September 7 Radio History

➦In 1929...the forerunner to 'Let’s Pretend', a Saturday morning radio show for kids was heard for the first time on CBS Radio Network. The Adventures of Helen & Mary became Let’s Pretend 5 years later. Let's Pretend, created and directed by Nila Mack, was a CBS radio series for children. In its most famous form, Let's Pretend, the Peabody Award-winning series ran from 1934 to 1954.

➦In 1934...Daniel Trombley "Dan" Ingram was born.  Ingram is an American radio icon with a fifty-year career on radio stations such as WABC 770 AM and WCBS 101.1 FM in New York. "Big Dan" started broadcasting at WHCH Hofstra College, Hempstead, New York, WNRC, New Rochelle, New York, and WALK-FM, Patchogue, New York.

Ingram mastered the talk-up, talking over the intro to a song, ending right before the vocals. Ingram could get the song title, the current temperature and a one-liner in his talk-ups. He wholeheartedly embraced one of radio's golden rules: When you're talking to the audience, do it like you're talking to one person.

Ingram was noted for his quick wit and ability to convey a humorous or satiric idea with quick pacing and an economy of words—a skill which has made him uniquely suited to, and successful within, modern personality-driven music radio.

He is among the most frequently emulated radio personalities, cited as an influence or inspiration by numerous current broadcasters.



Dan was well known for playing doctored versions of popular songs. The Paul McCartney & Wings song My Love Does it Good became My Glove Does it Good. The stuttering title refrain of Bennie and the Jets went from three or four repetitions to countless. In the same vein, the distinctive refrain added to Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede, Ooga-ooga-ooga-chucka would start repeating and listeners would never know when it would end. (Other examples include Paul Simon's 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, and "rearranging" the spelling of "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y" on the Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night.)

Dan's longtime closing theme song was "Tri-Fi Drums" by Billy May. An edited version of the song was used for broadcast.



Dan commented occasionally about the pronunciation of his name: jingles often are heard pronouncing his last name as "Ing-ram," but Dan has said it is correctly pronounced "In-gram."

Ingram died June 24, 2018.

➦In 1936...Early rock & roll icon Buddy Holly was born Charles Hardin Holley in Lubbock Texas. His name was misspelled on his first record contract and he decided to leave it that way.   At age 22, he died in a plane crash Feb 3, 1959 along with Ritchie Valens and J.P.Richardson (The Big Bopper.)

➦In 1949...Windsor (Ont.) radio station CKLW, later to become Canada’s all-time most listened-to station (due to its huge US audience), increased power from 5000 to 50,000 watts. The station had moved from 1030 to 800 KHz, a Canada/Mexico clear channel, in the great frequency shuffle of 1941.

As television's popularity boomed, CKLW, like many other stations, coped with the changes by replacing the dying network radio fare with locally based disc-jockey shows. Throughout most of the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, CKLW was basically a "variety" radio station which filled in the cracks between full-service features with pop music played by announcers like Bud Davies, Ron Knowles (who had a rock-and-roll show on AM 800 as early as 1957), and Joe Van. For a few years in the early 1960s, CKLW also featured a country music program in the evenings called Sounds Like Nashville. This ended in 1963.

➦In 1979...ESPN, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, made its debut on US cable TV as the world’s first full-time channel devoted to sports.

➦In 1999…Viacom made its biggest acquisition ($35.6 million) by announcing plans to merge with its former parent CBS Corporation (the original, not the current one). The merger was completed in 2000, bringing cable channels TNN (now Paramount Network) and Country Music Television (CMT) under Viacom's wing, as well as CBS' production units and TV distributors Eyemark Entertainment (formerly Group W Productions) and King World. CBS' production unit and King World (which has since folded Eyemark) operated under their own names; however, TNN and CMT were merged into MTV Networks almost immediately.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY:

Monique Gabriela Curnen

• Drummer Dennis Thompson of MC5 is 71. 
• Actor Julie Kavner (“The Simpsons”) is 70. 
• Singer Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders is 69. 
• Keyboardist Benmont Tench of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is 67. 
• Actor Corbin Bernsen is 66. 
• Actor Michael Emerson (“Lost”) is 66. 
• Pianist Michael Feinstein is 64. 
• Songwriter Diane Warren is 64. 
• Singer Margot Chapman (Starland Vocal Band) is 63. 
• Actor W. Earl Brown (“Deadwood”) is 57. 
• Comedian Leslie Jones (2016′s “Ghostbusters,” ″Saturday Night Live”) is 53. 
• Model Angie Everhart is 51. 
• Actor Diane Farr (“Numb3rs,” “Rescue Me”) is 51. 
• Actor Monique Gabriela Curnen (“The Dark Knight”) is 50. 
• Actor Tom Everett Scott (“Southland,” ″That Thing You Do!”) is 50. 
• Drummer Chad Sexton of 311 (three-eleven) is 50. 
• Actor Shannon Elizabeth (“American Pie”) is 47. 
• Actor Oliver Hudson (“Nashville”) is 44. 
• Actor Devon Sawa (“Slackers,” ″Final Destination”) is 42. 
• Actor Benjamin Hollingsworth (“Code Black”) is 36. 
• Actor Alyssa Diaz (“The Rookie”) is 35. 
• Contemporary Christian musician Wes Willis of Rush of Fools is 34. 
• Actor Evan Rachel Wood (“Westworld,” ″Thirteen”) is 33. 
• Actor Jonathan Majors (“Lovecraft Country”) is 31. 
• Actor Ian Chen (“Fresh Off The Boat”) is 14.
• Jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins is 90. 
• Singer Gloria Gaynor is 77. 
• Singer Alfa Anderson of Chic is 74. 
• Actor Susan Blakely (“The Towering Inferno,” ″The Concorde: Airport ’79″) is 72.