Radio Days
Don and Larry take us to those thrilling days of yesteryear with Nostalgia Theater
By John Quinlan, Journal staff writer | Posted: Sunday, June 17, 2007
Don Miller, seen through co-host Larry Fuller's microphone, chats with him during a recent Saturday airing of Nostalgia Tehater at radio station KSCJ. (Staff photo by Jerry Mennenga) KSCJnostalgiatheatre084.jpg Larry Fuller shares a laugh with co-host Don Miller (not seen) during the airing of Nostalgia Theater at radio station KSCJ. (Staff photo by Jerry Mennenga) Don Miller, left, pours some coffeee for co-host Larry Fuller during an airing of Nostalgia Theater at KSCJ. Don Miller's microphone rests on a few Nostalgia Theater production notes at KSCJ. Nostalgia Theater producer Scott Wick looks for some information for one of the day's guests, Paul Guggenheimer, at KSCJ. Nostalgia Theater producer Scott Wick adds a verbal "gong" noise to a Saturday morning production at radio station KSCJ while co-hosts Larry Fuller and Don Miller chat in another sound booth. A coffee mug ad production notes for Larry Fuller await him at KSCJ. From left, co-hosts Don Miller and Larry Fuller and producer Scott Wick chat during a segment of Nostalgia Theater one recent Saturday at radio station KSCJ. Larry Fuller, co-host for Nostalgia Theater on KSCJ, talks with guest Lindsay Washburn, a Western Iowa Tech student who recently starred in a theatrical production of "Sorry Wrong Number" that involved WIT Humanities chairman Ralph Swain and was produced by Paul Guggenheimer, also guests on the show. She is looking at a photo of Agnes Moorehead as she appeared in the original 1943 CBS "Suspense" radio production of "Sorry Wrong Number."
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"
"Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. The Lone Ranger rides again!"
"Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."
DUM DE DUM DUM...
DUM!
Back in the 1930s, '40s and early '50s, families would sit in front of their Atwater Kent "cathedral" radios as the stentorian tones of the announcers from those fabled radio shows introduced, respectively, to their avid listeners, "The Shadow", "The Lone Ranger" and "Dragnet." It was the Golden Age of Radio. By the 1950s, though, radio shows like these and "Our Miss Brooks" and "Have Gun -- Will Travel" had become TVland staples. And in the early '60s, the last of these dinosaurs died, replaced by music, though not the William Tell overture.
Returning us once again to those thrilling days of yesteryear, with tones no less dulcet than those radio voices of olde, are Larry Fuller, 69, and Don Miller, 71, the longtime radio fans who co-host "Nostalgia Theater" from 9 to 11 every Saturday morning on KSCJ 1360 in Sioux City.
It is Fuller's first radio gig. Miller's radio experience stretches back to his high school days.
Miller, a mostly retired radio man, and Fuller, a retired pharmaceutical representative with a museum-worthy collection of radio shows and memorabilia, bonded over a love or those old-time radio shows, and they got their chance to replay them on a regular basis on a December day in 2002 that will not live in infamy.
Miller, recently retired from The Globe and doing part-time news work at the station, was at KSCJ when it celebrated its 75th anniversary on April 4, 2002. Asked if he could find any old radio recordings to commemorate the occasion, he thought immediately of Fuller and his vast collection. Miller had once hosted an earlier version of Nostalgia Theater while working on Sioux City's KBCM. The show ran from 1977 to 1983, ending when the station became KG95.
"That's where I met Don," Fuller said. "I used to call in and I'd win his quizzes all the time."
So Fuller gave Miller 25 to 30 old-time radio shows on cassettes for a 6-hour anniversary special that caught on with a nostalgic public.
"The bottom line on that episode on April 4, 2002," Miller said, "was the fact that people were saying, 'Don't stop now, Jack, keep going.' The station was besieged with all kinds of letters."
