Calling Art: The Birth of the Late-Night Dedication

We’re going back, way back, back before it all started, before nearly anyone but the skinny old man with the silver-toned voice can remember. Back to 1943: Treasure Island, San Francisco. The war was on, and this scrawny eighteen-year-old kid named Art Laboe stepped into his first radio station, asking for a job. He remembers the manager—a big, burly guy. Art was eighteen, five foot two inches, 111 pounds, a slice of nothing. “Maybe I can get a job here?” is what he asked the manager, and when he says this now, imitating what he sounded like then, he makes his voice high and adolescent, cracking a bit. “No, no, no,” he replies to himself—doing the manager now, voice going low, almost growling. “You don’t have the voice for it.” A quick smile, because we know how that turned out, then: “You’re too young. I don’t know why she let you in here. We don’t have anything for you.” Art tells how he started shuffling toward the door, but the manager wasn’t done with him yet and barked out, “One more thing: If you want to be on the radio, on this station, you have to have a third-class FCC license.” Well, Art had a first-class license. He was studying radio engineering at Stanford and said so. “Come back here!” The manager again, that growl. Art leans back, sighing a little with the effort as he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet, then a card, which he lays on the table, pointing. “That card,” he says now, still growling, still the manager on Treasure Island in 1943. “You see? All my engineers have been drafted. I shouldn’t be on air. Now, with you, with that card, that card makes me legal.” I look down at the card he’s pointing to and see that it is, indeed, a radio license, updated, a long string of zeros preceding his license number.

He describes how the manager took him back to where the transmitters were and asked if he knew how to tune them, the big hulking refrigerator-looking things with all sorts of wires coming out (yes, yes he did); how he looked up and saw a sign on the wall, tacked there and written out on butcher paper: if the damn thing works leave it alone. They shook hands, the manager and Art, and from that moment on, for more than seventy years, he’s been in the radio business.

Only at first it was behind the scenes, working as a station mechanic. He wanted to be on air. So between the church programs, the vitamin programs, the chunks of time bought up in fifteen-minute slots, Art came on to announce what was up next. The station signed off at midnight, but by eleven o’clock no one was buying any air time. That left a whole hour to fill with whatever he wanted. He wanted to fill it with music, mostly. The big-band stuff. Swing and jazz. But that got dull all on its own. So Art thought, Maybe I’ll get some phone calls. And he gave out his number.

The only problem was that when people called in—and they sure enough did—how could they be heard? There wasn’t the technology to hook a phone into the board, or even project a call through a speaker to pick it up on the mic. What came next came naturally. Art would repeat the conversation to everyone else,

into the microphone. “I’ve got someone on the telephone here,” he’d begin. “Who’ve I got on the phone? Merle. Well, I’ve got Merle on the phone. She says she’s glad she’s listening. Oh? She wants to hear the Benny Goodman Trio. Well, thank you, Merle. We’re going to play the...