As great as it was:

getting the giant  pandas sent  to this country from China while at KCBQ in San Diego, spearheading the campaign to establish Charter Schools in San Diego,

saving the Beatle concert from a teen riot in Cleveland while at KYW, or

swimming across San Diego through 200 swimming pools , and

walking Death Valley, and

sky diving ten thousand feet, and  

climbing ten thousand foot Picacho Del Diablo for Muscular Dystrophy. 

Everything I needed to know about radio, I learned at KGBC in Galveston. 

As a lad  in1946, isolated from the world on a slow moving Merchant Marine  tanker, I had plenty of time to think about choosing a career path that didn’t involve cleaning bilges. Radio kept pecking at my cerebrum until I determined to go to KGBC and introduce myself when I returned from a long voyage in the Pacific..

The day after my return, I went to KGBC, and sought out Orland O.Dodson, the news editor. I had often  heard  him, and admired his open, clear style of reporting.. After a brief introduction, I straightaway told him that, because of him, I wanted to be a newsman. He was encouraging, and introduced me to the owner, Jim Bradner,  who had just retired from being second in command of the TVA,  a huge  system of Federal dams in the Tennessee area. I told Mr. Bradner that I wanted to get into radio.” Stick around, Harry,” he  said affably. “You can never tell what might crop up.” 

A few days later, tooling around town in my new-used- Buick, I turned onto Strand  Avenue,  a block  away from the wharf area when my car was rocked by a concussion, trip-hammered seconds later by an ear-splitting explosion. I swerved, disoriented to the curb.  Others on the street walked around in wide eyed shock. Cars braked and drivers sat stunned. The music on KGBC faded  mid- tune and Dodson’s  authoritative voice came on, explaining that a ship, the Grand Camp, had blown up on the dock at Texas  City. Dodson told us that he was on his way there to get more details..

 I drove to the wharf for a better view of the massive  plume of smoke and fire roiling in the skies above me. It reminded me of the mushroom cloud  suspended above Hiroshima. I gunned my car and headed across the causeway toward Texas City.          

On the way, I heard Dodson  describing a scene of biblical destruction. His voice was constricted as he pleaded for volunteers to help.

I was there in no time. It was a matter of a few blocks from the shattered outskirts of Texas City to the  bedlam of the dock area. Buildings were splintered. Cars were smashed and overturned, including two  police cars. Hundreds stumbled around like zombies, bloody from the shrapnel that lacerated them when the ship exploded, and black from the tons of oil that had been blasted skyward, atomized, then  rained  down on them.

Others like me volunteered, including a couple of  Air Force colonels from nearby Ellington Field, who took over in the absence of policemen, many of whom were  wounded or killed when the shrapnel scythed through the city. They commandeered trucks and directed  me and the others to start picking up bodies, many unrecognizable, and stacking them onto the flat beds.  One of the colonels ran to his car, sped to a high school auditorium, and proclaimed it a morgue.

Medics  arrived from John Sealy Hospital in Galveston  and began triaging the near-dead,. many so mangled that they were passed over in favor of those who had a chance to survive the next few hours. Later, it came out that there were close to 600 dead,  and around 3500 wounded.

Talk about your divine intervention…a man driving a Jeep had been dock-side when the Grand Camp blew, flipping over his Jeep, and trapping him under it, A few seconds later,  a torrent of shrapnel rained  down on the bottom of the jeep, now the top, shielding him from being shredded.

Hours later, the unexpected happened. Orland O Dodson appeared  and to my surprise, said, “Harry, I saw you working with the colonels all day, but now  I need your help. Will you take over for me?  I have to get back to the station. I know you can do it,  Just say what you see, and ask for blankets and water and emergency supplies.” He gave me a list of more things to ask for, and was gone, leaving me alone after he arranged for me to use the only public phone booth left standing, guarded by a deputy sheriff. I found an open water pipe, washed off as well as I could and changed jobs, telling myself that now I was a real reporter.

Despite my bold façade with Orland, O. Dodson, I was  surprised  that my reports flowed in a stream of words that came out easily despite the macabre setting. It was all spontaneous. I didn’t even know where the words came from. Damn! I was a good…”ad-libber,” a term I was to learn some time later.

  When he returned to KGBC, the really real reporter Orland O Dodson, dug deeper for the reason why the ship had exploded. He knew that the Grand Camp was carrying a hold full of  fertilizer,  ammonium nitrate. All anyone knew was that a small fire had  broken out on the Grand Camp, and when it couldn’t be doused with  portable extinguishers, the order was given to batten down the hatches to smother it. So, why did it blow?

Dodson called a professor at Texas A and M, for an on-air interview. He led off by telling the professor about how the crew had tried to stifle the fire by covering it up in the hold,  The professor explained that the resultant trapped heat caused a decomposition of the ammonium nitrate, producing a combustible gas, which exploded when they watered it.  He told Dodson that the ship blew up because everyone did precisely the wrong thing. The professor failed to explain to Orland that the S---- word , now forbidden by the FCC, was actually derived from the dire instructions that shipping companies posted at the top of the holds when ammonium nitrate was the cargo. S.H.I.T was short for “Store High In Transit.”

