There is nothing more liberating than a ten thousand foot sky dive out of a plane without quite knowing what you are doing or where you are going to land, and if you do, if you will survive. Come to think of it, it is kind of like being in radio.

            I was willing to do anything to get ratings. To me, part of it was just being on the air and injecting a strong presence, doing the services and creating excitement with the music The rest of what I did was what Randy Michaels described to me as three dimensional radio. Maybe it is best not to analyze those things if you know them, anyway. To me, the best knowing is knowing without knowing you know if you know what I mean..

            I did a lot of physical shtick. Swimming across the city in 200 swimming pools. Climbing a ten thousand foot mountain: Picacho del Diablo in Baja for charity. Walking Death Valley.

Sky diving is a blatant grab for ratings. I did it twice., once on the way up in San Diego in the latter 50’s, when I owned 40% of the audience, but was just starting and unsure how firm my hold was.

The second time was when I returned to KCBQ in San Diego from Detroit after a great ride with Specs Howard, and again was pulling out all the stops.  

I had not been interested in returning to radio, but GM, Dick Casper, let 9 months go by, and with  KCBQ sagged to 5th place, he called me to come back. I had ruled San Diego 8 years prior and there was no guarantee that I could do it again.. Dick didn’t care He wanted me. I have always been a sucker for a good pitch and he closed me. I have an adrenal gland for a heart, and one can only take long runs on the ocean front for so long,

Things had changed. My 50’s teen audience was now in the 18-24 range and rock was evolving. I pondered the material I would use for my re-entry. Maybe, I should do some harder stuff. A basic rule: A long term successful jock has to re-invent himself from time to time to keep his audience’s interest.

I was not a shock jock but pondered whether I could skate on the edges with my older audience. Nothing blatantly dirty. Maybe a little triple entendre stuff. Even double entendre was too blatant for me, but triple. hmmm…something no one could quite put their finger on as being tasteless and vulgar.

            I tried to conjure up a shtick that would appeal to both young men and women, maybe, a beauty contest for both men and women, but not like any ever held. A vision gradually took form. I always ask myself questions when I am in an alpha state. It is a kind of out of my body experience. What, I was asking myself, is the one body part revered by both men and women, Of course, the derriere. Guys because of its sculptural beauty on a girl…. and girls, because on a guy, it is the only visible part of his body they can admire.  

You doubt me? Go to a major mall in your city and just watch. Single out a young man. When he sees a good looking girl, approaching, he will certainly zoom in on her frontal parts, face etc etc. But when the girl passes, you can see his eyes drop down to her derrière as the piece de resistance.

Girls do the same thing, but more subtly. When they check out a man superficially, they like the eyes and his smile, butt it always comes downs to the butt, literally and figuratively. Ask any girl. If they are honest with you, they will giggle and fess up.

I liked the idea. It was the kind of thing that might infuriate some elements in my listener-ship but they would still hang on out of sheer fascination .Long before Howard Stern, I knew that the public loves bawdiness. Yet, that was not the Happy Hare my San Diego listeners had signed on to. I needed a handle, a way to frame it to take the sting out of it.  Naming it  “The Best Ass in Town”  was not going to do it

Then, in the middle of the night, I sat bolt upright out of a sound sleep. I had it.. It was creative and amusing, would create a lot of buzz and forth and…it was prefect. A play on words and….. The Keaster Parade.”

It was now February ‘69. I would run it in April giving me plenty of lead time. I put it aside as a done deal.

I began to plot out the rest of the year.

I have already told you how I broke the round the world speed record for jet passenger, 43 hours and 31 minutes upon my return. Mayor Frank Curran had asked me to come up with a sensational way to proclaim San Diego’s 200^th anniversary of its liberation from Mexico. That was just a warm-up. Now what?

Of course………., a sky dive into the Rough Water Swim in La Jolla. This was a five mile swim for hearty souls, starting with a mass rush into the water at La Jolla Cove, a grinding triangular course swim through water roiling with crashing waves, and turbulent currents, then the final leg back to the beach.

The La Jolla Chamber invited me to do the swim, which I graciously turned down. But…I came back with, what if I officially “started” the race by sky diving into the Cove. The race would start the second my keaster hit the water. They liked this even better.

I have found that when I involved myself headlong without a helmet into something like this, my spirit guide rushes in to pile on other elements that makes it even  more gripping

Jerry Lewis heard me talking about the sky dive on my show, and volunteered his yacht as the pick-up vessel when I landed. Then, he asked me to find a way to solicit money for his MD campaign. That was when I conjured up the swim-across-the-city idea swimming as many pools as there were people who would throw a party to welcome me  and  hand me money for Jerry’s campaign after I swam the length of their pool.

Of course, I had prepared intensely for this. The parachute training alone took me all of…a  week or so, a refresher course on how to open the chute and how to guide it to my landing place ten thousand feet down off the shore of the Cove. A sky diving club had volunteered the plane, but only if I would submit to a training course on how to actually do it. They thought that my body splattered on the La Jolla cliffs was bad for their image.

