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| The WMAL crew about 1964: (l. to r.) Felix Grant, Jackson Weaver, Frank Harden (standing), George Wilson, John Wilcox, Dave McConnell, Bill Trumbull. McConnell is now with WTOP/CBS. |
Even the radio waves pulsing through my world, run to Hell as it is by tasteless, moronic punks crawling over each other like maggots to get to fitness clubs and Crate & Barrels, bring little solace anymore.
I was the first to tire of talk-show hosts saying the rich don't have enough and the poor have too much, of $80,000/year retirees in Idaho calling in that Medicare is bleeding them dry. All the Money Matters I need to know is that when I invest heavily in a market that has been going uppity up up, it will start going down-ditty down down.
The classical station plays too much Gershwin, not enough Lehar. The oldies market here favors above all else "Love Potion No. 9," the rock equivalent of "Newsnight Maryland." I am reduced to listening to WWDC AM1260, your "Tennessee Waltz" station. But for every ten renditions of "Unchained Melody," or "High Hopes," they pop in a Tony Bennett or a real big band number and I am taken back to the days when radios still had glowing dials, when network news was heralded with kettle-drum rolls and trumpet blasts, when Trumbull did just fine without Core (and nobody'd let a fish-wife like Stevens near a microphone), when Harden & Weaver were not only alive but funny.
Harden & Weaver WERE funny. They ceased being so around 1980 either because the sponsors forbade them playing around with commercial scripts--the substance of their show--or because Weaver became a Jehovah's Witness i.e., a humorless zombie. Frank and Jackson are in The Radio Hall of Fame but not as they should be: for coasting so long on empty.
The ones I miss the most, the heroes in this little reminiscence, are Felix Grant, God rest his soul, the evening man on WMAL, 1963-1988, and Bill Mayhugh, his all-night follower, 1963-1992.
Everything about these guys was sophisticated, especially the music, big-band, contemporary jazz. They never pretended to be, never were cast as anything more than entertainers.
Grant was the only one I ever heard who could hold one's attention speaking in a monotone. Which he did, talking only about the music and never about his family, his dog or his drive to work. One wondered if he ever smiled or cracked a joke.
Mayhugh, my mother observed, always sounded like he was about to burst out crying, but at 3 O'Clock in the morning, when so Fitzgerald says, it's always a dark night of the soul, who wants Bob Barker? These guys were good, inoffensive company.
Villains include talk-pioneer, Ken Beatrice. In fact, it was the importation from Boston of this crowned emperor of all the imbeciles that began the degeneration I hereby lament. It was Beatrice who squeezed out Felix Grant that 12-year-old mentalities throughout the land might blubber about Dick Motta or The Bullets. Like nearly all radio personalities, he was a phony,an artifice. In time, sports writers,no doubt envious, made him totter by hurling facts. He toppled himself one night by ignoring weather bulletins and monomaniacally talking 'Skins while tornadoes ripped through the area.
But the wall was breeched. In came The Age of Talk, when people will tell you to invest in Widgets or eat worms just to have something to say. Mayhugh was the last of the old night-beacons to shut down. For Larry King.
The only thing left to do is wrap up with this jingle played every Midnight--between Grant and Mayhugh--for years until the mid-'70s:
The Potomac in the twilight
is a river turned to flame,
and the smell of cherry blossoms
is like nothing you could name!
That's why we like to be in Washington, D.C.!
There's an endless row of faces
that have come from everywhere
There's a deep abiding purpose
and it lingers in the air.
That's why we like to be in Washington, D.C.!
The wooded hills around us
and the rush along The Mall,
The quiet walk down tree-green streets,
when evening starts to fall.
In memorials of marble,
and in monuments of stone,
there's a constant shining spirit
of the greatness we have known!
That's why we like to be in Washington, D.C.!
W...M...A...L...Washington!
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| Some photos taken by Neal Conway at the 1985 celebration of 25th Anniversary of Harden & Weaver's WMAL morning show. Above: Frank Harden and Jack Weaver with Sonny Jurgenson and Sam Huff. Right: Bill Mayhugh stops by with Montgomery Donuts. |  |
Copyright 1998, 2003 by Neal J. Conway