Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [15]
Although he was becoming a popular personality at KJOE, now that he was no longer in the Air Force, Carlin had no need to be in Louisiana. He packed up and returned to New York, enrolling in the Columbia School of Broadcasting. It took him all of two weeks to realize that he already had more than enough on-the-job training at KJOE to learn everything the school could teach him about broadcasting. He quit and headed right back to Shreveport, where he would stay for another year.
In radio, the typical objective for on-air talent was to keep moving into larger markets. Homer Odom, an acquaintance who later managed the Bay Area’s KABL for McLendon, offered Carlin a job with Boston’s WEZE, a “beautiful music”-style station and a network affiliate that broadcast NBC soap operas such as the long-running Young Dr. Malone. Carlin went up to Boston and took a job running the board—unglamorous duty that he justified by reminding himself he’d moved into a bigger radio market. It was here that he had his run-in with Cardinal Cushing. Spinning popular balladry and orchestrated pop songs by Perry Como, Tony Bennett, and their ilk in his part-time role as an after-hours disc jockey, the devoted R&B fan bridled. “I had to play that and keep a straight face and make believe I liked it,” he remembered. After three months he knew he was in the wrong place. When Carlin took the news van to New York, the furious station manager tracked him down at his mother’s apartment. There’d been a prison break at the new maximum security facility in Walpole that they should have covered. Prison breaks happen all the time, Carlin argued; they could cover the next one. “They thought that was a poor attitude for a professional,” he recalled. Sure enough, when he returned with the truck, he was unceremoniously relieved of his job.
The one bright spot of Carlin’s short stay in Boston was his instantaneous rapport with a WEZE newsman and Boston native named Jack Burns. Born in November 1933, Burns was almost four years older than Carlin. The two men shared an attitude toward the military: Burns, who spent his teen years living the peripatetic life of his father, an officer in the Air Force, realized he was no serviceman as soon as he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1952. After serving as a sergeant in Korea, he gladly took his discharge and headed back to Boston, where he studied acting and broadcasting at the old Leland Powers School of Radio and Theater in Brookline.
Jeremy Johnson, an aspiring actor who’d done a hometown Bob and Ray-style radio show with a partner before enrolling at the Powers School, met Burns there and quickly became a friend and drinking buddy. They first became acquainted on the set of a student-run radio comedy—“variety stuff,” recalls Johnson, like Fred Allen’s Allen’s Alley, primarily consisting of mock interviews with outlandish characters. “We used to go to parties together and drink—quite a bit, actually,” says Johnson. One time, after passing out on the floor and staying overnight, Johnson woke up and saw his friend still snoozing. He staggered to his feet, stood over Burns, and woke him up by putting the fear of God into the hung-over acting student: “I am omnipotent!” he boomed. “I am omnipresent!”
After graduating from Powers, Burns spent some time in New York, studying acting at Herbert Berghof’s studio and performing in an off-Broadway production of Tea and Sympathy, the controversial Robert Anderson play about an effeminate young man, originally directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan. Soon, however, he was back in Boston, where he took a job as a radio newsman. By the time Carlin arrived at WEZE,