The launch
A couple of months later, Willie Clark signed on as the station's new program director, and soon thereafter he gave Miller the green light to launch Nostalgia Theater and to bring in Fuller to get the job done. With Fuller's collection of more than 8,000 recordings, the station didn't have to subscribe to a service to get them. He has enough old radio shows to keep "Nostalgia Theater" running another 20 years without a rerun -- and he's still collecting them.
"And so on Dec. 7 of 2002, Mr. Fuller and I started our first show on Saturday morning. In a nutshell, that's how we got going," Miller said.
Four-and-a-half years later, the show is running like that battery bunny.
Back in the KBCM days, Miller had little control over what shows he was able to play. He subscribed to a service out of Bellingham, Washington, that provided reel-to-reel tapes of various shows each week. He could ask for comedies or dramas, but he had to put on whatever shows he had in hand. It was limiting.
These days, Miller just stops by Fuller's home every week and they pick out the coming Saturday's shows.
"Every Tuesday night for the last 230 Tuesdays," he said before the first May show this year, "I'd come over here at 8 o'clock on a Tuesday night and spend 30 minutes to an hour with Larry, and we'd go through his shows."
Fuller would have already picked out some likely candidates for broadcast, depending on the theme for the week. Maybe comedy or drama, or shows that might play favorably on an upcoming holiday. And when someone of interest to their audience dies, it's worth an on-air mention, as was the recent occasion of the death of Bobby "Boris" Pickett, author of "Monster Mash," Fuller said.
They're still kicking themselves a bit for not taking advantage of their Dec. 7 launch to commemorate the Pearl Harbor bombing anniversary.
"Larry goes through a lot of these shows," Miller said. "Because of time constraints he has to work out, we've got like 110 minutes Saturday morning, allowing for commercials and chitchat and the stuff that we do -- or he does, the two nostalgia quizzes -- we need about roughly no more than 78 to 80 minutes of programming of actual shows."
Fuller still has a lot of the old reel-to-reel tapes, but he also has a lot of the shows on cassette tapes and digitally restored CDs.
Somehow Fuller manages to come up with the right combination of programs, say three shows running 24, 26 and 29 minutes in length. With most shows clocking in at around 29 minutes, it can be a challenge. "We're always fighting the clock cuz we talk too much," he said.
No interruptions
The shows are run uninterrupted because they don't want 21st century commercials disrupting 1940s-era programming. Too jarring. They prefer the commercials that were originally broadcast with each program. And the advertisers agree.
"We never interrupt the shows," Fuller said
One recent comedy week, for instance, they started with "Our Miss Brooks" starring Eve Arden, followed by "Amos 'n' Andy" and "The Fred Allen Show."
Longtime producer Scott Frink, operating out of the master control booth next door, was happy.
"Amos 'n' Andy just cracks me up every time I hear it," he said.
And fortunately the threat of thunderstorms never necessitated a weather alert from Frink in the middle of a broadcast. He was able to hold off until the first modern-time commercial break before giving the weather report.
Frink, the Saturday morning ringmaster at KSCJ, has his own on-air hour with "Swap Shop" from 6 to 7 a.m. before overseeing "Ask Earl May" and "Nostalgia Theater." Like the nostalgia guys, this is part-time gig for Frink, the fulltime credit manager for Sioux City Foundry who tends to downplay his contribution to the latter two shows. "I just push the buttons," he said.
When they started doing Nostalgia Theater, they had but one sponsor. And for the first six months, a local cafe and an auto dealer were their only regulars, Miller said. At that point the program director told them they needed more sponsors or the station was going to pull the plug.
So the on-air guys took to the streets. With Miller's gift of gab and Fuller's sales experience, they quickly built up a solid roster of about a dozen advertisers; and the guys say they do everything they can to keep these people happy. It helps that most of them are among the show's biggest fans.
The Arbitron ratings speak well of their success, getting into the rare double digits for a Saturday morning show, Miller said. "We're running about 21, 22 percent of the audience. They call them shares, and that's really good. That's just fantastic," he said.
Their audience even follows them into Saturday afternoon on those occasions when football games bump "Nostalgia Theater" to a later start time, Miller said.
"We've got between 3,500 and 4,000 listeners. That's a lot of people in Siouxland," Fuller said.
The fan base also gave them the freedom to do a special five-hour edition of the show on Christmas Eve.
Preserving the past
Quiz king Fuller, who used to win these contests years ago, handles the nostalgia quizzes these days, two per Saturday, with an impressive array of gifts provided by the show's sponsors. The questions can be as easy as 'Who was buried in Grant's Tomb?' Usually, however, they require a bit of knowledge about the radio shows of the era.
The quizzes one recent Saturday asked the name of the school where Our Miss Brooks taught and what nickname Louisiana Gov. Huey Long borrowed from Amos 'n' Andy. The answers, not tough for anyone listening to the day's shows, were Madison High and The Kingfisher. They were easy enough anyway for winners Gary Trapp and Nancy Van Meter.
The hosts admit that younger listeners are hard to come by. Anyone under 55 is not likely to be familiar with the the old-time shows. Fuller said network Radio died on Sept. 30, 1962 when CBS finally pulled the plug on "Yours Truly," "Johnny Dollar," and "Suspense." A few younger fans remember the same shows from their later TV incarnations. And the guys are often queried by youngsters whose grandfathers say they used to listen to "Gunsmoke," a popular TVland staple, on the radio.
"That's really why we do this -- preserving the past," Miller said. "It's an art form that we're never going to see again. Not in this day and age. But it's nice to remember that."
Being such "generational stuff," Fuller said he wonders if anyone will even care 20 years from now.
He recalled the time he was asked to address a mass communications class at Morningside College.
"It was 18, 19-year-old students that didn't have a clue what I was talking about, I says, does anybody remember Fibber McGee and Bob Hope? No. Jack Benny? Nah. So I'm sitting there talking for almost two hours, watching them go to sleep and falling out of their chairs practically. It was the wrong audience," he said.
The teacher made them stay awake and turn off their laptops. All to little avail, Fuller said, laughing.
But these Nostalgia Radio guys, like Burns and Allen before them know, their audience, and those college kids aren't it.
One exception is a 25-yar-old Le Mars fan who was schooled in old-time radio by his grandparents.
"He said the thing is, you don't have to use your eyes. He said you do have to use your mind's eye as you sit back and close your eyes and listen to the radio," imagining what was happening to Flash Gordon or Marshall Dillon, Miller said. "And actually people used to watch the radio. Larry will testify to that."
"Well, yeah," Fuller said, chuckling. "We sat there and looked at the radio.
"Don and I both love radio. And we both have a ball."
"Absolutely. That's the bottom line. We enjoy it," Miller added.
Say goodnight, Larry.
Goodnight, Larry.
Yes
"Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. The Lone Ranger rides again!"
"Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."
DUM DE DUM DUM...
DUM!
Back in the 1930s, '40s and early '50s, families would sit in front of their Atwater Kent "cathedral" radios as the stentorian tones of the announcers from those fabled radio shows introduced, respectively, to their avid listeners, "The Shadow", "The Lone Ranger" and "Dragnet." It was the Golden Age of Radio. By the 1950s, though, radio shows like these and "Our Miss Brooks" and "Have Gun -- Will Travel" had become TVland staples. And in the early '60s, the last of these dinosaurs died, replaced by music, though not the William Tell overture.
Returning us once again to those thrilling days of yesteryear, with tones no less dulcet than those radio voices of olde, are Larry Fuller, 69, and Don Miller, 71, the longtime radio fans who co-host "Nostalgia Theater" from 9 to 11 every Saturday morning on KSCJ 1360 in Sioux City.
It is Fuller's first radio gig. Miller's radio experience stretches back to his high school days.
Miller, a mostly retired radio man, and Fuller, a retired pharmaceutical representative with a museum-worthy collection of radio shows and memorabilia, bonded over a love or those old-time radio shows, and they got their chance to replay them on a regular basis on a December day in 2002 that will not live in infamy.
