Keep the Needle Peaking

By Gary Corry and Red Neckerson

Before Jeff Foxworthy, Gary Corrys alter ego Red Neckerson was already a household word in Atlanta. Soon Neckerson was telling radio audiences to jist ask themselves from coast to coast. Borrowing from the Barbara Mandrell song, Gary was redneck before it was cool. The reason behind the success of Red Neckerson is no less than Garys skills as a humorist. Anyone can do a redneck voice; not every redneck voice is wildly hilarious. When not in character as Neckerson, Garys sharp wit and word crafting helped boost the ratings of several morning jocks. In an earlier era, Gary would have been rubbing elbows with Stan Freberg, Jack Benny, and bob and Ray. Besides all that, Gary was a damn fine air personality and program director. The story of his radio career is fascinating. He is a good man and I am fortunate to have him as my friend.
John Long
President,The Georgia Radio Museum and Hall of Fame

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450247009

Gary Corry

About the Author Gary Russell Corry worked his way through Southern Illinois University as a DJ, newscaster and sports play by play announcer at WRAJ in Anna/Jonesboro, Illinois. In 1963 he went to suburban St. Louis to work for WIBV, and then quickly accepted a position with WCPO in Cincinnati as head comedy writer for the station. He was soon promoted to full-time Disc Jockey and was retained by the new owners when the station was sold and the call letters changed to WUBE. In 1969 he was hired as Program Director of legendary WQXI in Atlanta. In 1971, the company entered the New York City radio market with WWDJ and Gary was moved there as the morning drive DJ. When the station changed formats in 1974 he worked briefly at WPAT. Corry returned to WQXI Atlanta in 1974 and was eventually named Program Director for the second time. As a contributor to the Gary McKee Morning Show he created the Red Neckerson character which became an almost instant success and the feature was soon syndicated nationally and beyond to more than 300 radio stations. Gary has recorded Grammy-nominated comedy albums; he wrote a long-running humor column for an entertainment newspaper the Hudspeth Report, has toured comedy clubs, appeared on national TV in commercials and as a guest and has been a television booth announcer. When WQXI dropped the music format, he was hired by WYAY as a commentator, writer and character voice performer on the Morning Zoo Crew anchored by Rhubarb Jones. After the station was sold, Gary joined WSB’s Cap’n Herb Emory’s cast as Red Neckerson on the weekly NASCAR talk show. His current CD is “Stock Car Comedy.” In 2008 he was inducted into the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame. He is also an accomplished artist and horseman. He and his wife Dixie live on their small horse farm in North Georgia.

Book preview

Start Me Up

A long, long time ago, back before rock and roll music ruined out lives, damaging our psyches beyond repair and leaving us deaf, there was a quiet little community where children could run and play all day with no fear of being subjected to horrors like reality TV shows. Wild fantasies such as television sets, or radio with pictures, would have been considered laughable science fiction as likely as tiny, pocket-sized telephones that one could carry around sending and receiving calls at any time from any location. Pure bad dream material. With no radioactive boob tubes to stare at, people were forced to look at each other and even converse.

You’re ugly.

Look who’s talkin’..

In a small village such as Rinard, interesting topics were quite limited, so whenever the men loafing in the pool hall or general store grew weary of telling and re-telling the same old dirty jokes, wildly distorted versions of mundane events dominated the conversation.

A friendly greeting or a casual hand wave between a man and woman launched immediate reports that they were engaged in a torrid affair. A wrestling match strictly for fun between two kids was described as an attempted murder. Such exaggerations, twists and blatant falsehoods were perfectly acceptable as the only method available to combat the excruciating boredom of peace and quiet. As we all know, if there is anything a good American hates, its peace and quiet.

During especially dull times such as the dog days of summer when neither human nor animal stirred, even those meager non-events could not be relied upon for conversational material. Thankfully, the miracle of broadcasting, the magical ability of people in far-flung locales to transmit their voices filled the void. Whenever there was a long pause with only an occasional cough or spitting sound emanating from the benches where the local loafers were lounging, one of them would inevitably pipe up with some outlandish statement about something he claimed to have heard on the radio.

They said on the radio the police raided the Shelton gang’s headquarters down at Pond Creek Bottoms and broke up a big bootlegging operation. Shots was exchanged and they was several wounded.

Every story or sentence uttered had to be argued. Failing to do so was a serious insult to the speaker and implied disinterest.

You’re crazy as Hell, someone would say, Ain’t been a bootlegger in 45 miles of there since they allowed ‘em to sell liquor and that was 30 years ago.

You’d ought to know you damn drunk. How many did you say was wounded?

Guy on the radio said several. I reckon could’a been a couple or 3 or as many as a dozen. Them Sheltons are always firing away at somebody. If they’s nobody else around they go to gunning down one’ nuther.

Yeah, I hate that. We’ll sure miss ‘em once they’re all shot.

As a young, innocent boy I noticed that the guy on the radio seemed to hold an important position in life and given my ‘druthers I decided early on that I’d druther be a broadcaster than a listener like the town loafers. Okay, so I was just kidding about being innocent.

At the time, I had no idea that I was doing valuable research in preparation for a long career, but I spent a lot of time listening to radio. If I had known where I was headed I could have called it monitoring which sounds much more worthwhile. Baseball games and adventure serials such as The Lone Ranger, Captain Midnight and Superman were my favorites but I would listen to music if I had to.

There was a lot of live programming on the air mainly because recording techniques were rather primitive. If a musician hit a sour note or an actor flubbed his lines, too bad, there were no re-takes. This led to the blooper industry as money-hungry entrepreneurs collected examples of broadcasting screw-ups to sell in books and recordings. A few examples from the so-called Golden Age of Radio include:

Legendary announcer Harry von Zell proclaiming, The next voice you hear will be that of our new President, Hoobert Heever.

Mel Allen; It’s smipe poking time, gentlemen.

Ralph Edwards; And here is one of radio’s most charming and lovely young sinners.

Weather report: Tomorrow will be rowdy followed by clain.

These mildly humorous mistakes were considered pretty wild stuff in their day. The word bloopers hadn’t come into usage yet and the occasional on-air blunders were called fluffs, a rather effeminate label for a screw-up.

After the advent of wide-spread TV old time radio programming evolved or digressed whichever one prefers, to mostly Disc Jockeys playing music and attempting to entertain, bloopers are deliberately used along with cornball jokes, stunts and obscenities once confined only to pitch-black opium dens and brothels in the slums of Singapore.

We’ve wandered a long way from the times when The Federal Communications Commission, was going strong and a damn or a Hell could lead to immediate firing and threats of $25,000 fines, loss of the station’s license and a year in federal prison for slinging smut at the tender sensibilities of the listening public. It was a little more costly than say, putting a quarter in the cuss box. Though I had learned to repeat every curse word and obscenity in our fractured English language at an early age, such potentially dire consequences kept me from expressing them over the airwaves.

My first glimpse at the insides of a radio station came on a hot, summer afternoon when another kid and I decided to stop in at WFIW in Fairfield, Illinois after delivering a truck load of wheat to the granary. We had been shoveling the wheat from collecting wagons into the bed of the large truck all day and it was sweaty, back-breaking labor.

Station personnel were congenial and welcomed us in, showed us around and let us observe the broadcaster on duty. A well-dressed man sat in the air-conditioned room calmly sipping coffee while cuing up records, answering an occasional phone call and turning on his microphone to chat briefly between songs. I couldn’t help but think how great it would be to trade my job for his.

Turn Me On I’m A Radio

When Top 40 was born in the 50s I was a typical teenage guy, car crazy, girl crazy, restless and impatient to get out of our small, rural community and be somebody. I loved listening to the high-energy, joke-popping, laughing Disc Jockeys who sounded as if they were having a wonderful time playing records.

There were rumors of the big bucks those guys were raking in. I read somewhere that Dick Clark was knocking down a whopping one hundred and seventy five dollars a week as a DJ in Philadelphia before going into TV. I thought if I ever had a job paying that much I’d be rich. That was when gas sold for 35 cents a gallon and Cokes cost a nickel.

St. Louis had three Top 40 stations and some of my favorite personalities were Shad O’ Shea and Jack Elliott at KXOK, King Richard and Rex Miller at KWK, and Danny Dark, Dan Ingram, Gary Owens and Ron Lundy on WIL. They were truly all-time greats in the business and St. Louis was home to an incredible wealth of talent.

WLS in Chicago boomed in loud and clear with Rockin’ Ron Riley, Dick Biondi, Art Roberts and one poor guy who used the name Dex Card. That was probably a Program Director’s idea as I was to learn that they sometimes insist on altering a Jock’s name just to make a statement that they are in charge. The majority of programmers were themselves lousy DJs and they have to do something once in a while to justify their existence.

Those classic DJs inspired me to seek a job in radio and over the years I have received many comments and letters from young people telling me that I have motivated them to enter the business. The exciting, fun days of radio are long gone. My advice to anyone contemplating a radio career is, run. Run as fast as you can in the other direction. Sitting all alone in a small control room reading a short positioning statement, meaning inane station slogan, two or three times hourly and programming a computer to play the music would be even more boring than trying to avoid work in a parts warehouse. It wouldn’t pay as well either.

After bouncing from one low-paying job to another I entered college at Southern Illinois University with the encouragement of my fiancée Dixie Lee Davis and her parents. I had not decided on a major and in those days young men had a choice of being drafted for two years military service or joining the National Guard or Reserves. I put college on hold to do six months active duty in the Army Reserves, got married and went to work again, still dreaming of being a Disc Jockey in a half serious way.

For the next few years our economic situation improved as I landed a job at the General Motors parts warehouse in St. Louis. It paid well with good benefits but I was bored to tears. Union protocol required us to work as slowly as possible in order to preserve the most jobs. Another guy and I were in charge of a section and we spent most days taking turns playing lookout for the foreman while the other guy hid and napped or read a magazine. I used the time to practice announcing by reading aloud. Quietly.

I took broadcasting correspondence courses and night classes in speech and TV production at Washington University. Finally the lure of broadcasting grew so strong I quit my job and we moved to Carbondale, Illinois where I re-enrolled in college, this time with a Radio/TV major.

The school gave me a student janitorial job and my tuition was paid by the government since I was a military veteran, following my grueling six month tour of duty as a cook’s helper at Fort Riley Kansas.

After my first two weeks of pushing a mop I submitted audition tapes to two local radio stations. Our landlord knew the Manager of WRAJ in Anna/Jonesboro, located about twenty miles from Carbondale. He put in a word for me and the manager, Don Michel agreed to give me a trial. The other station manager also called and wanted to hire me.

I was flabbergasted since all I had ever heard from the negative nabobs was how it would be all but impossible for me to get an on-air job in radio. I was far from polished as an announcer and knew nothing about operating the console or board as it is known in the trades, but my measly correspondence courses and speech classes at Washington U. along with my reading aloud practice gave me an advantage over other student applicants whom local stations used as a work force. Being a married man with a child, military experience and more maturity helped too.

The rival station managers argued back and forth for a few days over whose property I was, both pressuring me to commit and I chose WRAJ mainly to avoid offending our landlord and risk losing our nice, little forty dollar a month rental house.

It’s Only Rock ‘N Roll

And I Kinda’ Like Some of It

The radio courses at Southern Illinois University were totally out-dated and the entire department’s faculty excepting Doctor Ray Mofield, despised the new Top 40 rage that was sweeping the country in the late fifties and early sixties. Doctor Mofield who had not a single pompous bone in his body, insisted the students just call him Mo. He was a friend to all, ever positive and encouraging to the young hopefuls in his classes. The rest of the radio/TV faculty pretended to dislike him because the head of the department was an old, washed-up grouch who was wont to fly into a slobbering rage at the mere mention of Top 40 radio or rock and roll music.

Learning antiquated network announcing techniques was a laughable waste of time but I played along and made straight A s in my major The first thing I learned at SIU was that only outsiders used the first letter of a station’s call letters in conversation. It was ‘IL, LS, ‘RAJ, unless one wanted to be exposed as a mere listener.

To learn the ropes at WRAJ, er, ‘RAJ, I came in everyday during the week to observe the operation. The morning personality Bob Neeley, was a middle-aged man who had show biz experience from his evening job, running the projector at the local drive-in movie theater. He was therefore the station’s first hired announcer. Part of his projectionist duties required him to make announcements during intermissions such as specials on hotdogs at the concession stand.

Everyone in town knew and liked Bob. He said the same things at the same times every day. One could best sum up his DJ style with one word; consistency. At seven-ten, it was, That coffee sure smells good this morning Mother. At seven thirty five it was School’s in session. Slow down and give those kids a brake, b-r-a-k-e. He had a few more just as exciting but you don’t really care to read about them.

Bob patiently showed me how to run the console and type the log. I never knew until I got to my next radio job that it is not normal procedure and was most likely an FCC violation to type the official programming log, listing times that all commercials, news, and promos are scheduled after they have aired.

Following a few days of mostly observing Bob Neeley, the boss deemed me ready for my on-air debut. It was to be a leisurely shift featuring good music on a Sunday afternoon.

FCC third class license? Check. Straight As in Announcing classes at SIU? Check. Three days of watching Bob Neeley? Check. I was ready. What could possibly go wrong?

Feels Like the First Time

I was alone on the air for the very first time on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in June. It was a day of firsts as I also met my first listener face to face. There wasn’t much for me to do except clear the newswire, read newscasts on the hour and half-hour, run the console, take transmitter readings every 30 minutes, type the broadcast log as I went, cue up commercials on an old reel-to-reel tape player, and calmly ad lib for my life while fumbling through a huge pile of beat-up vinyl albums for my next recording. That’s all, nothing much. The boss had instructed the raw rookie DJ to play lots of Hawaiian music and Lawrence Welk for his listening pleasure.

The General Manager Don Michel, had graduated college as a music major. Who was I to argue with such credentials? He had told me that he would sit with me during my first solo shift and he did. For about five minutes.

Do this, push that, read this, type that, and never, never say this or do that. Then he was gone. Gone to take his family on a leisurely Sunday afternoon drive leaving me with a bad case of nerves and a discouraging, I’ll be listening.

Despite feeling like a combination one-man band/ knife juggler I somehow made the station go. There were even brief moments between frantic chore tending that I caught my breath and thought, "I’m on the air. I am a real announcer. A DJ, spinning some of, well, some of the worst records on earth but just think, I’m living the dream, beaming out airwaves over most of the entire county!

That caused a problem. When the boss made his exit he failed to lock the front door. In stalked a large, muscular man about forty years old with an extremely concerned look on his face. Station business I presumed since he stormed directly into the control room.

In a loud voice he demanded to speak to the Station Manager. When I informed him that the Manager was unavailable he demanded to speak to the Chief Engineer. I explained that the Manager, Chief Engineer, sales staff, News Director, Program Director, Production Director and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer were all the same guy, he went into a real rage, demanding that I shut down the transmitter immediately and cease sending those radio-active, poisonous rays through his body.

The man appeared to be about one short station ID from violence as I mumbled and stuttered about my lack of knowledge and authority while casting my eyes about for any makeshift weapon heavier than a Don Ho album jacket.

Turn it off! It’s driving me crazy, he yelled. The station is broadcasting illegally. Don’t you feel it? It’s running through my entire body day and night. I can’t sleep. I can’t rest. Do something or I’m going to go out of control.

I decided not to mention that the station signed off every day at sunset. Maybe this is a test, I tried to convince myself. Maybe the boss sent this guy to test my ad-libbing ability in a tight situation. It’s not likely, but maybe he wants to see me perform under pressure before really awarding me this minimum wage radio job.

Tell you what, I said, I’ll turn it way down and call the Manager to come and either fix the transmitter so it will stop sending out those radio-active poisonous rays or just shut the station down.

I turned the studio monitor’s