My pal of 40+ years Bruce Simon linked to this on Facebook and I had to share it with you here. It features longtime Los Angeles TV personality Ralph Story as he recalls several other longtime Los Angeles TV personalities like Spade Cooley and Clete Roberts. Some of you may remember Clete Roberts as the interviewer in three famous episodes of the M*A*S*H TV series in which he played a newsman interviewing members of the M*A*S*H unit.
Joe Pyne is in there. Pyne was more or less the father of rude Conservative talk show hosts on radio and TV, and people tuned him in more to watch the insults than the political discussions. The latter never got very deep or anywhere near the facts. Pyne was actually a hard guy to pin down in terms of political labels. Folks called him a right-winger and on many issues, he was. But he was also fiercely pro-union. His overriding view was to side with The Working Man. He hated hippies, bums and unemployed students but he also had no love for rich folks who hadn't, in his view, "earned" their wealth. For many years, the man who cut my hair also cut Pyne's and he said Pyne was a nasty man who yelled about practically everything but that his on-air rants were mostly calculated for their entertainment value. Some of us didn't find him all that entertaining.
The piece closes with Engineer Bill Stulla, who was on KHJ Channel 9 for years showing many of the cartoons that my pal Jerry Beck now includes in his "Worst Cartoons Ever" presentations. Over on Channel 5, Skipper Frank had Bugs Bunny cartoons and Tom Hatten had Popeye. Engineer Bill was stuck with Colonel Bleep and Spunky & Tadpole. But Mr. Stulla was a good broadcaster and managed to triumph over the cartoons he was forced to show…and for a while, he did have the Fleischer Superman cartoons and a few other goodies. I made my TV debut (and darn near my farewell) on the show he did before he was Engineer Bill. I wrote about that experience here and here. If you go now and read the first part of that remembrance, make sure you read the second.
So now here's Ralph Story, who (alas) is no longer with us. He was a pretty important person on L.A. TV himself…