Miller, recently retired from The Globe and doing part-time news work at the station, was at KSCJ when it celebrated its 75th anniversary on April 4, 2002. Asked if he could find any old radio recordings to commemorate the occasion, he thought immediately of Fuller and his vast collection. Miller had once hosted an earlier version of Nostalgia Theater while working on Sioux City's KBCM. The show ran from 1977 to 1983, ending when the station became KG95.
"That's where I met Don," Fuller said. "I used to call in and I'd win his quizzes all the time."
So Fuller gave Miller 25 to 30 old-time radio shows on cassettes for a 6-hour anniversary special that caught on with a nostalgic public.
"The bottom line on that episode on April 4, 2002," Miller said, "was the fact that people were saying, 'Don't stop now, Jack, keep going.' The station was besieged with all kinds of letters."
The launch
A couple of months later, Willie Clark signed on as the station's new program director, and soon thereafter he gave Miller the green light to launch Nostalgia Theater and to bring in Fuller to get the job done. With Fuller's collection of more than 8,000 recordings, the station didn't have to subscribe to a service to get them. He has enough old radio shows to keep "Nostalgia Theater" running another 20 years without a rerun -- and he's still collecting them.
"And so on Dec. 7 of 2002, Mr. Fuller and I started our first show on Saturday morning. In a nutshell, that's how we got going," Miller said.
Four-and-a-half years later, the show is running like that battery bunny.
Back in the KBCM days, Miller had little control over what shows he was able to play. He subscribed to a service out of Bellingham, Washington, that provided reel-to-reel tapes of various shows each week. He could ask for comedies or dramas, but he had to put on whatever shows he had in hand. It was limiting.
These days, Miller just stops by Fuller's home every week and they pick out the coming Saturday's shows.
"Every Tuesday night for the last 230 Tuesdays," he said before the first May show this year, "I'd come over here at 8 o'clock on a Tuesday night and spend 30 minutes to an hour with Larry, and we'd go through his shows."
Fuller would have already picked out some likely candidates for broadcast, depending on the theme for the week. Maybe comedy or drama, or shows that might play favorably on an upcoming holiday. And when someone of interest to their audience dies, it's worth an on-air mention, as was the recent occasion of the death of Bobby "Boris" Pickett, author of "Monster Mash," Fuller said.
They're still kicking themselves a bit for not taking advantage of their Dec. 7 launch to commemorate the Pearl Harbor bombing anniversary.
"Larry goes through a lot of these shows," Miller said. "Because of time constraints he has to work out, we've got like 110 minutes Saturday morning, allowing for commercials and chitchat and the stuff that we do -- or he does, the two nostalgia quizzes -- we need about roughly no more than 78 to 80 minutes of programming of actual shows."
Fuller still has a lot of the old reel-to-reel tapes, but he also has a lot of the shows on cassette tapes and digitally restored CDs.
Somehow Fuller manages to come up with the right combination of programs, say three shows running 24, 26 and 29 minutes in length. With most shows clocking in at around 29 minutes, it can be a challenge. "We're always fighting the clock cuz we talk too much," he said.
No interruptions
The shows are run uninterrupted because they don't want 21st century commercials disrupting 1940s-era programming. Too jarring. They prefer the commercials that were originally broadcast with each program. And the advertisers agree.
"We never interrupt the shows," Fuller said
One recent comedy week, for instance, they started with "Our Miss Brooks" starring Eve Arden, followed by "Amos 'n' Andy" and "The Fred Allen Show."
Longtime producer Scott Frink, operating out of the master control booth next door, was happy.
"Amos 'n' Andy just cracks me up every time I hear it," he said.
And fortunately the threat of thunderstorms never necessitated a weather alert from Frink in the middle of a broadcast. He was able to hold off until the first modern-time commercial break before giving the weather report.
