"Happy Hare’s Ancient Cupeno Rain Dance"

            It was great remembering my adventures with Frank Sinatra, but stealing the Beatle concert from WHK in Cleveland ranks near the top of my  adventures. However, there was one outrageous episode which is chronicled  by Don Freeman, the top feature writer in the San Diego Union Tribune and by 400,000 listeners back in 1969 as being true. Otherwise, I would  not have the guts to tell you about it.

            Upon  my return home  in San Diego in 1968,  after seven years of successes in Cleveland and Detroit, I had not intended to stay in radio but was interested in writing and exploring other fun things. This lasted nine months, then the calls from the radio stations started coming in. IN 1970. CBS placed Specs Howard and me among the top ten radio mornings show and that didn’t help me settle down. Specs, however, had launched his now legendary Specs Howard School of Radio and Television and I was doing a lot of voice work and had invested well and  felt no peck at my cerebrum to get back on the air.  But …the most intriguing  offer  came not from New York or L.A. but from San Diego where my wife, Carol, and I had  already settled in. It. came from Dick Casper, the GM of KCBQ. Dick was a high energy guy who knew better than to come on about how they missed me and would I please do the morning show.  Instead he called and launched into a barrage of jokes. I remember one of them. “Harry,” he said, I was reading the paper this morning Did you see this? Man found dead in a bath tub full of milk with a banana stuck in his mouth Police are looking for a cereal killer.” He got me. I started to work that next week.

            My first salvo in resurrecting KCBQ was to break the world record for flying around the world as a jet passenger in 43 hours and 31 minutes. A fascinating allegory  but lengthy. Instead I will relate to you the weirdest  adventure I or anyone else I know  ever had. Morning jocks know that we are all skating on the edge of the earth, about to spin off into the void.  This was Twilight Zone stuff.

            I had returned from my  round-the-world trip when I received a phone call from the padre at the Cupeno Indian reservation north of San Diego. ”We are broke, Happy Hare, and we need  a water well for our people.” So the following  Monday, when I went on the air, instead of asking my listeners for money for a direct contribution, I  strayed  into another dimension that no one, certainly not I, could have foreseen. Long time listeners were hardened to my off beat banter. So, I unhesitantly plunged into the unlikely story that I had gone to the Cupeno reservation and had a great time  with those warm folk and was about to leave  the party when a mystical  looking old Indian approached and said softly, “Follow me, Happy Hare.” Against my better instincts I followed him into a nearby woods, where he said to me, “Happy Hare, I have searched for many  moons among my people  to find  the one pure man of great soul who would inherit the Ancient Cupeno rain dance I did not find  the one in the tribe among my brothers but you are of pure heart and I have chosen you to learn this ancient dance which will bring rain to my people. So, I followed this man through the intricate choreography of the rain dance and then  satisfied that I had learned the dance, he abruptly turned and disappeared like a ghostly spirit into the woods without another word.”

            On a roll I then told my listeners, “I have practiced this rain dance until it is as one with my heart. Now I will do the dance ten days from now and rain will fall over the county.”  Those who know southwestern weather know that it seldom rains and there is no way to predict when that will be. And here I was sounding off  knowingly about something for which I had no feel, then setting  a specific date when it would absolutely “take it to the bank” rain. I said it with such conviction that I believed it myself. As the tenth day approached, I wasn’t so sure. But that morning came and I stuck with my story despite a bright sky when the sun came up. I did not waver. Then about the second hour into the show , I saw the first drops of rain tentatively splat my large outside the studio window and soon it struck that window with the roar of a freight train.

            Buoyed by this amazing coincidence  I performed this seeming miracle ten or twelve  times in a row. Then in a display  of versatility I said that “our friends in Tijuana have not had rain for a long long time..” I told them that I would perform my rain dance rain for them in twelve days.  On the twelfth day, I went through my on air tom tom ranting chanting rain dance and then was flooded with calls from Tijuana telling me they were being deluged.

            I performed my rain dance  18 times that year and each time it rained.  Jean Dixon, the world famous psychic, was in town. She appeared on my show as a guest and I asked her to explain my strange gift, and she told me that I had tuned into some kind of rain wave and that I could predict when it was going to rain with assurance,.  My predictions were so…predictable…that I did it another seven or eight  times with great aplomb. Then I did something stupid. I finally said to myself, “Harry, This is ridiculous. Nobody can predict rain.”

            When I confessed my self-doubt to myself my “gift” disappeared like it had never been. I was like everyone else, a simple mortal not sure of rain or of much else.  It has been explained to me by  people who  study this kind  of  thing that intellectualizing a mystical gift will make it go  away. The moral:. If you acquire a gift that  feels strange and abnormal to you, but is fun and  doesn’t harm you or anyone else,  go with it.

            In the ensuing years, I  was adopted by a parking fairy. He or she will reserve a parking place for me right in front of wherever I choose to go regardless of the traffic situation.  I have not  ever questioned my parking fairy.