The Grand Camp was literally blown sky high, almost downing two private planes flying a good five thousand feet over Texas City. The blast, heard 150 miles away,  was so powerful that the ship’s two ton anchor was ripped off its massive chain, and later found a mile and a half. away.

I left Texas City early the next morning, an hour before another cargo ship, the High Flyer  also carrying Ammonium Nitrate, exploded This created a  tidal wave that launched  a 130 foot long  30 ton barge out of the water where it surfed a hundred yards into the wharf area, crushing the phone booth I had been using for “Broadcast Central”.

I went into the station that morning before noon to find Jim Bradner waiting for me, grinning. He officially hired me as a staff man, a job that called for me to do man-on-the-street programs, read news, emcee studio music shows, do a jock show from 10am till noon, and host  a  black music - then called race music- show each Monday through Friday afternoons, sponsored by Royal Crown Pomade. I played  songs with lyrics such as  “My baby Ain’t no jockey but he sure knows how to ride. He jumps in the saddle and slides from side to side.”

My Program Director was a Hollywood-handsome man named Dean Turner, a fine talent. He put me into man-on-the-street programs by simply saying, “Harry, go out and do a man-on-the-street program at 23d and  Mechanic.” As many as a hundred listeners would show up to be on the air with me. My sponsor was Dixie Bell Ice Cream, the richest, creamiest ice cream I ever tasted, I would present each interviewee with a Dixie Bell certificate. My talent fee was a certificate.

We featured live studio music, such as Hubert Sutter and his jazz combo. Spud Goodall would often come in from Hollywood to visit his hometown and sit in with Hubert. He was a major Hollywood studio guitarist. Spud compared Hubert’s clarinet  playing to Benny Goodman’s. Hubert was legally blind and gave new meaning to the phrase  “Well,  neighbors, the old clock on the wall says it’s time to go.”  During the final moments  of his show, he would climb up on a chair and press his face against the large Westinghouse clock on the wall, barely able to make out the hands, in order to keep track of  the time.

KGBC also spawned Jack Carney who later went to St Louis where he was a major force..

Tom Dawson portrayed a highly popular country character named :”The Critter”. He  talked like Pat Buttram years before Buttram copied Elvis’manager, Colonel Tom Parker’s unique  style of talking to become Gene Autrey’s side kick.

He played Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” and “Lovesick Blues, “ Red Foley’s “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy,” and Ernest Tubb’s “Walkin’ the Floor Over You” and, of course, a lot of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

He was so popular that he received a standing ovation when he brought on Hank Williams at a concert. Hank didn’t get one, and was peeved.

 Tom ad-libbed one of my all-time favorite gags: His horse pooped during a parade and he went to the grand stand and told thousands of fans, “When something like this happens, I am moved to say that I am glad horses don’t fly.”

Tom forsook talent, and  went to New York where he eventually became V.P. of  Advertising and Promotion of the CBS Radio Division. When he donned the gray pin stripe suit, there was one fiat when I visited him at stuffy CBS: Don’t mention the Critter.

Years later, my acquired ability to morph those raw street interviews into humorous payoffs enabled me to win an audition in New York to host a  network television game show. The producer was Steve Carling who also produced the “$64,000  Question.” He was busted  for slipping the answers to the questions to favored contestants on that show. The week when the quiz show scandal broke was the same week I was to begin his new  quiz show called “Chase,” which was also trashed.

In Galveston, during 1948-9, I  hosted big band network shows from the Balinese Room and the Municipal Pier, over Mutual, and ABC…....my ticket to KLAC.

I returned to Galveston a few years ago to visit old chums and segued  to KGBC out of curiosity. Jim  Bradner was gone years before, and I had heard that the current owners had let it run down. 

On the way to the station, I heard an amusing, crisp talking guy on the air, and was curious to meet him. Entering a dark forbidding studio, I found an older one-armed man sitting at the controls dealing 45’s onto a pair of 33-45  rpm felt worn-down-to-the- bare-metal turntables. He knew about me and was apprehensive. “You aren’t going to retire and come back here  and take my job, are you?”  I said, “No, but I doubt if I could, anyway,” I told him that I had listened to him and was impressed, that he related to his audience, and sounded glad to be here, and that this was what it was all about.

I didn’t patronize him by saying, “And, I give you extra points for being able to juggle two turntables with one arm.” I also ran only two turntables at KGBC, but when I went to KLAC, I was startled to see that they had four turntables. “What?  Four turntables?  Such extravagance! Here, take two of them away.”

Of course, Hollywood was more lofty than Galveston. Paul Weston and I were close. He was a legendary arranger, ran the west coast division of Columbia Records, and  was married to Jo Stafford, whose  string of hits he had picked and arranged. Paul took me to lunch  by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel to cheer me up after I received my army draft notice.

We were engaged in small talk when Skitch Henderson, the Tonight Show Music Director, came over and sat with us. He asked Paul how it was going, and Paul told him that he had just finished a composition commissioned by the Vatican, patterned after 5th century Gregorian chants. Henderson asked him why he didn’t base it on the later 17^th century Gregorian chants and Paul replied, ”Skitch, if everyone thought like you, where would  5^th century Gregorian be?” 

Gosh, Toto!  This isn’t Galveston any more.