Frink, the Saturday morning ringmaster at KSCJ, has his own on-air hour with "Swap Shop" from 6 to 7 a.m. before overseeing "Ask Earl May" and "Nostalgia Theater." Like the nostalgia guys, this is part-time gig for Frink, the fulltime credit manager for Sioux City Foundry who tends to downplay his contribution to the latter two shows. "I just push the buttons," he said.
When they started doing Nostalgia Theater, they had but one sponsor. And for the first six months, a local cafe and an auto dealer were their only regulars, Miller said. At that point the program director told them they needed more sponsors or the station was going to pull the plug.
So the on-air guys took to the streets. With Miller's gift of gab and Fuller's sales experience, they quickly built up a solid roster of about a dozen advertisers; and the guys say they do everything they can to keep these people happy. It helps that most of them are among the show's biggest fans.
The Arbitron ratings speak well of their success, getting into the rare double digits for a Saturday morning show, Miller said. "We're running about 21, 22 percent of the audience. They call them shares, and that's really good. That's just fantastic," he said.
Their audience even follows them into Saturday afternoon on those occasions when football games bump "Nostalgia Theater" to a later start time, Miller said.
"We've got between 3,500 and 4,000 listeners. That's a lot of people in Siouxland," Fuller said.
The fan base also gave them the freedom to do a special five-hour edition of the show on Christmas Eve.
Preserving the past
Quiz king Fuller, who used to win these contests years ago, handles the nostalgia quizzes these days, two per Saturday, with an impressive array of gifts provided by the show's sponsors. The questions can be as easy as 'Who was buried in Grant's Tomb?' Usually, however, they require a bit of knowledge about the radio shows of the era.
The quizzes one recent Saturday asked the name of the school where Our Miss Brooks taught and what nickname Louisiana Gov. Huey Long borrowed from Amos 'n' Andy. The answers, not tough for anyone listening to the day's shows, were Madison High and The Kingfisher. They were easy enough anyway for winners Gary Trapp and Nancy Van Meter.
The hosts admit that younger listeners are hard to come by. Anyone under 55 is not likely to be familiar with the the old-time shows. Fuller said network Radio died on Sept. 30, 1962 when CBS finally pulled the plug on "Yours Truly," "Johnny Dollar," and "Suspense." A few younger fans remember the same shows from their later TV incarnations. And the guys are often queried by youngsters whose grandfathers say they used to listen to "Gunsmoke," a popular TVland staple, on the radio.
"That's really why we do this -- preserving the past," Miller said. "It's an art form that we're never going to see again. Not in this day and age. But it's nice to remember that."
Being such "generational stuff," Fuller said he wonders if anyone will even care 20 years from now.
He recalled the time he was asked to address a mass communications class at Morningside College.
"It was 18, 19-year-old students that didn't have a clue what I was talking about, I says, does anybody remember Fibber McGee and Bob Hope? No. Jack Benny? Nah. So I'm sitting there talking for almost two hours, watching them go to sleep and falling out of their chairs practically. It was the wrong audience," he said.
The teacher made them stay awake and turn off their laptops. All to little avail, Fuller said, laughing.
But these Nostalgia Radio guys, like Burns and Allen before them know, their audience, and those college kids aren't it.
One exception is a 25-yar-old Le Mars fan who was schooled in old-time radio by his grandparents.
"He said the thing is, you don't have to use your eyes. He said you do have to use your mind's eye as you sit back and close your eyes and listen to the radio," imagining what was happening to Flash Gordon or Marshall Dillon, Miller said. "And actually people used to watch the radio. Larry will testify to that."
"Well, yeah," Fuller said, chuckling. "We sat there and looked at the radio.
"Don and I both love radio. And we both have a ball."
"Absolutely. That's the bottom line. We enjoy it," Miller added.
Say goodnight, Larry.
Goodnight, Larry.
Yes
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Don Miller wrote on Jun 20, 2007 3:06 PM:
Ted Kneebone wrote on Jun 18, 2007 9:46 PM:
Tim Moreland, PhD wrote on Jun 18, 2007 11:47 AM:
Joe Terry-Boise, ID wrote on Jun 17, 2007 9:02 AM: