KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 13

KHJ 20/20 News

Bill Drake: The 20/20 news sweep wasn’t at KGB, it was totally devised for KHJ. The 20/20 news placement came about as I was flying from Fresno to L.A. to finalize the deal. I remember I had the flu, it was a night flight and I had a meeting the next morning. I was wigging out at all those damn lights as I was flying in, and I was thinking, ‘Jesus, there’s a lot of people out there, all listening to KFWB and KRLA. What can we do to make them want to listen to us.’ You know we had to do a lot of shit. But I was thinking about KFWB’s news being at :25 and :55, KRLA at :15 and :45. Not a whole lot you can do there. So I was figuring out the mechanics and the 20/20 thing hit me — news at 20 minutes past and 20 minutes before the hour.

We didn’t know if it would work or not but it gave us a longer sweep. It was before KRLA’s news at :45 and we went through the top of the hour. We could draw from anybody at the top of the hour at that point because everybody but KRLA was doing either news on the hour or at five minutes till. If people tuned us out and went to KFWB they would only be there for like five minutes. If anybody was looking for music around the top of the hour we were there. Oh yeah, we had to hide news. The previous people had made so many public service commitments. We had huge religious blocks and talk blocks and we couldn’t get rid of them. We buried them on Sunday mornings, early. The FCC was a whole different ball game back then.

Lyle Kilgore

Art Kevin: I was excited about the forthcoming change. Change was not a fearful event for me. All the new people appeared a bit “nutty” but then again, one could feel the power of it all. It was easy to want to be a part of all the excitement. I’d heard news would be de-emphasized, but in point of fact, that never came to pass. Ron Jacobs made things happen for news, for which I am eternally grateful. Working with all the new folks was a joy. The energy level was intense. The “20/20 News” format did not scare me. But I wondered what it might mean to more traditional listeners wedded to the half-hour or top-of-the-hour format. I was pleased to be trying something new and different.

The jock staff was fun to work with. They fully aappreciated what we were trying to do and never made us feel unimportant. In fact, I well remember how Robert W. or Steele or Gary Mack would question me about news stories that I had just aired. These were pros in the best sense of the word.

Roger Aldi

Roger Aldi: I was in my early twenties working the bottom of the KHJ job-ladder in the 20-man news department. One day in early 1965, a tall gentleman walked in and declared, “We are now a rock ’n’ roll radio station. News means nothing to me except the FCC makes me include it, so we’re gonna make it the best news presentation we can.” I asked someone who that was and they said, “He’s the new program consultant, Bill Drake.”

J. Paul Huddleston

Art Kevin: I’ll never forget what Roger Aldi and Andy West looked like when they returned to KHJ after covering the first night of the Watts Riots. I assigned them to ride together for safety’s sake. They had radioed in that their mobile unit had been attacked with rocks and the front windshield was gone. When they walked into the newsroom we all could see they still had shards of glass all over their hair. Some of the glass was in their ears and some tiny slivers shone from their foreheads. We spent several hours carefully removing the debris.

One day in Watts a group of teens were threatening to riot in front of their school. I dispatched Phil Barton to make his way to an LAPD command post a safe distance away from the school. Phil made a wrong turn and found himself in front of the school and in the midst of a mob that was moving toward his mobile unit. I asked him to keep his two-way radio microphone on for safety’s sake. He did. As the mob approached we heard Phil roll his window down and try and reason with the group. Next thing we know he was choking, they’d grabbed his tie! We called LAPD and they had to drive in to the building melee to save our man.

NEWSWEEK, August 30, 1965

I recall the night when police tried to quell a student anti-war protest that flooded the UC campus in Santa Barbara. I drove in with my mobile unit and found myself being advanced on by a student mob. They surrounded my car and started rocking it. As they were doing their thing I managed to convince one of the group leaders that we, KHJ, were the good guys. And that if they would stop rocking me around I’d tape their comments for all L.A. to hear and distribute and at all our other stations throughout the U. S. Thank goodness it made sense to the leader of the group. He called off his crew and proceeded to tape their grievances.

Jim Mitchell

Jim Mitchell: We always tried to talk to our audience, choosing stories that would interest KHJ listeners. In those days, hard news worked for young audiences. We had the Vietnam War growing and it could have life-and-death impact for young adults. Challenges to authority were everywhere with frequent trouble on college campuses and in central city neighborhoods. We covered the first Monterey Pop Festival live from the scene. It wasn’t always possible to build a whole newscast, even a short KHJ 20/20 newscast, with that stuff, but we seldom had a problem filling. We always tried for fresh actualities, sound bites from newsmakers and reporter-on-the-scene explainers. This was straight out of the Jacobs Honolulu Playbook. Over there, five or six local wire stories a day carried the “KPOI asked” slug, meaning we gave the wire service the story after we broke it. We regularly whipped stations with twice as many people on their staff. The idea was to keep it relevant and keep it moving. Jacobs’ theory was let’s do it as well as it can be done. He had bigger things to worry about, but he listened to us and pushed for improvement.

