Zenith City: Stories from Duluth

Radio Days

i recall listening with my mother to morning breakfast programs before I was old enough for school. There was Breakfast in Hollywood, with Tom Breneman, whose shtick was prowling the audience and trying on ladies’ hats, to the great amusement of his studio audience and astoundingly to the radio listeners who could only imagine the portly gentleman donning women’s hats. Mother always laughed when Breneman would say something like, “Well, ladies, how about this one?” Mother once told me that Breneman was fat, and four-year-old I rejoined, “He doesn’t sound fat.” The other morning program we listened to was Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, out of Chicago. Its opening theme song still resonates nearly seventy years later: “Good morning breakfast clubbers, good morning to ya . . .” Floyd Holm, brother of Mother’s friend Elizabeth Holm, sang with the Escorts and Betty on that program, along with two other Duluth natives, Ted Clare and Cliff Petersen, with whom Mother went to Central High School. Petersen eventually became producer of The Breakfast Club and sometimes appeared on the show as a rustic with a heavy Swedish accent. His son Tommy occasionally lived in Duluth with his grandparents and attended Grant Elementary School for a while. He was in my sixth-grade class. Mother and I also listened to her favorite soap operas: Old Ma Perkins, One Man’s Family, Stella Dallas, and Mary Noble, Backstage Wife are the ones I best remember. I was, of course, much enamored of children’s adventure programs like The Lone Ranger, Sky King, Jack Armstrong, and The Green Hornet. Later on I almost never missed the Saturday morning show There’s No School Today with Big John and his elf partner, Sparky. radio days 106 Radio Days | 107 By the time I was in the ninth grade at Washington Junior High School, I’d begun listening to Bob and Ray on KDAL and loved their satires of boys’ adventure shows and soap opera spoofs like “Jack Headstrong: All American American,” “Matt Neffer, Boy Spot Welder,” “The Lives and Loves of Linda Lovely,” and “One Fella’s Family,” as well as their man-on-the-street interviews conducted by roving reporter Wally Ballou. “The highly regarded Wally Ballou,” winner of sixteen diction awards, was performed by Bob Elliott. My delight with the work of Elliott and Ray Goulding continues to this day; I frequently listen to my four-CD set of some of their finest skits. Over the years, Bob and Ray sometimes worked in persons of local renown, most notably Odin Ramsland, who was for many years the general manager of KDAL. His name might appear in a Wally Ballou interview. These pieces were gentle satire except for the time in the late s when Ramsland pulled the plug on the CBS feed of Bob and Ray. Rock-and-roll music was rapidly ascending, and teens and the younger demographic had become the sought-after radio market. Bob and Ray were broadcast at : p.m. on weekdays, about the time teens were getting home from school. Another Duluth station, WEBC, featured a Top  format and dominated afternoon ratings. Sadly, Bob and Ray were off the radar, and Ramsland wanted to compete with WEBC, so he notified CBS that he’d be dropping the award-winning and highly regarded comics. On the last program that would air in Duluth, Wally Ballou picked out some yokel for an interview. The interviewee was quite a dullard, unable to answer questions coherently. At the conclusion of the bit, Ballou said something like, “Thank you for talking with me today, sir, and if you would please tell us your name and where you’re from.” The response was, “I’m Odin Ramsland from Duluth, Minnesota.” Though I wasn’t there, I was told by friends who worked at KDAL that upon hearing Ramsland’s name, the station’s premises erupted with raucous laughter, and the announcer in the booth, who was supposed to give the station break ID, time, and temperature, sniggered all the way through the announcement. 108 | Radio Days during the late s I was contemplating a career in radio, and as a freshman at the University of Minnesota–Duluth I auditioned for a spot on the staff of the student-run, low-wattage AM station, KUMD. Although I landed a position, I never quite distinguished myself until decades later when I...