Booger Brothers Broadcasting System

Almost everyone knows what a Les Paul guitar is, but history seem to be forgetting Les Paul the person. Firstly, his real name was Lester William Polsfuss, He never legally changed his name. Les Paul was a stage name he started using in the mid-1930s. It wasn't even his first stage name. Paul didn't start buildings guitars until the 1940s. Before his guitar era he was a radio performer, a recording engineer, a music director and for a time ...a pirate radio operator. Whole books have been written about the mans many storied accomplishments but I'd like to focus on radio and one pirate station in particular. More here. Paul was a genius engineer his ability to build a transmitter, or even an entire radio station is not in doubt —only the details around this particular tale.

The story is fabulous, who doesn't like a tale mixing wild house parties with pirate radio and hot jazz.  But it's main problem is that his biographies skip over it. The biographical reference is admittedly brief. It appears in his 1993 biography Les Paul: An American Original, by Mary Alice Shaughnessy. Les Paul was still alive when it was published, he died in 2009. That overlap also gives it more credence, but contemporary references were hard to find.

So let's start with his early radio experiences. He received some engineering training as early as 8 years old by an unnamed engineer from WTMJ. He became a musician as a teenager. He played with Rube Tronson's Texas Cowboys, and played with Sunny Joe Wolverton's Radio Band in St. Louis, MO, on KMOX. The book The Mighty 'MOX by Sally and Rob Rains identifies corroborates that early KMOX program. It is otherwise very obscure.

A young guitar player known as "Rhubarb Red" was part of The International Oil Burner Show between 4:30 and 7 AM from 1927 to 1930."

Les relocated with Joe Wolverton's band to Chicago and started playing on WBBM with them, and then solo as Rhubarb Red. He was performing as both a country artist and a jazz solist. As Red he started recording with Art Tatum which is when his career really took off. The book Famous Wisconsin Musicians by Susan Masino also has him performing at WISN in Milwaukee, WRJN in Racine, and both KBGA and KWTO in Springfield, IL and of course WJJD and WIND in Chicago. This is further referenced in the book Encyclopedia of American Radio 1920 - 1960 by Luther Sies

"Rhubarb Red. A CW tenor, guitarist and harmonica player, Rhubarb Red appeared daily at 6:30 A.M. and again at 9:00 AM. in an all request program WJJD, Chicago, IL; and WIND, Gary, IN, 1935-1937."

That same book has Les relocating to New York in 1937. The official Les Paul website puts it in 1938, but close enough. But 1938 is definitely when he began performing with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians on NBC radio.  In 1941 He returns to Chicago and becomes the music director for radio stations WJJD and WIND. So from his career history we can say definitively that his pirate station existed for a period of time between 1938 and 1941.

Here we have the pirate station boxed in my context. As the legend goes... in Jackson Heights, NY, Les created his own local radio station and broadcast jam sessions. His makeshift studio full of professional musicians. The station operated at low wattage and was only receivable locally, but due to the proximity of LaGuardia airport that included aircraft. Yes, the claim is that the airplanes flying into LGA would get scrambled signals of jazz music mixing with coordinates from the tower. Purportedly he solved that engineering problem with a "wave trap."

How much of that is true? Well, Jackson Heights is a neighborhood in the northwestern part of the Queens in New York City. Les Paul and his wife Mary Ford had an apartment in 40-15 81 St. That address is only about 2 miles from LGA. Most sources describe that as a studio apartment. But Les Paul in an interview said "Getting union cards jumped our pay to $150 a week and allowed us to take furnished apartments at Electra Court." Advertisements for the units described it as "The House of to-morrow, ready to-day!" The developers ran ads for furnished apartments in Down Beat magazine, specifically advertising to musicians —just as Les described. So here was have a plausible reason he had such access to professional musicians; his building was full of them!

Different versions of the tale claim that he set up his studio in the building’s basement, near the furnace room. His friends came over and they played together. But his friends at the time are now enormously famous musicians: band members from the biggest big bands of the era. Not the band leaders but the working union card musicians from Benny Goodman's band, Glenn Miller’s band, Artie Shaw's band, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey's bands, Fred Waring’s band, Bob Crosby’s band and Lionel Hampton's band. It's almost too fantastical to be real. How many of them lived at Electra Court?

I did eventually find a contemporary reference in the July 1940 issue of Popular Mechanics. I think that's Ernie Newton on bass which might make that band some iteration of the Les Paul trio. Did the FCC pay him a visit? Did he really take the  mic and announce the station name as "Booger Brothers Broadcasting?"

The Popular Mechanics article is missing the "Booger Brothers" connection but everything else is there. The general location, the famous musicians, and the broadcasting equipment stretching from the apartment to the basement. A 1953 issue of the Atkinson's Evening Post claims that Les gave the station ID as "The Booger Brothers, The Pink and Yellow network, top of your dial."  But Les went on to say "It was a good station... but the law would have caught up with us if an accident hadn't beat it to the punch." What accident? The Booger Brothers came to an abrupt end in 1941. While jamming in his apartment basement in 1941, Paul was nearly electrocuted to death. [SOURCE]

Paul describes it himself in the book The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy, 1915-1963 by Robb Lawrence. "I stuck my hand in the transmitter when I shouldn't have..." Bassist Ernie Newton knocked him free but he was seriously injured. After an ice bath they took Paul to the hospital. It took him two years to recuperate according to some sources. This is not entirely true but Booger Brothers was still off the air.

In 1941 or 1942 he moved to Chicago where he became the music director for radio stations WJJD and WIND. A promotional photo dated October of 1941 puts him in the Chicago CBS studio. Newspaper radio schedules still show his trio playing on local stations: they were as on air at KLZ and KVOR in May of 1942. A November schedule has him on WEOA, WCKY, WGAR, WHIO, and KMOX at different times. Some biographies have him moving to "Hollywood" in 1943. That's partly true. The only radio he did after that was for the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) because he got drafted. Though he did do some films. The Bing Crosby radio show that gets connected to this move was Kraft Music Hall and he didn't appear on that program until 1945. He got his own eponymous radio show in 1950. It was a 15-minute slot on NBC with his trio now composed of himself, Mary Ford, and rhythm player Eddie Stapleton. His career never stopped but I think that's the last major radio milestone on that long and storied career I mentioned.

The Jazz KNOB and the Lighthouse Cafe

 103.1 KNOB, which may have been the first all-jazz radio station in the world. I am always wary of broad claims of being "first," but Stein bought KNOB in 1957. Most other all-jazz stations claim much more narrow firsts. 88.3 WBGO claims to be the first Jazz Station to "webcast day and night" in 1997. In 1966, WLIB-FM claimed alternately to be the first jazz station in all of America programmed by African Americans and/or New York's only all-jazz radio station. It was almost certainly both, at least in 1966. Even WHAT-AM's all-jazz format only goes back to 1958, though their overnight jazz programming goes back to at least 1956... courtesy of Sid Mark's program.
Alex "Sleepy" Stein was a jazz DJ and owner of the infamous

If you are thinking of other Los Angeles area stations, KBCA only flipped to jazz in 1960, then dropped it in 1966. If you were thinking of the Alameda-based 92.7 KJAZ, it was founded in 1959. Despite their claims, it was not the first commercial jazz station. [More here] And what about KLON? It was founded in 1950 which is before most of these other claimants, but they didn't change to an all-jazz format until 1981! The station changed its call sign to KKJZ in July 2002. A 1958 article in Broadcasting magazine (below) firms up the KNOB claim. It appears that KNOB was all jazz but WHAT may have them on total operating hours:

"Southern California's KNOB began operation with a jazz format on 25 August 1957 in Long Beach, though the station only gradually increased its hours of operation to twenty-four hours as the station increased power and moved from 97.9 to 103.1 MHz a year later."

Stein for his part, didn't start in jazz. Stein was born in Georgia, then lived in Miami and Havana, Cuba. He even graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in languages. He moved to New York for a job at CBS. He later moved to Chicago for an announcing job on WIND. There he got his nickname "Sleepy" for a slot he inherited from Russ "Wide-Awake" Widoe. Later Alex was station manager and program manager at KARV in Phoenix. He moved from there to Long Beach, CA for a gig at KFOX-AM. It was at KFOX that Alex started doing remote broadcasts from the Lighthouse, a legendary jazz club in Hermosa Beach. More here. His show was called Mahogony Hall. Stein brought Niles, Jim Gosa and other early jazz DJs to KNOB. Ray Torian hired him as Program Director, then Stein bought half of the business and it flipped to all-jazz. Torian wasn't a jazz fan but he gave it a go.

But it was Howard Rumsey who brought jazz to the Lighthouse. Rumsey convinced John Levine, the owner The Lighthouse Café, to host a series of Sunday jazz jam sessions. Levine purchased the bar in 1949, Levine was skeptical but on May 29th, 1949 he gave it a whirl. It was hugely successful. Those live jam session broadcasts from the Lighthouse built Stein's reputation in the L.A. jazz scene. Jazz was popular but live jazz was a rare bird on the radio.

At the Lighthouse, the house band was Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars. Rumsey was a local. He was born in Brawley, CA near the Salton sea. He first began playing bass with Vido Musso and Johnnie Davis, then became part of Stan Kenton's first band. He played with Charlie Barnet and Barney Bigard then returned to Los Angeles and founded the Lighthouse All-Stars. Contemporary records recorded Rumsey's All-Stars with it's various line ups multiple times between 1952 and 1960. Their regular Sunday gig became Stein's bread and butter at KFOX. More here.

In the end, the Lighthouse All-Stars outlasted jazz on KNOB. In 1966 The Jazz Beat column of Billboard remarked that the "...Sleepy Stein and Ray Torian interests, who became involved in internal fighting, and hindered the stations growth." In 1966 Stein sold his interest in KNOB and became a stockbroker. The station flipped to an “adult request” music format. KCBA bacame the top jazz station in Los Angeles by default. Live jazz continued at the Lighthouse Cafe until John Levine's death in the early 1970s. That brought an end to Rumsey’s time at The Lighthouse. Howard Rumsey himself continued to write and record for decades. He died on July 15th, 2015. He was 97. He lived long enough to see the formation of Woofy Productions. Between 2003 and 2007 they released nine different jazz LPs in their "Sunday Afternoons at The Lighthouse Cafe" series.  More here.

I strongly recommend reading the paper Jazz and Radio in the United States by Aaron Joseph Johnson. He dives into this topic than even the Peretti text. You can download it [HERE]

Art Hellyer is Not Dead

Art Hellyer, said in a 1993 interview on 97.1 WNIB that he wasn't really a DJ he just "played music as a fill between commercials." Hellyer was a mainstay of Chicagoland radio starting back in the 1940s and lasting for five decades. His zany off-beat humor was part of what shaped our modern radio gestalt bridging the gap between guy s like J. Aku Head Pupule and the modern morning zoo. He was on air at WGN, WJOL, WLS, WMAQ, WJJD, WOPA, WIND, WAIT, WOWO, WCFL, WBBM and certainly others. His biography The Hellyer Say is not to be skipped. 

His first show was on WKNA in Charleston, WV in 1947 interviewing auto salesmen.  Despite behaving like Art Hellyer, he was not fired from that job. (In his book he actually devotes a whole chapter to what he was not fired for.) It was a theme in his career. His zany behavior got him ratings. WBBM famously fired him over a dress-code violation and then re-hired him. As he told the Chicago Tribune in 1996 more simply that he got fired "a lot."

"...I counted 14 times. It may have been more than that... I always said every one of my battles was over creative control. I wanted to be creative, and they wanted control."

It's hard to say which of his programs was the most important to his career as several of them held the number one slot in one decade or another. In the 1950s his program The Art Hellyer Show aka the Morning Madcap on 1000 WCFL-AM, again on 780 WBBM with his Supper Club shows in the '60s while also doing mornings at WAIT, Then again on WLS-FM in the '70s until they went progressive rock in 1969. He was number one again on 1160 WJJD-AM in the '80s. His time at WOPA straddles some of that doing WOPA Art Hellyer's Memory Lane in the mid sixties.