Art Kevin: In August 1965 I remember very specifically when Jacobs went to bat to try and get me — the news department — a better playback time for a two-hour news special about the Watts Riots. We finally went with it at 4 a.m. Later, after I’d submitted the two-hour show to a prestigious news competition, I got the tape back with a note from one of the group’s officers saying we were the ones to beat, but their judges couldn’t get past the playback time which indicated to them that we had no real news commitment.

Marv Howard

Except for the Watts riots I never felt put down by other L.A. news media. They claimed we were “too raucous.” In point of fact KHJ News was too busy doing award-winning work. The Chancellor of the University of California praised us. Politicians ran trial balloons by us. I reported live when Bobby Kennedy died and when he was buried near his late brother. I was there when someone tried to murder James Meredith during the march through Mississippi. KHJ 20/20 News listeners also heard the first radio interviews of Warren Commission critics such as Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg and Mort Sahl. KHJ’s financial success also allowed coverage of major political party conventions. We were the only L.A. radio station to have a reporter at the Chicago Democratic National convention of 1968. Yours truly was tear gassed along with Dick Gregory.

The news department had the best of everything. The newest and most advanced mobile news units and the best and most expensive field gear available. After the 1965 Watts riot we were the first L.A. radio station to issue our news department jumpsuits marked with a “PRESS” logo for field safety. We also obtained California Highway Patrol hardhats to ward off bricks, bottles and tear gas canisters and to protect personnel in tight situations.

The KHJ news department won numerous national, regional and local area awards for news excellence and was often mentioned on the UPI and AP wire services. We also had station stories picked up by such publications as the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Jim Mitchell: The big thing with Jacobs is loyalty. I’ll bet he doesn’t even realize that he hired me four times, three of them after I had left jobs with him. Other people have stories like this. I left KPOI because I wanted to get back to the mainland. I had a job lined up at KMBY, where I planned to golf my way around theMonterey Peninsula and attend junior college, but Jacobs called and talked me into going to Fresno State and working at KMAK. I left KMAK to play disc jockey in San Diego. Three months later he offered me San Bernardino at the time when KMEN might have been the best — although not the best-known — station in the country. Then I left there for the beauty of San Diego again, only to have him bring me into the breathtaking success story of KHJ. Not many bosses would take back somebody who bailed out on them so often.

Come to think of it ... he did it again! About twenty years after leaving KHJ, I was vacationing in Honolulu, and he asked me to cut show promos and station IDs for his show on KGU. Sure, he screamed at us. Maybe he sometimes pushed us beyond our endurance. But nobody ever doubted that he’d do anything for people who gave him their best.

Art Kevin: Obviously it was KHJ’s 20/20 newaformat, personalities and promotion that made it all happen. Our challenge in the news department was to be as exciting as what preceded and followed us, to compliment the station’s overall goals. I think we achieved that most of the time.

KHJ News Director Art Kevin and L. A. Police Chief Thomas Reddin

The transition from the “old” to the “new” was smooth because the men involved were professionals. They were loyal and they knew they could trust what I told them. In turn, I knew that Jacobs and I were dealing from the same deck of cards.

I believed Jacobs implicitly. He was always in the news department’s corner and never gave me reason to doubt that he sincerely liked what we were doing in the newsroom. We spoke quite a bit in those days. Sometimes I changed his mind on a given subject, other times not. But the respect we had for each other was mutual.

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http://www.93khj.com/

KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 12

The Birth of “Boss”

Bill Drake: Clancy Imislund, the KHJ Promotion Director was there before Jacobs was hired. I thought that Jacobs came up with “Boss.” But Clancy had some ads made up using the phrase, “Boss Radio.” Jacobs didn’t like it. Neither did I. I finally said okay because KYA was “The Boss of The Bay” when I was in San Francisco. However, I didn’t come up with it at KYA. They were “Boss of The Bay” before I got there.

Ron Jacobs: Clancy Imislund realized that something was going to happen because Steve Allen and Michael Jackson, the talk-show Michael Jackson, were being dumped. There was a definite vibe of change from what I heard later. Imislund started to put things together that would be ready for whomever was going to be arriving to do rock ’n’ roll. When I went up to meet him for the first time, he had these layouts of newspaper ads, very tasty ones, and the featured phrase was “Boss Radio 93 KHJ.” One of them showed the empty Hollywood Bowl with just a pair of kids sitting up near the back row sharing a transistor radio.

