DJ Sally Jessy Raphael

 

Sally Lowenthal was born February 25th, 1935 but if you recognize that face you would better know her as Sally Jessy Raphael. But her career started in radio and according to multiple publications she was fired from eighteen of the twenty four radio stations she worked at. The 2003 book Watching TV Talk Shows, cites merely 18 "jobs" so that claim is highly questionable. But without a doubt she had a huge radio career before her breakout in Television.  Her autobiography Sally: Unconventional Success lists a nine sets of call letters: WAVS, WFAS, KDKA, WINS, WIOD, WMCA, WOR, WPIX-TV, WPLG-TV and WRC-TV.  (Note: the index includes stations she never worked at. Ex. WOR, and KDKA.)

She's still alive as of this writing, 91 years old and she's only been retired since about 2014. You probably know her as a TV talk show host. For a stage name she combined her mother's maiden, Raphael and Jessy from her father's family. It was a name she used as early as the 1970s on air. 

During her teenage years she moved between San Juan, Puerto Rico and the New York suburbs. In Scarsdale, New York she worked at the local AM radio station, 1230 WFAS-AM in White Plains. The station had a program in which Junior High School kids read the news on the air and Raphael was one of the students selected to participate. She attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but no record ties her to WRCT, though it did sign on in 1949... so it's possible. 

She also attended the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan and graduated from Columbia University in New York. Raphael studied acting under at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Her autobiography starts in her 20s with a radio show at an unnamed station in San Juan. A caption for a picture suggests the station was 630 WKYN-AM. Her mroning show may or may not have been simulcast on WQBS 99.9 San Juan or 760 WORA-AM. It's not clear how much network was in that network. One source reported that she she hosted a cooking show on WAPA-TV in Puerto Rico. If it's true it was her first foray into television.

Before TalkNet her radio career is hard to track. Print references are few. Her autobiography is a good source but it's not a resume, it's a hard knocks tale. The hard, dated references are hwo we put the time line together. She is quoted on the back of the 1983 book Making It In Radio as Sally Jessy Raphael with TalkNet. In 1977 she won a Lulu award for the Sally Jessy Raphael Show on WMCA in New York. [SOURCE] The OPC Bulletin of November 15th 1977 has a blurb about her WMCA career as she stressed that talk shows are journalism. [SOURCE]

 "Indeed it was the capacity crowd needed, for "the fastest mike in town." For 17 years an expert in moderating radio talk shows, Raphael is most currently with WMCA. She regaled a laughing, cheering audience from the moment she stood up throughout hour she had the floor.  "This is the first time I have addressed a live audience," she declared almost shyly.  To titters, she added, she wanted to show "Why I am the greatest telephone talk person in the country, and modest."

The OPC issue from October states that "She’s been in the business 17 years, with 17 different radio or TV stations." That may be the origin of the "fired 18 times" tall tale. It goes on to add that for three years at WMCA, she did an hour-and-a-half TV program in the morning, a noon program featuring classical music and a night-time rock radio show.  If the 17 year tenure is correct, she started at the station in 1960. For that to be true she'd have had to start in 1960. According to her autobiography she was hired by WMCA in 1976 and fired in 1981. 

Yet the OPC Bulletin adds details to her resume missing from even her autobiography. In Miami, she was a radio reporter with Storer Broadcasting Corporation.  That would have to be WGBS-AM, which Storer acquired in 1945 as WFTL and moved from Ft. Lauderdale.  She also hosted her own daily public affairs program on that Post-Newsweek TV station.  Post Newsweek owned 3 different stations at one point but I think this was WPLG. But the first station she cites in her Florida tenure was 1190 WAVS-AM in Davie, FL. She eventually worked her way up to WIOD-AM in Miami.

She got a News anchor job at Channel 11, WPIX-TV in 1976, but was fired 8 months later. That probably overlapped with her part time at WINS-AM in New York. In between WINS and WMCA she was offered a full time job at KDKA and turned it down to work at WMCA rather than relocate again. [SOURCE] But after WMCA is when she went big. 

WPIX Action news, 1976

Raphael  hosted a radio call-in advice show distributed by NBC Talknet which ran from 1981 to 1987, but was so popular it went into radio syndication in 1982. Prior to that it was broadcast our of WRC-TV in Washington D.C. One source reports it ran into 1987 overlapping her TV career. 

“In Touch with Sally Jessy Raphael” debuted as a local 30-minute weekday program on Oct. 17, 1983, airing after “Donahue.” It was shot at KSDK’s studio. The Sally Jessy Raphael Show (later shortened to Sally), which ran in first-run syndication from October 17, 1983, to May 24, 2002. She rose to fame in the 1980s. But that TV talk show ran until 2002, just short of 20 years in network syndication.

First Black News Program

In the late 1920s journalist Floyd Joseph Calvin hosted what was probably the first really journalistic talk radio show.  It was sponsored by the Pittsburgh Courier a black newspaper. The Pittsburgh Courier was once the most widely circulated black newspaper in America. It's circulation was almost 200,000. It was published continuously from 1907 until it's bankruptcy in 1965. It's assets were purchased in 1966 and it resumed publishing and continues to the present day as the New Pittsburgh Courier. More here.

Calvin's program was broadcast on 950 WGBS-AM in New York City.  How it happened has been documented by a few reputed sources. Ryan Ellet wrote a great paper that explained much of  this in detail:

"Evidence strongly indicates that the Pittsburgh Courier Hour, which traces it's roots to 1927, was the first black radio series. On September 8, 1927, the prominent African-American Newspaper sponsored a 15-minute talk over radio station WGBS, owned by the Gimbel brothers department stores. The talk, given by Ruth R. Dennis...was Some Notable Colored Women..."

The book Harlem Renaissance Lives by Henry Louis Gates more assertively puts the start date to October 2nd 1927. But the program was definitely not yet named for the Courier. How long it had been going on is still open to debate. A 1925 radio schedule tantalizingly lists "Radio Columnists" as a 15-minute program on a Wednesday in April. the story of Floyd Calvin is more certain. More here.

The program described by Ellet was a talk given by Ruth R. Dennis who wrote religious features for the Pittsburgh Courier. It was through Ms. Dennis that the PD at WGBS-AM, Terese Rose Nagel. Nagel saw the success of Ms. Dennis' program and offered a similar opportunity to Calvin. So he wrote an article "Some Notable Colored Men" in response. It was broadcast on November 27th. He took the opportunity to editorialize about negro journalism.

And why not?  The Pittsburgh Courier had at that time been publishing for two decades. calvin had been worked there since 1924. When the program was cancelled by WGBS, he was successful enough to re-launch the program at WCGU-AM in 1928. A least that's according to the book Harlem Renaissance Lives.

There's not a lot of information on 1400 WCGU-AM. It predates 1935,  the earliest year of the Broadcasting yearbook. But it does appear in the 1929 Dept of Commerce broadcasting list. [source]. So I know it was on Coney Island, and owned by the U.S. Broadcasting Company. The book Airwaves of New York reveals it to be a sharetime with three other stations: WBBC, WSGH, and WFRL. The station had first aired in 1926, so it was a competitor (in a sense) to WGBS. it's call letters are an acronym for it's founder: Charles G. Unger. It was sold in 1933 and became WARD. So we know that Calvin left before that date.

Regardless, Calvin's career continued beyond radio. In 1935 he started "Calvin's News Service" a wire service marketed to black weeklies. He died at the age of 1937 at the age of 35.