Edwards - A voice in the box: my life in radio

A VOICE IN THE BOX

BOB
EDWARDS

MY LIFE IN
RADIO

Text illustrations by Susannah Edwards

Copyright 2011 by Bob Edwards

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edwards, Bob, 1947
A voice in the box : my life in radio / Bob Edwards.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-3450-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8131-3451-2 (ebook) 1. Edwards, Bob, 1947 2. Radio broadcastersUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
PN1991.4.E23
[A3 2011]
791.4402'8092DC23
[B]

2011018440

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of American University Presses

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ANDY DANYO KUBIS AND
KEN GREENE. WHEN I NEEDED FRIENDS,
THEY WERE THERE.

A VOICE IN THE BOX

November 6, 2004. Another cold, crisp night in the Windy City, but its warm inside the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Chicago Hotel, where hundreds of radio royalty have gathered. Men in tuxedos and women in beautiful gowns or sexy cocktail dresses are clustered at thirty-four tables, each adorned with flowers and a burning candle. At one end of the ballroom is a bandstand, where Mickey and the Memories will entertain for everyones dancing pleasure. That will come later, after dinner, many speeches, and a ceremony that is also a live radio program carried by the Premier group of stations.

The announcer is Jim Bohannon, one of my oldest friends in radio. He has alerted the diners to the Applause sign behind him and has let it be known that great audible enthusiasm is encouraged. At exactly 8:00 PM, we hear some upbeat theme music, and all respond to the signs insistent demand for applause. A floor director cues Bohannon, who says, Live, from Chicago, its radios biggest nightthe 2004 Radio Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Tonight, the Radio Hall of Fame inducts XM Satellite Radio superstar Bob Edwards.

Superstar? We do love our hyperbole in radio. As of that night, my show on XM was just four weeks old. I doubt if the fellow who, months earlier, fired me from my previous show at NPR regarded me as anybodys superstar. But no matterI was in the Hall.

Radio is closing in on its centennial, and its Hall of Fame includes the scientists who invented it, the hucksters who made money from it, the journalists who informed, the smart people who enlightened, and especially the enormously talented entertainers who came into our homes and cars and offices and made us laugh, cry, wince, fear, dread, guffaw, and enter worlds we could not imagine on our own. So here I am with Marconi, Edward R. Murrow, Arthur Godfrey, Alan Freed, Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos n Andy, Orson Welles, Paul Harvey, Wolfman Jack, Bing Crosby, Gordon McLendon, Studs Terkel, Ma Perkins, Cousin Brucie, Red Barber, the Lone Rangerjust a stew of people, programs, and genres spanning generations and having nothing in common but the microphone and an audience.

My induction ceremony was a watershed eventthe last in a series of traumas and triumphs that had kept me in a state of emotional whip-lash for most of the year. So this night in Chicago was the end of something but also the beginning of something. It symbolized my passage to a new radio home and an environment in which I could do what I regard as the very best work of my career.

Induction really recognizes a much longer journeythe span of a career. So lets go back to the little burg where my radio journey began in 1968, when I had no notion of a hall of fameonly a burning desire to be a voice in the box.

It was a perfect day for lust, a mild, sunny day in October 1968. The program director of the radio station had figured out a way to rendezvous with a female listener without his wife noticing he was not on the air. He preempted local programs, including his own, and carried ABCs national coverage of Apollo 7. The station had not shown such dedication to public service in the past, but his wife, listening from across the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky, would not question his absence from the air. After all, this was Americas first manned Apollo flight.

Someone was required to sit at the microphone and fulfill the government requirement that the station be identified each hour. The program director chose me. I was a twenty-one-year-old college senior and had been hanging around the station for weeks to learn the ropes. For five years I had been knocking on the doors of stations in my home-town, begging for a chance. Station managers told me that the Louisville market was too big to hire beginners and that I should make my start in the smaller towns of Kentucky. I was just about to do that when the program director of this tiny blip of a station in Indiana allowed me to sit in his studio and observe.

Now he was away, succumbing to manly passion, and I had my opportunity. As the ABC anchor cued the station break, I flipped the switch and spoke the first words of my broadcast career: This is WHEL, 1570, in New Albany, Indiana.

There were no fireworks in celebration and my debut escaped the notice of the local newspapers, but theres nothing bigger in a young mans life than realizing his dream. Never mind that I was working at the tackiest, most miserable little outpost in American broadcasting; I had crossed the threshold and joined the profession of Edward R. Murrow, Arthur Godfrey, and Red Barber.