A TV Guy’s Secret Love Of Radio   By David Louie 

A TV Guy’s Secret Love of Radio
By David Louie © 2024For someone whose entire career was in TV, I have a deep love for radio and appreciation for all the radio people I’ve met through the years. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’m sure it was my first transistor radio as a teenager that kindled this love affair. My parents had an upright radio console powered by vacuum tubes in the living room which always fascinated me. It had a lighted multi-band display for AM, FM and shortwave and push buttons pre-set for clear channel stations WTAM Cleveland, KDKA Pittsburgh, WJR Detroit, WLW Cincinnati and a few other stations licensed to Akron and Canton, Ohio. However, as a child of the 50’s, TV became my source of entertainment. What kid at that time didn’t watch “Winky Dink and You” and drew on a plastic overlay that stuck to the screen… until someone figured out the radiation from the set was too dangerous. It was interactive media long before its time.

The Beatles and the rock ‘n roll era in junior high (remember, I grew up in the Cleveland area, home to Alan Freed and the rock revolution) weaned me from TV to radio. Because I had appeared on a public affairs TV show for eight years as a kid, I was able to land a gig during high school, volunteering Saturday nights at Top 40 formatted WKYC Radio to answer the phone lines as teens requested songs to be dedicated to their boyfriends or girlfriends. I loved hanging out with on-air talent, including Jim Gallant and Jim LaBarbara, and with the board engineers who ran the turntables (before carts). One time, when the engineer needed an urgent bathroom break, he entrusted me to run the board on my own as the network hourly news ended and the first record needed to spin. It was tight. It was clean. This was at a 50kw clear channel, network-owned radio station! I was hooked.I absorbed so much about radio programming. I would DX stations late at night and collect the postcard confirmations sent back. I began to collect jingles through engineers and from other jingle fans. Thanks to supportive parents, I had an Ampex AX300 bidirectional reel-to-reel quarter-inch tape deck and other equipment. Soon, my jingle library included WABC, WCFL, KHJ, WLS, among many others, that were produced by PAMS, Tom Merriman, and Chuck Blore. Who didn’t love the distinctive sounder for 20/20 News used on Bill Drake formatted stations?

When WKYC was preparing to switch to a Power Radio format, the station brought in the late Chuck Dunaway (ex-KLIF and ex-WABC) as PD and afternoon DJ. He took over the midnight show for a month ahead of the format change, but he didn’t want to use his real name. He looked at me through the control room window, asked my name over the intercom, and the “Dave Louie Show” made its debut. Kids at school thought it was me, although our voices were not similar. My lips were sealed. Still, this was my short stint as a DJ, in name only.

While I briefly wrote newscasts for WMAQ Radio in Chicago in college (before switching over to TV) and subbed on KGO Radio for the immensely talented Lynn Jimenez a few times from the Pacific Stock Exchange, I never got to work in or on radio. But my love of radio never diminished.
I still have my parents’ freestanding radio console. The guts are not serviceable, and it’s covered in decades of dust in storage. Someday, however, it would be nice to have it restored at least on the outside as a testament to an unrequited love affair. A TV lifer can have a soft spot in his heart for radio.

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Photos from my high school years are likely buried in storage that would take forever to find, so here’s a photo you might consider using. It was taken in 1958 at KYW-TV Cleveland (Westinghouse owned at the time) where I appeared on a children’s public affairs show from 1955 to 1963 (age five to 13). I would have been eight years old in this shot. So I grew up on TV but then discovered radio. KYW became WKYC-TV and WKYC-AM/FM in 1965 under an FCC and court order reversing a 1956 station swap involving NBC’s Philadelphia stations and Westinghouse’s Cleveland stations.