In 1963 I was news director of WOLF Radio in Syracuse, New York. Five bells clanged on the UPI wire service machine. I knew that was a bulletin. Before I could get to the machine, another WOLF employee called and told me that shots had been fired in Dallas according to ABC Radio. I didn't know it but I was about to almost lose it when I had to tell my listeners that the President of the United States was dead. This is a 25 minute timeline of the events of November 22, 1963 through November 24th, the day the president was buried in Arlington, Cemetery. Much of what you will hear was the result of hours of phone calls to Dallas because WOLF had no national network and for many hours I had to go it alone. Ultimately a competing station allowed WOLF to pick up it network programming. In 1969 I had moved to WPOP in Hartford and decided to go through my old tapes to produce an anniversary program of what it was like on the day Kennedy died. This is the result of that effort.

I received this poem in the mail at one of the radio stations I worked at, probably WGSO, New Orleans, given the date on the poem. I had never heard of the author and I don’t think he’s the one who sent it to me.  I used it on the air several times, and I treasured the poem enough to make many copies of it and I filed them away. They have been lost for at least 20 or 25 years, maybe more. I had given up hope until last week, when I came across the original (no copies) in a box of memories stored in my closet. I thought you might enjoy it:

                                       The Christmas Mass
The snow was blowing out of doors
The drifts were piling high
And I could see pedestrians
As they were passing by.
The faces of my Irish friends
Came dimly through the glass
As they trudged along those icy streets
To worship at the Mass.

I thought a while, went back to bed
And cuddled safe and sound
As they plodded through those snowy streets
On sacred duty bound.
I envy them their strength of heart,
The faith that they renew
But on an icy cold Christmas morn
It’s good to be a Jew.

From The Vault:The night Jack Paar walked off “The Tonight Show” The Kenner Star September 2011

HEAR JACK PAAR'S ACTUAL WALKOUT SPEECH AFTER THE "READ MORE" JUMP IN THIS COLUMN!

        With Jay Leno and David Letterman, the Princes of late night television, its hard for my kids to realize that title was held by Johnny Carson for more than 30 years before Jay and David.  For Baby Boomers, (anyone born toward the end of World War II), the King of Late Night wasn’t Johnny Carson. It was a guy named Jack Paar. 

    Jack was named the host of “The Tonight Show” when Steve Allen’s tenure ended in 1957.  While Allen was funny, Jack Paar was funny... and controversial.  He was not afraid to take on the biggies, like the most feared show biz columnist of the time Walter Winchell or even Ed Sullivan.  But his biggest fight was with his bosses at NBC.  On the evening of February 11th 1960,  Jack Paar walked off “The Tonight Show.” He left because NBC had censored a joke from his show the night before. The joke was about a  British lady and a water closet. The joke wouldn’t shock a third grade class today but NBC thought it was offensive and chopped it, all four and a half minutes of it. As a teenager, I saw that show and wondered why NBC all of a sudden cut away to a five minute newscast. I knew something had to be up.
    I remember staying up late the next  night to see the show, as it had been on the news that Jack had walked out. America knew this before the show aired at 11:15pm eastern, because, a couple of years before, they had started recording the shows in the early evening using a modern marvel called videotape. 
    Paar was on for about five minutes when he said, “I’m leaving “The Tonight Show.” (Audience sighs in shock).  “There must be a better way of making a living than this,” and he got up and walked off leaving sidekick Hugh Downs with 85 minutes to fill. The walkout caused a sensation. It was all people talked about for three weeks until Jack finally came back after NBC apologized.
    What was the big deal about the joke? The joke, itself, was mild, even for 1960.It has been printed many times in the following years, but there is apparently no recording of it anywhere. More than likely the honchos at the network just hit “delete.” In fact, the show on which Jack made his triumphal return does not seem to exist either.  Most of Paar’s “Tonight” shows were taped over by the network so the tapes could be used again. Gives you an idea of the mentality of the executives who made the decision to cut the joke. Well, I guess your curiosity must be hanging by a thread right about now wondering what the heck all the fuss was about, so without further ado, here’s the joke America never heard:

Do they take me for a simpleton? From The Vault: November 2010 Kenner Star

    I am looking at a news article from 1988 on the USA TODAY website. The headline reads: “Have you noticed products are getting smaller, but prices remain the same?”
    Stop the presses!
    Excuse me?
    Can you say “hypocrite?”
    The article itself was actually first published in the Los Angeles Times and reads as follows: “Across the supermarket, manufacturers are trimming packages, nipping a half-ounce off that bar of soap, narrowing the width of toilet paper and shrinking the size of ice cream containers. For example, the makers of Skippy peanut butter added a large dimple to the bottom of the jar that allowed them to cut 1.7 ounces without any obvious changes to the packaging. The question is whether consumers who notice they are getting less for their money will stop buying the product.”
    While this news article was not a USA TODAY investigative piece, the mere fact they ran the story is ironic here in 2010. I mean, have you picked up a USA TODAY lately?

From the Vault: Nixon and Me The Kenner Star August 2001

    Recently on CNN, Larry King did his show from the Nixon Library and home in California with Nixon’s daughter Julie.  And as I watched them walk through the exhibits –  on Nixon’s peace overtures to China; his attempts to bring an “honorable end” to the war in Viet Nam; his involvement in the Watergate cover up that led to his political demise – I thought about the time I encountered Mr. Nixon.  
    It was 1963, and America was still coming off the most peaceful decade in a long time: the 50s. In the 60s, even as we tried to forget World War II, we entered the cold war with the Russians, and damn near had a nuclear war over missiles in Cuba, but President Jack Kennedy saved us,  and we dodged the warhead. So life was looking pretty good when I discovered Richard Nixon was in Syracuse, where I started in radio, for a Republican Party conference. I vowed nothing would stop me from getting an exclusive interview with the former Vice President who had lost to Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election.

The Ed Clancy Weekend

This is the only place you can find this 15 minute presentation of The Ed Clancy Weekend. Memories of Buddy Holly, Mel Blanc, the Beatles, the Ed Clancy Radio Cartoon and much more in just 15 minutes. Sit back and enjoy really good radio.

From The Vault: A Night To Remember - The Kenner Star 2000

            A lot of people in the New Orleans area know about Willie Pastrano, the light heavyweight boxing champ who died in 1997. I had a chance to meet Willie when I did my radio show on WWL-AM.  One of the best conversations I ever had.  I remember another boxer named Willie, and knowing him led me to one of the most memorable nights of my life.

            His name was Willie Pep. He was a featherweight out of Hartford, Connecticut  and he won more professional boxing matches than anyone before or since: 230 out of 241 fights.  He might have won more if a chartered plane crash hadn’t almost killed him. It merely slowed him down. There was no more exciting boxer than Willie Pep. His fights with Sandy Saddler are regarded by many as the wildest ever held.