From The Vault : Pardon My Blooper - The Kenner Star from 1998 & 2010

   Turn on a TV set any day this week and you’ll hear  words we couldn’t say on the air when I was starting out in broadcasting. Cable TV notwithstanding, it seems any show that wants to stay on the air has to have a few of “h” and “d” words. But now the dreaded “a” word has crept into nightly prime time television,  along with a couple of “b” words. In the old days, the only way those words got on the air was accidentally,  in “live” shows. We called them Bloopers.
    The blooper is to broadcasting what the “typo” is to the print media. The most famous newspaper blooper, you might be interested to know,  involved a social event in Washington: 
           “(male celebrity) arrived at the White House around 7:30 and entered Mrs. Roosevelt for the rest of the evening.” (For the slower ones reading this,  the word was supposed to be “entertained.”)
    I was guilty of a few bloopers of my own. My most embarrassing was in the early 60s in Syracuse, New York when, as a brand new radio anchorman at WOLF,  I introduced a taped report from Dan Daniels in Albany. I started the tape but no sound came out. The DJ, Jim Sims,  had not turned on the audio line for the newsroom tape deck.  Still trying to figure out what the technical problem was, and being extremely nervous and frustrated, I took the name of the Almighty in vain -- on the air.  When I realized what I had done, I waited for the angry phone calls from listeners. Nothing.  But I knew I had done it, and was waiting to be fired.  A few minutes later my news director waltzed into the newsroom and said, “Hey Ed, next time you swear, turn off your mike.”
    As I recall, Mr. Sims was an integral part of another classic blooper  I wish had been preserved for posterity. It was one of the first “Oldies” weekends heard in America. Jim was playing a song by Nervous Norvis, called “Transfusion.” I banged on the glass window separating the newsroom from Jim’s studio and signaled I had an urgent bulletin to get on the air.  Jim stopped the record and put me on the air, whereupon I informed the citizenry that “Pope John the 23rd has died in Rome after his long illness. Vatican officials said  the Pope never recovered from the coma he entered several weeks ago. Repeating - Pope John the 23rd is dead.”   Jim thought quickly and realized he cold not go back into “Transfusion,” so he started the record he had cued up on the other turntable: “Torture” by Kris Jensen.
    Also at WOLF, one of our young announcers  gave us the late breaking news that “the Soviet Union fired off another interconontinentalneetle  missile today.”
    In the 1950's a man named Kermit Schaefer produced a series of records called “Pardon My Blooper.” While the content of the records was probably legitimate, Schaefer had to resort to “re-creating” most of the broadcasts, because either no one was running a tape in those days, or he could not get  permission to use the segment. While some of the bloops are not fit for the sensitive ears (or eyes) of the family readers of these pages, many of the good ones were not scatological at all. Well, not very.
    A typical example of a “fluff” in the good old days of “live radio” is when a news anchor informed us that “ Buckingham Palace today announced the marriage of the Duck and Doochess of Windsor.”
    “You’ve just heard the front side of Doris Day’s latest hit, “Secret Love.” Let’s take a look at her backside.”
    “Recrapping today’s top stories...”
    “Senator Bensten said he got the story from a White Horse Souse.”
    “State Police said the fog was a thick as sea poop.”
    “That’s the news, and remember, for the breast in bed, try Sunbeam.”
    “Tonight’s news brought to you by Iowa Gas Service Company. Remember,
90 per cent of Iowans have gas.”
    “The news is brought to you by your   A and Poo feed store.”
    “He’s at the 40, the 45,  the 50, the 55....”
    “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States, HOOBERT HEEVER.”
     “This is the National Broadcorping Castration”     
Another re-creation on a Shafer album depicted an indicent that reportedly caused the near ruination of a broadcasting career. It supposedly took place in the 1930's on the “Uncle Don” (Carney) kiddies show. At the end of his Saturday morning program he is alleged to have said good-bye to the kids and then came out with , “There, that ought to hold the little b______s for a while.”  Since his mike was still on, the whole nation supposedly heard him and switchboards across the country were flooded. Kermit Shafer put it on his record album, using an actor, but did it really happen? Snopes.com says it did not:
     The only articles linking the name of Uncle Don with the tale did not report it as recent news, but merely recounted the incident years later as an occurrence that took place at some indeterminate time in the past...
    ...As veteran radio writer Bill Treadwell offers in the chapter he devotes to this story in his biography of Don Carney, "If Don had really said this, he would surely have been removed from the air (which he definitely wasn't”...
    ...The whole thing might have died down after Don Carney's death...were it not for a series of popular (Kermit Shafer)Blooper records that rekindled public awareness of the legend...
    Uncle Don may not have lost his job over this, but he did have to spend the rest of his life denying it ever happened. There were so many “Uncles” on the radio in the Thirties and Forties that it could have been any one of them. My guess is that it happened to one of them. I’ve been in radio long enough to know that these things happen, and sometimes they happened to me as evidenced by the words of my news director: "Hey Ed, next time you swear, turn off your mike."