I’m going to have to ask you to click on some sound bites this time, but you’re going to have a lot of fun with this. Let me introduce you to a friend of mine by the name of Bruce Bradley. Lots of folks know about Bruce, because he was an important radio personality in New York, Boston, and St. Louis. Bruce and I worked together at the station in Boston where I met my Lady Wonder Wench. There’s an air check of my show one night, when Bruce decided to drop in on the current podcast. I think you’ll enjoy the fun. But if you’re not from Boston, there are some things you’re going to need to know about, in order to understand what’s going on.
Here’s the scorecard. Bruce and I played a lot of tricks on each other. I started the Grape Aid Society…GAS…featuring stories like what’s purple, weighs 8 tons and lives in the sea? Moby Grape…of course. So Bruce started promoting elephants. How do you know if there’s an elephant in your refrigerator ? Watch for foot prints in the Jello. You get the idea. I had a venus fly trap. I called it Irving the Second… Superplant. Faster than a speeding clump of crab grass…able to gulp tall garbage dumps in a single chomp. Bruce had Super-mosquito. They had many virtual battles. Arnie Ginsburg was a very important dj on another station. The Blue Bunny was a somewhat…semi sleazy bar at Nantasket Beach, where the station did a lot of broadcasts. And I claimed that the first person to slap a slab of meat between a couple of pieces of bread was not the Earl of Sandwich. It was the Duke of Shrewsbury. Therefore, your lunchtime treat should be called a Shrewsbury. Bruce disagreed.
Ok. Back in time now…way back. It’s about midnight in Boston, at WBZ radio…and I’m minding my own business doing my show, and Bradley comes into the studio to answer some phone calls. Please either click on this url or copy and paste this link into your browser and open it:
https://www.yousendit.com/download/WFJWMFhzR3NlaFExZXNUQw
That’s my friend Bruce Bradley. He’s not in my bookStaying Happy Healthy And Hot (www.amazon.com), because unlike the guys in my book like Imus, and Wolfman Jack and Cousin Brucie, some people don’t know about him. But now you do.
Dick’s Details Quiz. All answers are at www.dicksummer.com/podcast
1- What can fruit flies now safely forget ?
2- What does the Marine Bobbit worm have in common with the Lorena Bobbitt woman.
3- What happened to 16 of the top 20 cities most often hit by hurricanes ?
Dick’s Details. They take your mind off your mind.
I wanted you to meet my friend Bruce Bradley for a reason. He was brilliant on the air, and he was for a long time a real friend to my Lady Wonder Wench and me. As you may know, I spent a lots of years on the radio. Radio was different then. It was a magic box. We hid our radios under our pillows at night, so we could listen to Louie Louie, and the Dodgers, and you could find out if school was closed tomorrow because of the snow. But there was something more coming out of the box than just the music and the information. There was magic in that little box. And the magic in the box somehow instantly made the voices in the box appear in your mind as complete, living, breathing, people. People who became your friends. They were there with you whenever you needed them. They made you laugh, they told you stories, they made you feel better when you were hurting. The magic in the box turned just voices into real people. Real Friends. Radio was different then.
Bruce and I always wanted to be the magicians in the box. And for a while, we were. The stories a magician tells on stage, are just as important to the magic as the rabbit he pulls out of the hat. And the way he tells the stories turns a simple stick into a magic wand. If you read the story he was telling, it wouldn’t be the same. The magic was in the telling. Please click on A real friend and listen carefully to this story about a woman from the Night Connections personal audio cd. And watch her suddenly appear in your mind.
What did she look like to you? What was she wearing? How did she feel about her friend? What do you suppose she’ll do with the rest of her life ? See what I mean ? Magic.
A Real Friend is from the Night Connections Personal Audio CD. If you like it, you can just keep this blog, or if you’d like a fresh copy, just check out the night connections icon on the home page.
Thank you for making my friend Bruce Bradley feel welcome, here in this magic box where you keep this podcast. I’m pretty sure he knows you did that. Because you see, Bruce died last Saturday. But he was a master magician. And magic works in wondrous ways…forever.