In all fairness to myself, I must admit to you that I had dived before, into a parade attended by a hundred thousand San Diegans, all with eyes skyward watching in awe  as I……but that is another story for another day.

Okay.  What else?

May was coming up and I always did a bit or two on Cinco de Mayo in deference to my large Latino audience, not just in San Diego but in Tijuana. I would devote a couple of shows to this fiesta that was celebrated heartily on both side of the border.

Young Anglos used this occasion to out-party the Latinos.

They didn’t care that it was a major national holiday for the Mexicans, celebrating the great victory in Puebla over a French Army, twice their size. This victory May 5^th 1862,  freed Mexico from the French.

Americans generally don’t know that the French intended to use their defeat of the Mexicans to extend a supply line from Mexico to the Confederates in the Civil War and help the South win the war. Even then, the French hated us.

Hell! The American guys ands gals didn’t care about that. They just wanted to party that weekend on margaritas and Dos  Xes  Beer. Viva Mexico!  Party on!

            I wanted them to have a good time, but I also devoted my shows to put in a few good words about the historical significance of Cinco de Mayo I always reserved a couple of slots each hour for bits. I managed to play 17 songs, did 13 minutes of commercial and still managed to fill my shows with shtick, information and gags.

In fact, after serious stuff about Cinco, I even had enough time to horse around about it. The Mexicans loved it because they knew that I had respected the holiday with historical facts and doing them justice, and they knew it was now time for Hare to play.

I told my audience about the  real significance of  Cinco de Mayo. 

Hare:

“Most people, including my Mexican amigos, don’t know the real historical significance of  Cinco de Mayo. Here is what happened.

 You may not know it, but Hellmann’s Mayonnaise was manufactured in England. And in 1912, on its maiden voyage, the Titanic was carrying 12,000 jars of mayonnaise scheduled for delivery to Vera Cruz, which was to be the next port of call after the Titanic’s stop in New York.

The Mexicans loved mayonnaise. This would have been the largest single shipment of mayonnaise ever to be delivered to Mexico.

History records that the great ship hit an iceberg on the way to New York and sank with that precious cargo of mayonnaise going down with it. The Mexicans were heart-broken.

They declared a national day of mourning which they observe every year on May 5^th. . This tragic day has gone down in history as  Sinko de Mayo.” 

Serious contemporary programmers, upon reading of such liberties with a tight format,. are probably muttering that my show was destined to get a cold reception, nit an ice berg and go down like the Titanic. The Jan, Feb, March 69 ARB came out showing that I had restored KCBQ from #5 to # 1 12-34 with 400,000 cumes in a market of a million.

Though I have been off the air for many years, I am still invited to major Chicano fiestas as guest of honor.

Well into the second quarter of the new year at KCBQ. I had done the jet passenger break-the-world-record bit and involved myself in giant fiestas with both Latinos and Anglos. Regional mayors has invited me to be their Parade Marshall in local parades. The trends were rich and holding.

What hit me was that I was making it by being the same old Hare, not the smart ass  “Keaster Parade” guy I had considered morphing into when I returned to the air.

I was called by the planners for the biggest outdoor event in the city to take part in their event. The Over The Line tournament attended by tens of thousands of San Diegans.”   The tournament would have been the perfect venue for the Keaster Parade.. 

 Over the Line was a three man/woman team sport based loosely on baseball. When a player makes a spectacular play, he will often “drop trou.” Or if a woman, flash her boobs accompanied by wild cheers. These are men and women many of whom are serious professionals executive, attorneys, who choose this one weekend to literally let it all hang out.  The promotion was the perfect blend of timeliness and bawdiness. I had the feel for it and would pull it off with aplomb.

“Are you ready for the Keaster Parade, Hare,?” asked the promoter.

 I unexpectedly heard myself say, “I think I’ll pass.” 

 In this period of my career, I went into a zone. It occurred to me that our San Diego Zoo needed pandas. As we had no diplomatic relations with China, I contacted the Chinese Trade Commissioner in Toronto. He was a hip guy who actually laughed, and told me he thought it was a good idea, and followed through

In a few months, the Chinese Government formally announced that they were presenting this country with a pair of pandas. I neglected to ask him to have the pandas sent to San Diego.  Instead,  they were sent to the Washington Zoo.

I don’t quite know why I passed on the Keaster Parade. It probably is still a viable idea for an 18-34 male audience. It seemed that other things kept coming to me in a natural course of events that crowded out this contrived shtick. Besides, it wasn’t quite “me.”

            To this day, jokes keep coming to me.

Hare: “I drove into a service station and asked for five dollars worth of gas. The guy took the money and farted.” 

 I might have used that joke during the last gasoline crisis in the early 70’s but didn’t think of it. You can take it now that it is timely 36 years later. 

Next week, the harrowing tale of my Rough  Water Swim sky dive, and more…. 

Thanks to all of the radio folks who contacted me saying said they read portions or all of my Immigration piece on their shows around the country. The sequel to this runs on John Rook’s site, linked here in RDN. It will be there is a day or so.