Post Mortem Broadcasts

 

There is a small but growing number of dead DJs who have ongoing programs in radioland. It's a strange convention, but one that was inevitable after the re-run was invented. Early radio, like later early television, was all live and re-runs were impossible without re-performance. The first re-runs probably began immediately after the advent of pre-recorded syndicated programs distributed by mail. Eventually this process would have led either knowingly or unknowingly to the airing of programming by people now deceased. I assume just based on raw actuarial tables that this must have happened by 1940. But strangely today this has evolved to a very deliberate practice.

I'm not aiming for a canonical list here. Essentially any rerun of any golden era program at least somewhat meets this description. What I'm looking at here are hosted monologue programs. To listen to these programs is to listen to a dead Disc Jockey talk to you. This something much more morbid than listening to re-runs of Lum and Abner.  Here are a few particularly eerie examples.

91.3 KVLU - Best of Bax
This one is particularly weird. It's not a series of re-run whole contiguous programs. KVLU staff spent years digitizing tapes and acetates. For years now, on Sunday nights, KVLU has broadcast the Best of Bax a two-hour program made of excerpts and "related materials"  that are pieced together from tapes spanning his 50 year radio career.  More here.

WWCR - Gene Scott
OK, so this is a shortwave station but it's so weird I can't skip it. Gene Scott was preacher who used to lease a frequency on WWCR's transmitters. he is now deceased but still is aired on the station. How can that be?  Scott was diagnosed with prostate cancer and refused conventional treatment and relied on God to heal him. That is as effective as homeopathic medicine. His widow pastor Melissa Scott, took over the franchise and used what was left if his ministry to keep his zombie voice on the air. More here.

89.7 WGBH - Ray Smith on Jazz Decades
The program debuted back in 1972 on WGBH, but Ray died in 2010. Over those 38 years he produced over 1900 shows. The Station manager apparently thought that Ray should live on like a ghost haunting evenings at the NPR affiliate.  More here.

820 WNYC–AM- Danny Stiles' Music Museum
Danny Stiles died in 2011. His oldies program, the Music Museum still airs on Saturday nights at WNYC-AM. Stiles was a long time NY disc jockey having also been at WRCA, WEVD, WNSW, WHBI, WNJR, WJDM and WPAT in his 55 year career. His WNYC program played pre-1950s pop and his playlists dipped all the way into the 1920s. So not only is the host deceased... but so are almost all of the recorded musicians. More here.

For the record that is nowhere near a complete list. The most I think about it the more I realize there must be. It's endemic. Marian McPartland of Piano Jazz died last year. She stopped recording programs in 2010 and she is still in reruns on NPR. Jay Harris on WMNR was in post mortem reruns until recently I believe. Karl Haas on WCLV in Cleveland died in 2005, but the station continued to run tapes of Adventures in Good Music until 2007.  And by all reports NPR intends to put Car Talk into reruns like a Charles Shultz 'Peanuts' comic strip.  That will get extra funny as all the cars they discussed slowly become antiques.

Milton William Cooper

 

By most measures (including mine) Milton William Cooper was a bit crazy. As a conspiracy theorist he crossed that community's version of the Maginot line into Ufology, the occult, Illuminati, numerology, Freemasons, AIDs denialism, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the whole wacky enchilada. But radioland has a lot of eccentrics worth discussing. So yes, he was a conspiracy nut. But more importantly, he was a shortwave radio broadcaster.

On the bad side, I have to admit that Bill Cooper had a bad side. But he is hardly as memorable as the cranks that listened to him.  Reportedly Timothy J. McVeigh was a fan. The only loose confirmation of that fact is a statement by a Southern Poverty Law Center spokesman  that Cooper was well known within the militia movement.Without a corroborating statement I can only class that as a rumor. But his connection to militia movements is undisputed.

His program aired on 7.415 MHz WWCR , a shortwave radio station broadcasting our of Nashville, TN.  It's programming is very similar to that of WBCQ in Maine. The call letters stand for "World Wide Christian Radio" but listeners often call it World Wide Conspiracy Radio. Cooper's show was aired on weeknights from 1993 to 2001 and always began with air raid sirens. The program provided 8 solid years of programming that makes Alex Jones sound like a puff ball. Cooper read letters from listeners, and often broadcast live taking live callers. His show also streamed online, which was a real novelty back in the 1990s. You can listen here if you feel you must. (more here)

His undoing was his IRS denialism. There is a special sub-group of conspiracy nuts who believe the IRS has no right to levy taxes. This is a special kind of crazy because it's in such plain language in our most important founding document.. Article I of the Constitution "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises...etc."  Bill's reading comprehension aside, the real problem was that Bill took the step of not paying income taxes. In July 1998 he was charged with tax evasion and an arrest warrant was issued. But the Feds didn't try very hard to arrest him. Two years later the US Marshals Service got around to naming him a major fugitive. By all reports, they still hadn't tried looking for him at his home. In November of 2001 Apache County sheriff's deputies finally knocked on the door of his trailer home.

According to the police Cooper fired on the deputies and they returned fire. In the exchange Cooper was killed. Interestingly the Apache County police hadn't come to serve a warrant on tax evasion. One version of the story holds that they were there only on an unrelated complaint. Bill was allegedly accused of threatening someone with a firearm. He died November 5th 2001 at the age of 58. More here.