What probably got his career going the most was his time on on WCFL. There he was given carte blanche for the first time in his career and he more or less ran amok. He offended big sponsors, like Coca-Cola and General Motors but the listeners loved it.  In he did spend a few serious on air. He advocated for the seat belts in cars in the 1950s and in 1960 spent time explaining to listeners the importance of the then brand new Polio vaccine to quiet the anti-vaccination nuttters. In 2011 he made another come back of sorts and began Internet radio station Party 934. Not bad for a guy that one quipped that "...the average life of a disc jockey in Chicago is three years."

Transcription Mystery Disc #178

What I know of the Milt Herth Trio you could fit on a matchbook cover. They were an obscure music trio, half jazz, half novelty wholly strange. They were sometimes also billed as the Milt Hurth Trio, as this one it labeled. And that's not just random small town playbills. It was sometimes spelling with a "U" in paid newspaper advertisements. More here.


This disc is an 8-inch metal core Recordisc with an outer edge start. It's partly labeled with the band name "Milt Hurth Trio" and the date 9-15-46.  The song name is not listed, and the initials CFC are in the center prominently. I think those are the engineers initials. But that's a guess. It could just as easily be a radio recording, there was a CFC in Canada in the mid 1940s, but I have nothing to corroborate that connection.

The group consisted of pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith, drummer O'Neil Spencer, and of course Organist Milt Herth. Sometimes they performed as a quartet with guitarist Teddy Bunn. Later Erinie Austin played drums for them. Herth cut as many as 8 sides for Decca in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and at least one for Coral around the same time. According to the 1943 Billboard Yearbook Herth's debut in radio came in 1933. Another source credits his debut to 1935 as an organist on WIND-AM.  He was still releasing marginally listenable organ music as late as 1955.

The Wax And Needle Club!

The Wax and Needle Club ran for about two years. DJ Bill Evans ran this top 10 count down show of sorts. The station was 1000 WCFL-AM and the program was a half hour program that aired at 7:30 PM on weekdays running after a sports program and followed by a live concert in Grant Park. In 1949 it was preceded by news and followed by news and a serenade. A June issue of Billboard from 1948 describes the program cynically but with some detail:

" ...Bill Evans, the Wax and Needle Club, WCFL, reports a good mail pull on his quiz disk gimmick in which he invited teen-agers to submit the reasons why they'd like to guess the title of a different quiz disk on his show each night. Evans interviews the youngster and, if he can identify the disc, he receives a special Bill Evans album of current pops..."

Let me state for the record now that DJ Bill Evans is not the jazz pianist Bill Evans. Accept no substitutions. Which Bob Evens he was remains unconfirmed.  My theory is that our Bill Evans is the one that was on 720 WGN-AM for years. [more here]. It was the right place at the right time, and it's very rare a market will allow two DJs to use the same name at the same time. My "evidence" is a 1948 advertisement in Billboard listing both WGN and WCFL net to Bill Evans name.

If I'm right, he was running the Bill Evans' Show 6:30 AM to 8:00 AM weekday mornings as early as 1953. A 1955 issue of Billboard put the start of his career as 1943 which works with the timeline as well. His morning program was re-named "Morning Reveille" and ran into the 1950s. His career started in Duluth, Minnesota. Teasingly his 1995 obit confirms that and at least two other stations. "After leaving WGN-AM, he purchased a radio station in Ames, Iowa. He later sold it and bought one in Lakeland, Fla."  I confirmed in a 1958 issue of Radio Daily-Television daily that the station in Ames was 1430 KASI-AM. Interestingly they also state he quit 560 WIND-AM that same year... so we must add more to the resume.

As successful as these early teen target programs were, they also didn't fit the format of the era. Program Directors from the 1940s didn't know what to do with direct audience engagement. For them, getting fan letters was the full extent of quantifiable success... unless you showed up in the Crosley ratings. Call in shows were relatively new. Teens as a marketing demographic were strictly a post-WWII phenomena. They were totally unprepared. I found a few winners of his polls:  Peggy Lee, Herbie Fields, Eddy Howard, and Mel Torme, This was no hot jazz or R&B program. This was safe, wholesome, harmless, homogenized white pop.  Just marketing to teens was edgy enough back then.