . .
To Gordon, and through him, to us, it looked like this: “Well, Billy Jones is not having his best year. In Baltimore at this time, twenty two games in, he had already established a 315 average. This year he’s having a tough time trying to stay above 215. He takes ball one. Nobody on, nobody out. This pitcher reminds you of Daffy Dean doesn’t he? He has that same little twitch when he goes into his wind up. Whoa! This time he winds up with ball two. Jones almost went for it, held back just in time. There’s a lady down there wearing a big red hat in about.. oh I don’t know ... about the twelth row. There’s a little boy, big boy actually, about five sitting right behind her and that kid just dumped his chile dog on her hat. STRIKE. Fast ball dead center. I swear that ball was in the catchers mitt before Jones swung at it. And I mean he swung at it... “

Well, he would have done it a lot better than that, but you can see what I mean. I was watching him read the damn stuff from the ticker tape and I swear he was there at that game. And so was I. He was incredible and every time I heard him, I learned more about what could be done with this magic medium with just the right words, the right voice and the right attitude.

Don Keyes had hired four deejays to go to KTSA.. Don himself was the fifth. But we didn’t go to KTSA, at least not right away. The license got hung up at the FCC for a few days longer than expected. So, Don called each of the guys and told us to come to Dallas where we would spend those few days monitoring (listening to) the greatest radio station on the planet ... KLIF.

As Cath and I came within radio-shot of Big D, we obviously were eager to hear the station. It was on this final approach to Dallas where I first learned the meaning of one of Gordon’s favorite phrases, “Change the lemon into lemonade. He had four deejays he was paying and he wasn’t going to pay them to just listen to the radio. One of the first things we heard was a promo urging the audience to listen the next day to the special line up of the greatest radio talent in America ... A new deejay every hour ... Bruce Hayes, Don French, Ken Knox, Bob Cooper, Art Nelson, Chuck Blore ... WHAT? I didn’t know who the rest of those guys were but I sure knew that last one ... and he was going on the air the NEXT DAY?
Oh ..... My ..... God.

(...to be continued)