Ken DeVaney (Email dated February 18, 2002): For what it’s worth, it was I who initiated the name “Boss Radio,” the slogan that is now indelibly etched in the history of radio itself. In May 1990 the 25^th anniversary of Boss Radio generated a staff reunion. The event marked a sense of renewed nostalgia and history of the early, frantic days of the new KHJ format that debuted a quarter century before. At the time, Clancy Imislund was “officially” credited with coming up with the Boss Radio slogan. Well, for all of his considerable gifts, he did not coin that term — because he had no basis upon which to do it.

With my wife’s disability we had a great number of teenage mother’s helpers in and out of our home in the San Fernando Valley at the same time we were pulling together KHJ. I noticed that these girls, in the slang of the day, constantly used the term “boss” when referring to someone or something that was superior in all respects.

Before “Boss Radio” made its debut I was at one of our brainstorming sessions on Melrose awaiting the official signing of Drake-Chenault, and shortly thereafter, the hiring of Jacobs. I told the group of my experiences in a house full of teenagers day and night. The next thing I knew Clancy was developing ads based on a “boss” theme. Now, you may believe that or not, but that is the way of it.

Bob Shannon: Initially, Jacobs wanted to change KHJ’s call letters. Too much baggage, he thought, and he wasn’t even a little impressed that they originally stood for “Kindness, Happiness and Joy.” His stations had names you could get your arms around. K-POI (rhymes with ‘hey boy’), K-MEN (the deejays “K-mentioned” things), K-MAK (“K-making the hits in Fresno”). Easy to say, easy to remember. You get the drift. Jacobs was animated, going a million miles an hour trying to convince Bill Drake and Gene Chenault, who were trying to keep up. “We’ve gotta get rid of these call letters,” said Jacobs. Silence. Drake and Chenault glanced at each other. Then, very quietly, Drake said, “Ron, you can do almost anything you want. But trust me, you’ll never get RKO to change them. Never.”

Ron Jacobs: Well, we couldn’t play with the call letters in L.A. On the one hand, KHJ had huge recognition because three call-letter stations were around since 1922, the beginning of commercial radio in the United States. But KHJ had all this — not so much negativity but ambivalence — lack of constant identity. They just changed formats too many times. I couldn’t come up with something. And there was a lot of heat on to get copy locked in for ads in the L.A. Times.

Our first ad was all the original jocks standing behind an elephant. Colonel Parker always said, “You can always count on elephants or midgets to draw a crowd.” Another thing we had to do was to get with Johnny Mann and make jingles. I had to give John something, some words. I was desperate. Imislund, because of his hard work and our deadline, was the person who pushed the “Boss Radio” slogan. I couldn’t top it even though I thought it was passé. And I really didn’t want it. The worst thing to have with the kids, and that’s certainly how we defined the audience in those days, is something that’s already burned out, you know. But we always played around with call letters like at KMAK in Fresno, the disc jockeys were called the “K-makers.” I wanted something that we could apply to the deejays collectively. KFWB had a good one when they were cooking.

Chuck Blore: KFWB’s original jocks had a collective name that was born when we wrote a jingle calling them “The Seven Swinging Gentlemen.” That never really stuck, but a couple of years into it I did some traffic-safety bits, where a little girl (Don MacKinnon’s daughter) questioned the jocks about traffic safety and, of course, they always gave the right answers. So she proclaimed, “By the power invested in me, I declare you to be — one of them KFWB Good Guys.” That one stuck!

Ron Jacobs: The term “Boss Jocks” came up in the first meeting about call letters with Drake and Chenault. I said, “Well, if we do go with Boss we can call the guys Boss Jocks — or B.J.s.” And Chenault freaked. He got all embarrassed and asked, “Won’t people think we mean blow jobs?”

Robert W. Morgan (Email to Ron Jacobs, August 17, 1997): As I’m typing this there’s a Jack in the Box spot on TV using the phrase, “Man, that’s boss!” We’ll never live it down.

Ron Jacobs: The phrase, “Boss Angeles,” originated several weeks after we were on the air. I was standing in the booth and Dave Diamond was on one night when he said, “The time is such and such in Los Angeles.” Wow! The light bulb went on and I thought to myself, schmuck, you know this isn’t Los Angeles, this is Boss Angeles. And that’s how that happened. As it turned out, it worked out pretty good.

Ken DeVaney: As to my contribution to KHJ, I like to think that because there was very little interference from RKO in New York, I was in a position to loosen the purse strings and spend money like crazy to operate our promotion like a Barnum & Bailey Circus. Like Jacobs, who actually knew the man, I was a great admirer of Colonel Tom Parker.

