Remembering Radio Personality Dan Ingram

Dan Ingram

NYC Radio Personality Dan Ingram, who died Sunday night at his Florida home at the age of 83, had long been widely hailed as the quintessential top-40 radio jock, the one against whom others were measured, writes longtime New York-based media watcher David Hinckley for medium.com.

“He was probably the funniest DJ on the radio during his prime,” says Joe McCoy, who as program director of New York’s WCBS-FM in the 1980s and 1990s frequently brought Ingram in. “You literally sometimes understood what he was really saying about five minutes after he said it.

“Most DJs will tell you that they wanted to be like him. But there was no one like Dan Ingram.”

For those who had their top-40 experience outside the monstrous signal of New York’s WABC, Ingram delivered quicksilver wit in a droll, bemused tone. The Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next To You,” for instance, was tagged “the porcupine love song.”

He referred to his show as “the Ingram mess” or “the Ingram travesty.” He addressed his listeners as Kemo Sabe, from Tonto’s line in The Lone Ranger, and as that might suggest, he sometimes pushed ethnic humor in ways that might be problematic today. He might have had to lose his Tonto “voice,” for instance, and he might hear some pushback for saying a picture of Mao Zedong reminded him of his laundryman.

His explanation was that it was humor and that his ethnic bits, like his double entendres, were absent all malice.

They were his way of taking top-40 radio banter to the edge, and that edge was something he spent years assessing. If he could at times sound like some guy reeling off wisecracks in the creamer line at the coffee machine, those cracks really reflected how seriously he took radio.

“I always thought that he said things ‘off the cuff’,” recalls McCoy. “But he told me that he got the next day’s music sheet every day and made notes on each song.“

• Radio has changed a lot since “Big Dan” was on Musicradio 77WABC, but there are many lessons that today’s personalities can learn from Dan and his success. Adult Contemporary consultant Gary Berkowitz lists his top five. Click Here

• Blogger Ken Levine, known for his work on Cheers, Frasier and Almost Perfect, paid tribute to The Magic that was Dan Ingram. Click Here

• For an in-depth six-hour audio history of Ingram’s career put together by Allan Sniffen and many helping hands on the New York Radio Message Board. Click Here

• Radio's Best Friend, Art Vuolo Jr. shared this Ingram tribute: