My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [6]
From an early age, Stan was my idol. I delighted my parents and friends endlessly with my impersonations of him. I turned into Stan at any and every occasion. No one paid much attention, though. As I explained years later at Stan’s funeral, that was because every other kid in the neighborhood was doing his own impression of Stan Laurel.
I also loved to sing, though I was not among the singing teacher’s favorites. I tried out for the school’s a cappella group every time there was an audition, and every time the teacher turned me down. She only let me in, finally, when they ran out of basses.
School was a playground for me. In and out of the classroom, I had a great time. It did my poor brother no good. As he came along, all he heard was “Your brother Dick did this” and “Dick did that,” and it pissed him off. He became well-known as a troublemaker. After I graduated, he was called to the dean’s office one day for some infraction, and instead of listening to a long reprimand he hit the dean in the jaw and knocked him down. Needless to say, that stunt got Jerry kicked out of school, and he had to drive twenty miles every day to the next closest high school in order to get his diploma.
Shortly before my seventeenth birthday, I spotted an ad in the local newspaper for a job as a part-time announcer at the local CBS radio outlet, WDAN. I had been searching for jobs. Friends of mine working at the market were making eleven bucks a week. The radio station, which had lost a few announcers to the draft, was paying only eight dollars a week. But it was radio, so who cared?
I auditioned and got the job. I worked after school and on weekends, from ten P.M. to midnight. I referred to my show as The Yawn Patrol, but that was hardly true. It was a dream job. In this little station, I did everything: I played records, read the news, gave the weather report, wrote my own commercials, and even sold my own advertising. If a breaking story came in from New York, I patched it in myself.
Even if nothing big happened, each night was a thrilling adventure, an experience that made life seem large and important. I felt like I was at the center of the world, and in a town as small as Danville, I was. People tuned in for information, and I was the one giving it to them. I almost lost the job a few times, though. There were several Saturday nights when friends of mine came down to the station and danced in the lobby, and we got caught having a party. That was a no-no.
But it was hard to resist such temptation. As jobs went, I had the coolest one in town, especially among my age group. I tried to look the part by getting myself a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses like Dave Garroway, a popular radio personality long before he became the first host of NBC’s Today show. Through Dave and other shows like his, I discovered Sarah Vaughan, jazz, and the pop music of the day.
Every once in a while I tried to air some of the hotter stuff I liked, such as Stan Kenton or a short-lived group called Sauter Finnegan that played chords like nobody was playing in those days. But whenever I snuck something progressive into the playlist, I was called on the carpet. My bosses wanted Glenn Miller and nothing too far to the left or right of him.
Occasionally I made a mistake. I had these sixteen-inch disks with a number of cuts on them that provided an intro to the news, or in the case of the weather, a bouncy little ditty that went, “Oh Mister Weatherman, what’s the weather today …” Then I came in and read the forecast. Well, one night I put on the wrong cut, and without immediately realizing it I played a tornado warning.
It sounded like an emergency broadcast. Attention, attention, everyone. A tornado is heading for the city. Stay near your homes, make sure you’re near shelter, and stay tuned to this station.
Once I heard what had happened, I tried, without sounding alarmed, to correct it. There was no tornado! There was no storm! But it was too late. Every single