I suggested and authorized the budget to tow KHJ banners over Southern California beaches and turn loose sky writers promoting the arrival of Boss Radio. The resident promotion manager, Clancy Imislund came up with the plan to buy up every “seven-sheet” billboard in the Los Angeles Megalopolis for Boss Radio’s debut month.

This floored Jacobs, not just because the size of the ad budgets but because billboards were illegal in his home state of Hawaii. When the broadsides appeared in early May of 1965, the two of us spent two days “riding the route,” verifying the presence of every billboard. The message jumped out because of its simple design, “93/KHJ, Boss Radio” in electric Day-Glow colors against a black background. But they were everywhere.

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DETAILS: http://www.93khj.com/

KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 11

Gary Mack: As the rest of the crew was hired -- Robert W. Morgan, Roger Christian, The Real Don Steele, Dave Diamond, Sam Riddle and Johnny Williams-- we set about the business of getting organized. Ron Jacobs was brought in as Program Director -- the best I’ve ever met.

Charlie Tuna: The Real Don Steele was the rock star leader of the Boss Jocks. Very mysterious, said very little off the air, but when he did, people listened. Sam Riddle was the businessman, always had a million outside deals going on in addition to his KHJ-TV show. It all paid off down the road; one of Sam’s productions was “Star Search” with Ed McMahon. Johnny Williams was the perfect all-night man, soothing voice, relaxed presentation and always right there with the quips and perfect feel for the format. No one could sound like he was having a ball during the really slow and lonely times any more than Williams.

Sam Riddle: When the time came to get ready for the new Boss format, I’ll never forget practicing on KHJ-FM so no one would hear me. Ron Jacobs said, “OK, you’ve got seven seconds to say what you used to say on KFWB and KRLA in forty-five seconds.” We had an engineer running the board. Dexter Young was my engineer and he took care of me. I thought: that’s fantastic. I’ll have more time to be on the phone to book Bobby Sherman concerts.

Gary Mack: It was grueling. Jacobs and Drake stood in the control room with an engineer while the future Boss Jocks practiced this new format. Every word and every nuance was critiqued on the fly. “More up! More energy! End up! Faster!” I remember the distinct odor of flop sweat. But every day got better, and we made our mistakes off the air.

Claude Hall: Bill Drake assembled a good staff. One of the smartest things he did was hire Ron Jacobs because Jacobs was a very, very hard-working guy. He’s extremely bright. Drake may not be that bright, but he thinks. He just sits back and thinks a lot. His major role, I think, in RKO during his time as consultant, was a thinker -- as a brain to figure things out. A lot of people think Drake invented the tight play list, that he invented this and invented that. He didn’t. But like a genius and the role of a genius takes in many different facets what he was able to do was synthesize. Einstein didn’t “invent” E=mc², he synthesized it. And this is what Drake did with Top 40 radio.

Ron Jacobs: When I got to KHJ I felt a rapport with Bill Mouzis. He was a pro who sensed what we would be doing in production, which was totally different from KHJ’s old-school sound. I asked Chief Engineer Ed Dela Pena if he could assign Mouzis to production. It was Mouzis who did all of the tedious razor splices. Mouzis sat there unconcerned when Morgan and I got into one of our screaming sessions about how he was ruining my copy — or how I was writing crap that a cave man couldn’t work with. Both of us running back to the “production library,” which was, at best, maybe 30 movie sound-track albums in a room where it was legal for us to touch turntables and argue some more. Morgan and I started our love/hate relationship in Fresno in 1962 and each of us knew that the other would be looking for any reason to provoke a confrontation. That was wonderful fun. It made us feel like we were “creative.” After a while, we were bringing in tons of money for RKO, more even than the mighty Channel 9. We could carry on, bellowing and slamming around and the suits just had to put up with it. (Laughs.)

Carol Morgan: I remember how important it was to Robert; he wanted Ron Jacobs there. He also got them to hire Don Steele. There weren’t too many people in radio that he really connected with. He loved people who were really bright and quick. Ron fulfilled something for him that he and I had always had between us up to that point.

Dexter Young: I worked mainly with Sam Riddle. I used to see Sam in the hallways. He was doing his TV show on Channel 9, KHJ-TV, but working for our competitor, KFWB, as a disc jockey. I used to ask Sam, “Since you have your TV show here, why don’t you have your radio show here too?” There had been a rumor that he was coming to KHJ and he finally did come with us. He and I became very good friends while working together. My wife and I were invited to his wedding.

