Last week, I promised that I would tell you about my adventures while working weekends at KPOP, the San Diego Pop Standard station. I took the gig, because I felt like riffing, nothing serious, so I had promised myself not to get too involved in a dubious cause,  which every Pop Standard (65 median demos) station is these days. I also took it because it was a dirty job that no Illegal alien was willing to take. 

However, I did not keep that promise to myself, and got serious not long afterward. I was compelled  to help resurrect  this  marvelous format., or a variation of it, to make it marketable, and began plotting to see what I could do to switch the tracks and divert this train wreck. In order to set the stage for this drama, it is necessary for me to tell you a little about how I work. 

Instead of playing poker or doing  cross word puzzles in order to keep my neurons firing, I write scripts, mostly movie scripts, and a lot of  radio stuff not meant for airing, but serves to keep me sharp. It is theater of the mind, played by actors who have no bounds.  

For my actual on air shows, I would do outrageous bits naming popular teachers or local figures as the central characters. I would not check with them first, but playfully threw them into the middle of a muddle. Then, this prominent  teacher or local would be the subject of razzing from a lot of people that day. Cume builders 

Let me give you an example of a think piece about Chuck Blore.

I chose him because most of you know him by name and reputation, and that among many other embellishments, he conceived “Color Radio” when programming at KFWB in Los Angeles. He is in the Pantheon of  Programmers. 

Here beginneth the Blore think piece, not intended to air.

Several hundred years ago, ancient English cartographers literally drew a blank when drawing a map of the world. There would be the known world, then a blank region to be filled in later when an explorer, hopefully English, ventured into that forbidding part of the earth and drew rough sketches of the new land. The cartographers would then formalize the sketches and claim the new territory for England, beating out Spain, Portugal and Holland, the other big players.  

In those times, It was believed that dragons inhabited unexplored regions, and  the cartographers warned early ships’ captains in their finest calligraphy. “Beyond this place, there be dragons.” Out of fear, most ships’ captains trimmed their sails away from those dragon-ridden waters.  

There were an intrepid few, such as Magellan, Captain Cook, Columbus, Juan Cabrillo, Ponce de Leon, and Juan Pizzaro, who defied the dragons and set full sail into those dark regions. They have their equivalents today, the dauntless few who plunged into the unexplored dragon-ridden radio realm: Chuck Blore, for instance.

Blore is descended from the Spanish explorer, Juan Pizarro, who claimed the western Territories for Spain. The original inhabitants, the Ute Indians had, for centuries, called their territory “Coloradio,” later shortened by the Spaniards to “Colorado.“ 

Blore’s ancestor, Juan ”Bizarro” (As he was affectionately known) Pizzaro, was renowned, not only as a fearless conquistador, but as the inventor of a method of transmitting messages across great distances. In a moment of enlightenment, he took two sawed off buffalo horns, between which he strung a long length of woven grass. By speaking into and listening at one end of a horn, he could communicate with others at a distance of many paces. 

“Bizarro” settled down among the  Indians in Coloradio where he began s new life, performing a morning show designed to awaken the tribe, all of whom by now possessed his revolutionary invention. 

He was a gagster, but History does not record the jokes he told. There would have been a loss  in the translation, anyway. One gag is vaguely  recalled by the oral story tellers sitting around the camp fires, something about the “Fountain of Ute.” Oral history recorded that a helper would  pound a tom tom, signaling the punch line of each gag. 

History records that he soon  got competition for his show, the helmsman of the ship that brought them to these shores. His name was “Howard Astern,” but he didn’t last long., kept asking the normally naked Indian women to put some clothes on. 

Many moons later.“Bizarro’s” great great great etc. etc. grandson, the genius Chuck Blore, sentimentally named his  revolutionary new KFWB radio format “Color Radio.” in honor of his ancestral home, “Coloradio.”

(Drum roll.....Two hits on the tom tom) 

By letting my mind free-range like this, I often ventured into a “zone,” and once mysteriously tuned into a “psychic frequency” that enabled me to predict rain. It is chronicled  by  reputable local newspaper columnists that I predicted rain a total of 18 times, without fail, over a year’s period, making each prediction a good week or ten days in advance. Factoid: No one in California knows when it is going to rain.  

I describe it more fully in my earlier chapter titled “Happy Hare’s Ancient Cupeno Rain Dance,” but the short version is that I made up a tale in much the same fashion as the Blore lore above, telling my listeners that I had encountered an Ancient Cupeno Indian medicine man who singled me out over all others to learn the Cupeno Indian rain dance. He explained that he had chosen me because I was “pure of heart.” 

I returned to the studio and actually performed my made-up version of the dance, chanting in an authentic sounding Indian tongue, accompanying myself with a tom tom. I would then pretend to fall into a short “trance,” then come out of it and make my prediction about when it was going to rain. What happened next is “bizarro.”

The predictions turned out to be true, hauntingly so. It is great fun when I get swept up like that, not knowing how a bit is going to turn out. The audience senses when this happens, realizing that I am in as big a suspense as they are. I lost the gift when I told myself, “This is ridiculous. No one can make it rain.” Intellectualizing it lost it for me. 

Moral: if you stumble into “the zone,” don’t question it. 

I’ve come to launch into such things with absolutely no doubt that it would work,

such as: bringing about the import of pandas into this country

(So what if I did  call the Chinese Trade Embassy in Toronto and risk loss of  face?)

Or, spearheading the establishment of Charter Schools when few knew about them. 

My secret about doing risky shtick?  None.  I just do it.

I built such a high tolerance in my audience that they forgave me everything just so

it was fun, or worthy. If I fell on my face, it was funny, so what? “That’s Hare for you.” 

The following event  also really happened I was invited by a  regional Indian tribe, the Kumeyays, to go to their reservation, and act as the starter of a half-marathon race by some of the fastest Indian runners in the state, several hundred of them. 

I mounted the podium and delivered a few Indian jokes like, “A lot of  Californios don’t know it, but the Kumeyays (pronounced  Koom e yi’s) were the first cowboys in this state, before it was a state. They wrote the first cowboy song, Then, I would launch into, “I’m an old cow hand from Viejas Land..Kumeyay yi yippee yippy yay yippy yay. Kumeyay yi yippee yippee yay!”  

But the fun didn’t really start until I “ordered”  them to line up for the race. I shamelessly shouted. “Gentlemen, start your Indians!”  The runners collapsed in laughter, temporarily unable to start the race. 

In that year’s period, I took a 65+ median age format and transformed my  Sa-Su 10a-2p slot into #1 45+ AQH and  #1 TSL in the entire year long 2000 Arbitron.  

Soon after, I wrote a farewell memo to VP Mike Glickenhaus, who had become a valued friend, thanking him for the fun, frivolously quoting the Lone Ranger, “My work is done here.” On my last day, while exchanging goodbye hugs with people I had come to respect, I received a memo from Mr. Glickenhaus asking me to join him upstairs.. 

*Editor’s note. No Utes, or Conquistadors were injured during the writing of the Blore segment. However, the Encyclopedia Britannica gives Chuck Blore sole credit for inventing “Color Radio” without help from the Utes, “Bizarro” or the Conquistadors. 

I always wondered about my lineage, and this is as good as I think it could get.  It'll probably end up in my bio someday ..... Chuck Blore