March 12 In Radio History

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In 1933...U.S. President Franklink D. Roosevelt held his first of 30 Radio "Fireside Chat".

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In 1953...Memphis disc jockey Rufus Thomas signed with Sun Records to release a song called "Bear Cat," an answer to Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog."

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In 2001...TV-radio talk show host/singer/songwriter Morton Downey, Jr., son of singers Morton Downey and Barbara Bennett, died of lung cancer at age 68.

Downey He was a program director and announcer at a radio station in Connecticut in the 1950s, and later worked in various markets around the U.S., including Phoenix (KRIZ), Miami (WFUN), San Diego (KDEO) and Seattle (KJR).

Like his father, Downey pursued a career in music, recording in both pop and country styles. He sang on a few records and then began to write songs, several of which were popular in the 1950s and 1960s. He joined ASCAP as a result. In 1958, he recorded "Boulevard Of Broken Dreams", which he sang on national television on a set that resembled a dark street with one street light. In 1981, "Green Eyed Girl" charted on the Billboard Magazine country chart, peaking at #95.

In the 1980s, Downey was a talk show host at KFBK-AM in Sacramento, California, where he employed his abrasive style. He was fired in 1984. He was replaced on KFBK by Rush Limbaugh, who has held the time slot ever since, later via his national syndication.

Downey also had a stint on WMAQ-AM in Chicago where he unsuccessfully tried to get other on air radio personalities to submit to drug testing.  Downey's largest effect on American culture came from his popular, yet short-lived, syndicated late 1980s television talk show, The Morton Downey Jr. Show.

His third – and final – attempt at a talk radio comeback occurred in 1997 on Cleveland radio station WTAM in a late evening time slot.  It marked his return to the Cleveland market, where Downey had been a host for crosstown radio station WERE in the early 1980s prior to joining KFBK. This stint came shortly after the surgery for lung cancer that removed one of his lungs. At WTAM, Downey abandoned the confrontational schtick of his TV and previous radio shows, and conducted this program in a much more conversational and jovial manner.