Ron Jacobs: Roger Christian was known in the market. He was even very big at KFWB. Roger gave us a degree of instant credibility, as did Sam Riddle. Roger had a name in Southern California because of his association with The Beach Boys. He was very helpful in getting us established in the record industry. Even though Drake and I had done well in other markets, there’s an L.A. snob thing. Ironic, since most of the record dudes were from somewhere else originally. Roger contributed something neat right at the beginning. For some reason I could hear “Little Deuce Coupe” by The Beach Boys as a tune that could be used for a KHJ promo, sort of a long, produced jingle. Thanks to Roger, we got permission from Brian Wilson to use the instrumental track. I banged out some words. The thing was a grabber. Who hadn’t heard the song?

Ron Jacobs: Since the jocks couldn’t sing — HA! — we wrote the thing so that they could sort of talk in rhythm. Like:

"I’m Robert W. Morgan and I’ll be startin’ your day,

Six ’til nine every mornin’ on the new KHJ ..."

Then Roger brought in some real singers to do it and they may as well have been the Beach Boys because these guys sounded just like them. They were Bruce Johnston and Terry Melcher. They performed as The Rip Chords and as Bruce & Terry. Melcher produced The Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders, and other artists. And Bruce Johnston joined the Beach Boys on the road. They sang the chorus:

"It’s the new KHJ, You don’t know what we’ve got.

While Los Angeles goes, now, It goes all the way.

And we know that you’ll go for the new KHJ.

It’s the sound of success, Boss Radio, in L.A.– KHJ.

It’s the new KHJ, And here’s what we got."

And the other jocks would come in:

"My name is Roger Christian, You’ve an invitation

To join me nine ’til noon for some rockin’ relaxation."

"And every day at noon, you’ll hear me, Gary Mack.

Remember that name: Mack, Mack, Mack"

"In the afternoon, bab, Accept no substitution:

Get the Real Don Steele -- And wipe out air pollution."

"When the workin’ day is done and you point your car towards home,

Just dial Dave Diamond, and you’ll never be alone."

"From Hollywood A-Go-Go ’til twelve o’clock at night,

Sam Riddle is the man to make your day end right."

"If you listen late at night ’til the morning shadows creep

A guy named Johnny Williams might be talkin’ in your sleep."

Ron Jacobs: Lemme tell you, when this started blasting out of moldy old KHJ, people really took notice. Starting with this little promo, I discovered that being the #1 station in Los Angeles you could ask for and get just about any goodie you could imagine. I mean the key word really is “imagine.” Another station could have set up that jingle with Roger but no one thought to. When I pulled that off in 24 hours, the jocks, who never worked with me like Morgan had in Fresno, began to respect me a bit. And as to the air sound, between Roger and Gary Mack you had a nice midday thing. (And how cool was it to collaborate on a song wth Brian Wilson and Roger Christian? I began to occur to me that we really had made it in Hollywood.

KHJ: INSIDE BOSS RADIO ~ Part 10

The Rock ’n’ Roll Boys

Ed Dela Pena: Before Bill Drake and the boys came in we had ‘talk’ radio, the announcer Michael Jackson, and all sorts of other things mixed with Lakers ga

mes. When the Lakers moved out here to Boss Angeles we had a broadcas

t exclusive to air Lakers game

s on

KHJ and KHJ-TV play --

starring the "beyond-the best" sports announcer, Chick Hearn

. We even had a lady that did a home economics show. Anyway, it was a mishmash and a complete fiasco

in the That was before w

e moved back to Melrose in 1961. We started a rock ’n’ roll thing with Wink Martindale over at the 1313 North Vine studios and it sort of went along there for awhile. It did pretty good in the ratings. In fact we were pushing KFWB for #1 when KHJ went back to

Melrose. At that time, the thing sort of fell apart and they went back to a mishmash.

Bi

ill Mouzis: I was trying to think if we had

any other well-known jocks beside Martindale. I’m sure we did, but none with The Winker's Hollywood renown, respectability and rockin' reputation. But, that didn’t last very long, because the payola scandal hit. RKO General

panicked, they pulled out of it. I think we went to “The All News Station.” Just prior to Boss Radio coming on the scene they were right in the midst of planning for “The Entertainme

nt Station.” That was going to be the next format. They had already talked to Gypsy Rose Lee, she was getting ready to sign a

contract. They were lining up other talent. I was the engineer for The Steve Allen Show out of his house right here in the San Fernando Valley.

Betty Breneman: I had worked at KHJ as music librarian since 1959 when ouroldie feature was called “Great in ’58” — how creative! Many formats had come and gone.

In April 1965 the PD, Don Otis, called me into his office, few feet from the sidewalk, right off the lobby. Otis said that he would be leaving in a month or so. The small room later became Ron Jacobs office, except that Otis kept it much neater, by the way. There was never anything on his desk besides the obligatory phone, intercom and desk calendar. Oh yes, there was always a pen to the right of the middle of the desk slanted at the precise angle ready to be picked up.

There were none of the stacks of papers, calendars, charts, colored marking pens, records, photos, L.A. Rams stuff, kilos of "Gold

Presentation Records," etc., etc., etc., that were to become part of the landscape of that office when Ron took over as PD. And believe me, things changed and happened much faster.

Dave Diamond: When I got to KHJ it should have been a signal to them that times were changing and the rock ’n’ roll boys were going to take over. I think Steve Allen resented us. I always respected him and thought he was a

great talent but times move and things change. There were some other big stars on the station. All I knew is we were going rock and Drake had the support of RKO and had not yet hired all the staff. The former on-air staff and all the network shit were dropped. Gary Mack, Steele and Morgan had been hired. Sam Riddle was on board, Roger Christian, then, Johnny Williams. Frank Terry came on last as I recall.

Betty Breneman: Don Otis called me in to introduce me to, “This young man, Bill Drake, who will be helping out with some new programming around here. You’ll be working with him on the music.” Shortly after that, of course, the whirlwind started. Construction people showed up in my library to divide it in two to accommodate an of

fice for Bill Drake. Bill then introduced me to Bernie Torres, who he referred to as “my assistant.” Bernie called himself “Bill’s right-hand man.” I was encouraged by Bill to get acquainted with Bernie because we’d be working together. Sometime during our initial conversation, Bernie told me that when he tells me something it’s the same as Bill telling me. And I thought these guys were pretty bossy coming in to my music library, taking my space and telling me what to do.

Bernie gave me a list of office supplies he’d need and asked me to get them. I had worked at KHJ for six years – and that wasn’t the best way to endear himself to this stubborn, possessive Italian lady! I informed him of the company’s procedure to acquire those supplies and said he could do it himself. It’s a wonder I lasted through those first couple of weeks. Mind you, I really was not privy to the mystery unfolding there. After a rocky start, though, we did work together smoothly.

Bill Drake: I knew that Betty Breneman should be on the team right away. She had been at KHJ for six years. She had been through the horrors of hell like with Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows on the air. They had Michael Jackson, the talk-show guy. Betty knew everyone in the L.A. music scene and was well respected. She knew the town and knew the station and she impressed me as being very knowledgeable and willing and open-minded. And in talking to her, she was very receptive. You’d talk to Betty and she’d say, “I can do that.” She was also a nice lady. And while she was going through some of that early crazy stuff, she was two months pregnant.

Gary Mack: At the time, Steve Allen and his wife Jayne hosted the morning show from a studio in their home. Robert Q. Lewis did the afternoon-drive show. They were phased out, and the “no-name announcers” were phased in. During our air shifts, we play

ed a lot of Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, and tried to sound like mellow staff announcers. But as soon as our air shift ended, we

headed to a production room where the real work was taking place — the new Boss Radio format was

in rehearsal.

Bill Drake: In 1964 I hired Gary Mack out of Texas for KYNO in Fresno. He was a very good guy but it didn’t really work out. Whatever it was, there was no animosity. I realized that he knew a lot about what I did and he was down in L.A. doing something at KRLA. He seemed to have gotten more logic to his thinking.

Gary Mack: By 1965, I was working at KRLA in Pasadena when Bill Drake called, and he wanted to get together. The prior year, I had briefly been Bill’s Program Director at KYNO in F

resno. We met at Martoni’s and while sitting at the bar, Bill told me that he and Gene Chenault were going to be consulting RKO General’s KHJ and he wondered whether or not I’d be interested in working there. He had me when he first said “hello.” I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just become the first Boss Jock. I was a Boss Jock and I wasn’t even sure what it was. I spent two years on the air at KHJ. At one point or another — Ron Jacobs can corroborate this — I had a 28.6 share. Numbers that we have never seen since. That station was truly, truly powerful.

Casey Kasem: While I rarely listened to KHJ and their t

errific staff of disc jockeys, I knew that they were going to be #1. You see, at one of our KRLA staff meetings, fellow deejay Bob Eubanks, who owned the Cinnamon Cinder Teen Night Clubs, told us that he was hearing from the kids that they were tuning in to KHJ — and he warned us that the next ratings book would reflect that. Sure enough when the ratings were published, KHJ was Number One.

Mitch Fisher: In April 1965, I got a call from Ron Jacobs, who had just been sprung from the Honolulu hoosegow. He was in Halawa Jail for 30 days for

some trumped-up setup involving his being rousted at the airport on his return from Hong Kong for possession of three milligrams of marijuana. After a year in Hong Kong and a month in the slammer, Jacobs, his first wife, and a Kowloon alley cat left his hometown within 24 hours of his release and returned to the West Coast. They camped in a cheap motel near the L.A. International Airport. Jacobs was feeling deflated after his recent experiences. I had read in the trades that Jacobs’ Fresno competitor and nemesis, Bill Drake, was getting ready to program KHJ.

I browbeat Jacobs to call Drake. I insisted that the two of th

em would make a great team. Jacobs was stubborn and afraid of rejection. His self-esteem was in the gutter. He finally gave in and called Drake, convinced that his call would be refused. The opposite happened. A quick meeting was set up with Drake and his partner, Gene Chenault. Robert W. Morgan picked up Jacobs and drove through a rare Los Angeles rainstorm and dropped him at a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard. And the rest is Rock and Roll Radio History.

Bill Drake: Gary Mack was the one who explained to Ron Jacobs what we were planning the first night Jacobs came aboard. We were all together for the first time and I remember I was pacing back and forth and Gary’s talking and Jacobs and I were thinking that if anybody had told us a year before that he and I would be pacing back and forth up there — well, that was a weird thing.

Robert W. Morgan: I sat outside in my Volkswagen for three hours with the car parked in an emergency area because I didn’t have enough gas to drive around the block. Jacobs walked into the restaurant as my friend and came out as my boss.

Ron Jacobs: When this whole hiring ordeal was through, I called Morgan at two in the morning or something. We’re both, “Right on, man!” because now we f

igured, you know, Morgan and I had fantasized about this very specific thing back in Fresno. I couldn’t have picked anyone better to tackle L.A. radio with and I think he felt the same way about me.

So Morgan and I did a middle of the night prowl of the building at 5515 Melrose. We conned our way past the guard, which was no small task bec

ause we were young guys in a beat-up Volkswagen. And we just wandered around this huge place. The station where we worked together in Fresno was like twice the size of a garage. We were blown away by this place that seemed like the fucking Pentagon. We’d never even heard the idea of an engineer spinning records in another room. But this was the Big Time in every sense. We were like kids in a candy shop. It was just the best.

The next time I had to go in there and be cool about it, not all ga-ga and giddy like when I had been sneaking around with Morgan. I pulled up to the gate in my new Cad

illac convertible. The uniformed guard welcomed me. “Good morning sir, go right ahead.” And I’m in. Within a couple of days they had my name painted on the parking space — and the spaces back there were both prestigious and precious. Most employees had to park a block or more away from the building. I didn’t know where I was going so I wandered into a TV studio and remembered not to walk in front of a camera. I sort of worked my way backwards into the offices. From that point on Drake rarely came in the building. If Drake decided to come down from the mountain and we had to talk in person, it would be next door

at Nickodell’s.

Bill Drake: I think one of the things I really loved about Jacobs was that he was always more inventive and brighter than I was with ideas. I would take the simplistic approach and say, “Wait a minute, the listener ain’t going to get it.” And the good thing was that I could take these sometimes bizarre ideas and break them down to where the guy working at the service station or McDonald’s or whatever could dig it. I remember I used to say, “This is not a radio man’s radio.”

Ron Jacobs: (To Drake) The best thing you and I had going was that I’m too far out and you wanted to take it back out to the place where we met in the middle.

Bill Drake: (To Jacobs) That’s why it worked.

Ron Jacobs: Like, the music that you were listening to at ho

me was different from the music that I was listening to at home. You really liked Tom Jones, the Supremes, Motown. I’m up in Laurel Canyon listening to Miles Davis, right? But that had nothing to do with work.

Bill Drake: Well, I realized we couldn’t make a living on KHJ with Miles Davis. (Laughs.)

Frank Terry: That’s one thing that no one ever writes abou

t Jacobs. He was a tremendous jazz aficionado. Ron had an ear for jazz. And I thought I knew something about jazz, that’s what I kinda grew up on, but he turned me on to a lot of really cool jazz albums. During the years that we knew each other and worked together, here we would be — it was kind of funny — we would be working at these radio stations playing this teenybopper bubblegum stuff and going home and listening to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and Oscar Peterson.

Jim Mitchell: It was mighty peculiar to walk into 5515 Melrose and see Jacobs in a suit, button-down shirt, and tie. This was a guy I never saw in long pants or shoes at KP

OI, a guy who appeared in Newsweek magazine wearing a muumuu. But, everything else was exactly as I remembered from the other stations: Astonishing intensity, relentless in trying to make every second perfect, almost giddy delight at doing something really, really well, intimidating rage when we screwed up. The rage never lasted, though. We started the next day fresh. Some people never got that part, so they thought he was a dangerous maniac.

Ron Jacobs: When we came together at KHJ, we, meaning the group that was going to later be known as the Boss Radio crew, were not treated warmly. There were so

many different formats in and out of there. It was like everybody was asking, “How long are these guys going to last?” The big power in the building was KHJ-TV, Channel 9. They were the strongest independent station in L.A. and they had the “Million Dollar Movie.” People were taking bets on how long we’d last. Plus the fact that we were young compared with the people who worked there and some of the guys had long hair.

