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Burns was the station’s news director. Carlin, the newcomer, moved into an apartment with Burns and another roommate. While the New Yorker was jeopardizing his own livelihood in radio, Burns was establishing himself as a bona fide newsman, interviewing Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and traveling to Havana to interview Fidel Castro. “I was staying at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana and it was . . . well, I really believe life is like a B-movie without the music,” Burns once recalled. “The blonde told me she was working with anti-Castro forces and she needed to use my telephone because hers was bugged. Fantastic! People with beards running around, carrying guns. The last I saw of the blonde was when they dragged her and the phone from my room. Somebody suggested it might be time for me to return to the States.”

After Boston, Carlin quickly landed on his feet. He heard from a Shreveport acquaintance who’d become a sales manager at KXOL, a competitor of McLendon’s KLIF in the Dallas-Fort Worth market. “Anybody who came to Dallas-Fort Worth knew that was the place to be in radio,” says “Dandy” Don Logan, a fellow Shreveport radio personality who spent some time in Texas himself. “It was a real hotbed for DJs. They had a lot of what they call ‘six-month wonders.’” Media figures who would become nationally recognized, such as CBS newsman Bob Schieffer, game show host Jim McKrell, and The Price Is Right announcer Rod Roddy, were all products of the Dallas-Fort Worth radio scene around Carlin’s time. Starting in July in the seven-to-midnight slot, Carlin took to calling it the “homework” shift, taking dedication requests from young lovebirds and peppering his banter every Friday night with the all-important high school football scores. “Developed great rapport with teenage listeners by not putting them on,” he wrote a decade later for an early press kit.

In between spinning new songs from singers such as Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, and Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon on The Coca-Cola Hi-Fi Club (later known as The Teen Club), Carlin began extending his comic premises on-air. KXOL was a popular station with local advertisers, known for its brisk in-house production of ads and jingles. The DJ who preceded Carlin each afternoon once did an entire hour so packed with commercials that he had time to play just one song, Carlin recalled, “and it still sounded like pure entertainment.” But during the evenings Carlin had relatively few commercial obligations, and he used the time to his advantage. “It was nice—the log book wasn’t very crowded, so you could have a little fun,” he recalled years later, in a tribute to the station. “It was so relaxed, in fact, that one night I did two whole hours in a British accent. Apparently, no one thought anything of it. . . . It was a chance to express my goofy self at night.”

“Everything George said was funny,” recalls Pat Havis, then a Fort Worth resident, a twenty-year-old divorcee and mother of a baby daughter, living on odd jobs and listening to her favorite DJ at night while she did the household chores. “He helped me laugh at myself, and everything in general.” Though a newcomer to Texas, Carlin was quickly established as an asset for KXOL. His name was prominently featured in ads on benches at bus stops across the city, says Havis. One of Carlin’s recurring bits, the “Hippie-Dippy Weatherman,” depicted a gently addled hippie character years before the long-haired, glassy-eyed hippie archetype came into mainstream usage. (The term hippie, generally presumed to have been adopted by Beat Generation hipsters in reference to their younger collegiate followers, was not yet widely recognized, though by some accounts it had been used on the radio as early as 1945 by Stan Kenton, one of Carlin’s musical heroes.) Carlin’s Weatherman sounded as though Maynard G. Krebs, Bob Denver’s absent-minded, bongo-playing jazzbo on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, had taken up meteorology. Adopting the deliberate, bemused voice of a chronic stoner (without making explicit references to marijuana), the