The 1960s - The Heyday - Part 2

1964 saw several changes at WROV, including the departure of Jerry Joynes Rumor had it that Jerry left because he couldn't stand listening to the "chimes" every fifteen minutes, but he says this wasn't the case. "No, (laughs) that had nothing to do with it. Actually, I'd been there ten years. It was 1964. And I had an opportunity to do Virginia Tech sports so I took it. I wanted that more than a DJ job. I had a non-competitive contract with Burt so I had to work outside of Roanoke for six months.

"Eventually I ended up with Times-World at WDBJ. When I first went there I went there as PD. Burt wasn't happy...he said 'yeah you're going to go over there and take your audience' but I honored the contract." Jerry said he always admired Ron Sunshine and Fred Frelantz . "I had lot of admiration for those guys. A lot of guys came through ROV when I was there but I especially had a lot of admiration for them. We had fun and were always playing jokes on each other."

Jerry Joynes left WROV in 1964.

1964 also brought two big new sounds to WROV. Early in the year, The Beatles exploded onto the playlists. And a few months later, Roanoke met Jack Fisher . Jack grew up in a tough neighborhood in Wilmington, DE and decided as a teenager that if he knew how to dance, he could attract girls, make a name for himself, and use it to get a job as a radio or TV announcer.

After teaching himself by watching other dancers on TV he landed a job as one on Philadelphia's Grady & Hurst TV show where he was known as Irish Jack. This led to a job as one of the regulars on ABC's American Bandstand, a local show which had just gone national with host Dick Clark. For four months Jack was seen across America every afternoon, dancing with partner Dottie Horner alongside Bandstand regulars such as Bob Clayton and Justine Carelli.

Dick Clark and Jack Fisher on the American Bandstand set in 1957.

After Bandstand, Jack again worked for Grady & Hurst who were then doing a live TV show from Atlantic City's Steel Pier. During this time, Jack met and befriended almost every big name in the music business including Ricky Nelson, Bobby Darin and Fabian. When Joe Grady retired in 1960, Jack worked with Ed Hurst on a network radio show from the Steel Pier.

After fulltime radio jobs in Georgetown, DE and Portsmouth, OH, Jack ended up in Washington, DC, at WEAM where, in early 1964, he was sent to help MC America's first Beatles concert (Jack introduced Paul McCartney). After a falling out with owner Harry Averill, Jack was fired. Just as he was about to run out of money, he was offered a job at WROV. Upon arriving Jack embarked on a campaign to bring the Beatles to Roanoke. He didn't succeed, but this gained him much notoriety in the market.

Jack & Bobby Darin on the Steel Pier in 1959.

During his early years at WROV, Fred Frelantz was also a medic in the National Guard and in 1964 was required to serve his six months of active duty. Upon returning, he pulled off one of the most memorable events in Roanoke entertainment history. After his stint in the service, Fred wanted to re-establish himself with the WROV audience by performing a big publicity stunt. So in the fall of 1964 he announced that he was going to break a California disc jockey's record for continuous non-stop broadcasting by doing a "radio wake-a-thon."

Ron Sunshine thinks Fred may have gotten the "wake-a-thon" idea several years earlier when the two were in Oklahoma. "When we were in Oklahoma City, KOMA did one in the window of a department store. I remember Fred being so intrigued by it that he tried to talk the school radio station (KUVY) into letting him do it.

"When he went to KIRL in Wichita I remeber him telling me that he was trying to get management there to go along with it. Whether they did or not I don't know." It's possible that they did, as a 1966 WROV promotional flyer mentions that Fred had previously "gone for 97 hours and 119 hours without sleep."

Fred Frelantz relaxes on the sofa in his Wake-A-Thon trailer Towers Shopping Center, December 1964

The station rented a trailer and positioned it in a highly visible location on the lower level of the newly built Towers Shopping Center. There, on Pearl Harbor Day 1964, Fred began broadcasting 24 hours a day. He lasted 142 hours and 5 minutes (just under six days) and missed the world record by just a few hours. And as a promotion, it worked in a major way. To this day it remains a vivid memory for thousands of people. In 1981 Fred said "I could cure cancer but I'll always be remembered for that darned wake-a-thon!"

Jack Fisher, newly arrived from WEAM in Washington, DC, remembers: "The Fred stories surrounding his stay in this trailer are legendary. Cigarettes and coffee, and more cigarettes and coffee, people dropping in at all hours including some questionable female companions. All the while we played the music at the station, doing our regular shifts, throwing the mike to Fred for comments etc. It was during this time that Fred and I established a unique on air chemistry that you just don’t get with any two radio guys. We parlayed this into a wonderful friendship and on air program."

Several days into the Wake-A-Thon Fred started looking a bit sleepy.