Dave Diamond: It all started for me with my being hired by Drake in 1965. The first day I spent with Drake was my introduction to his philosophy and personality. That’s the day I got hired for $15,000, which was AFTRA union scale, same as everyone else. I was making $30,000 in Denver doing an afternoon TV show and a night radio show. But who in their right mind wouldn’t make that trade? I showed up in February, stayed at a motel on Vine Street, just down from the Hollywood Ranch Market, later moving to a pad on Tamarind, a few blocks from KHJ, up around Gower and Sunset.

Sam Riddle: I’d been in Los Angeles since 1960. I was at KRLA for four years and KFWB for two years. In the last six months, ’WB change

d the jingle to “KFWB Dial 98” because they knew they were losing it; Bill Drake was coming to town. I was so happy when Bill Drake called me and asked if I would like to come over to KHJ. I had a television show at the time on Channel 9, KHJ-TV, for two years called “Ninth Street West.” And I said yeah, it would be easier to walk down the hall to the radio station than to go back over to Aldo’s Restaurant across from KFWB.

I remember, before we ever went on the air, we were AM and FM. I mean that’s years ago and to tell you how times have changed — like when Drake gave the logos — he would say “Ladies and Gentlemen, you’re listening to AM (emphas

is) and FM (de-emphasis).”

Robert W. Morgan: Hey. I voiced the original IDs, not Drake. As I recall, they ran beyond the sneak preview and into the real Boss thing. When he did get around to cutting them Drake copied my inflection, “AM and FM” which I hated at the time — both mine AND his.

Johnny Williams: A convoluted thing got me the PD p

osition at KCBQ in San Diego in 1965 which, as it turned out, was just bullshit! I’m in San Diego and things are going very poorly at this radio station. Then suddenly I’m meeting Bill Drake. He was at KGB. He was planning KHJ at the time. I really loved the way KGB sounded. I’d never heard anything like it. I was really impressed with their a

cappella jingle — it just knocked me out. I got in touch with Drake and we wound up meeting and going out to dinner there in San Diego.

I didn't have a clue that Drake was was thinking about

me for KHJ. We just talked for hours about radio: Old School, not having any job (or appointmemtoffer or anythinlg

ob offer or anything. I didn’t hear from him again for several weeks. In the meantime I got a part-time job up at KRLA-Pasadena and moved the family up to L.A.

Bill Drake: You know, I really don’t remember if Johnny was at KRLA full time or not. Maybe Gary Mack told me he was there. I really can’t

remember, but we sure lucked out on him because he was the perfect guy for all-night and did that six hours a night for how many years?

Ron Jacobs: Johnny

Williams was the very best all-night j0ck of the many that I work with. We has just met for the first time just a few days earliear but we were on Page One

from the first s dialog, took place at a funked out, old "Plate Lunch Joint:, none of them authenic Meanwhile while I’m on weekends at KRLA thinking I’ve died and gone to heaven. I’m on the air in L.A. doing a Saturday night shift and, I think, there was a Sunday night shift too. I only did that one weekend, possibly two, when Drake called and said, “We’re setting up a radio station across town and I want to talk to you.”

So I

went to talk to him. I was just blown away! First of all he was offering $15,000 a year. I had never heard of that kind of money. That was so much money I couldn’t believe it.

Ron Jacobs: I was hired at $15,000, which was for a year. An

d perks? How cool to have a hot Mobile Phone, all maxed out in high total gloss black, with Old School black Caddy Coupe DeVille Turtle Waxed to the max.

We all in the KHJ Program Department (72 men and about a dozen wahine reported to me, the 26-year-old PD -- but I only knew about 0.063% of all I was supposed to know. The KHJ's 1955 Official NBC Operation & Policy Standard Manual was bigger then the tiny Moloka'i phone book.

Casey Kasem: Ron Jacobs and I became friends when he had asked to have a meeting concerning the possibility of my moving from KRLA to KHJ. As a matter of fact I think there were two or three meetings. We had a mutual respect for one another’s talent and hit it off. The only reason I didn’t go to KHJ was because the money I was asking for was much more than the salaries of the KHJ air staff — at the time I was enjoying success and making big money with my daily TV show and weekly dances. Ron couldn’t risk doing anything that might disrupt the great morale at KHJ or upset the DJs who were responsible for making his station #1. A few short years later, I called Ron and asked him if he would be interested in producing a countdown show, the Top 40 Hits in America. His immediate reply was, “Sounds great! Let’s get together and do it!” And with our associates, we did. And I’ve been counting down the hits ever since.