The media said that Fred was lulled to sleep while being driven to breakfast at the Roanoker restuarant by Dave Moran . But truth be told, Fred had started hallucinating and had finally fallen into an unwakeable sleep shortly after a live break during which he said "Dave! Look out for that (censored) truck!" He was taken to a room at the Patrick Henry hotel where Sunday brunch guests were upset over seing "that obviously drunken bum" being carried through the lobby. Fred slept for one whole day, woke up, went to the Texas Tavern and ate, then returned to the hotel and slept for another 24 hours.

And about this time, there occurred another famous first for WROV and the Roanoke Valley. Jim Carroll did his first sports broadcast. Jim, an Iowa native, had been on the Armed Forces radio network during the Korean war. He'd worked in Phoenix and Rome, NY before coming to WROV in 1961 as a salesman and announcer. Three years later, Jim began his sportscasting career with the Cave Spring - Northside football game. Jim would go on to broadcast about 1,300 Valley sports events over the next 41 years.

WROV during the mid 1960s featured several other well-known disc jockeys including H. Gale Henley, Dick Brown, Buddy O'Shea, Jack Shields and Glenn C. Lewis - The Voice Of The Turtle, whose show opened with "In ancient times, prehistoric monsters roamed the face of the earth - today, these monsters are now extinct....except the Voice of the Turtle." Overnights one heard the likes of Jack Shields, Marty Hall, the Enormous Jack Curtiss and Dave Moran the Music Man during the week and Mopey Williams on weekends.

The Voice Of The Turtle, Glenn C. Lewis.

Contests included an hourly trivia question called the WROV "Riddle Raddle," the "Quickie Quiz," and the WROV Diamond Keeper, where some local citizen was given "the WROV diamond" and clues were given to help listeners find them and win it.

Advertisers included two locally owned restaurants whose food was always being given away in WROV contests: a drive-in hamburger joint called Mr. Moes and the Star City's most famous restaurant chain, Lendy's. Lendy's was owned by innovative Roanoke restauranteer Leonard Goldstein, who served up Big Boy hamburgers, Slim Jim sandwiches and KFC.

But perhaps the most well-remembered commercials on WROV at the time were from a local used car dealer called The Automobile Exchange. Twice each afternoon, owner Ralph Peck got on the phone with WROV copy/promotions man Jan Wilkins and talked about Ralph's best deals. These were supplemented by an array of commercials, all featuring different people singing the jingle which went "The Automobile Exchange has cars in your price range, every make and model you choose, with them you just can't lose, so see Ol' Ralph today for the top deal in town, The Automobile Exchange tops everyone around!"

Dick Brown, Glenn C. Lewis, Dave Rinehart and Jack Shields host the 1964 Dick Clark Caravan of Stars (  more... )

The Automobile Exchange song was written by Jim Nesbitt who worked for a short time at WBLU. He later moved to Nashville and wrote "Welfare Cadillac" for Johnny Cash. Dave recalls "I remember there was some concern at WROV when Ralph Peck wanted to use the jingle because everyone thought (me included) it didn't fit.

Jan took it and had some choir record it and it became Roanoke's "signature song" of the 1960s." Other big advertisers of the era included Yoda's, Kenney's and Toot's Drive-In (who ran a clever commercial produced by Fred Frelantz that included a jingle that went "Toots Toots... Toots Toots... Toot's Drive-In out on Williamson Road!").

WROV's big clients of the sixties also included Roanoke's three topless bars: Papa Joe's, Joe & Johnny's and Sammy's. Fred Frelantz was a regular customer of Papa Joe's and once was involved in an incident with Roanoke's most famous topless dancer.

Jack Fisher remembers "there had been a topless wedding at Papa Joe’s which had received national publicity and this is where Fred comes in. One night soon after the topless wedding Fred decided to pay one of his visits to the club. He thought he got lucky. The young lady who participated in this wedding was performing that night. She displayed an interest in Fred and they decided to leave as the club closed.

Burt Levine, Barbara Felton, and Jan Wilkins pose with cards and letters that listeners sent the troops in December 1965.

"Unfortunately for Fred, the dancer's new husband happened to observe this from somewhere in the wings and with a few of his friends gave chase. Fred managed somehow to dodge the chase, and after dropping off the girl hid out in his car at various places in Roanoke not daring to return to his apartment, sure it was staked out by an angry husband.

"He arrived early for the first time ever for our two man show and relayed the story to me, he had been hiding all night. He told me he thought he had shaken them and that they could not find him. I told him that could be a problem when I threw him the mike as we went on the air. Think anyone might be listening to the number one radio station in town?"

Though Jack Fisher's 1964 campaign to bring the Beatles to Roanoke didn't succeed, WROV was institutional in bringing several other major rock acts to the valley. The July, 1964 Dick Clark Caravan of Stars show at Victory Stadium was Roanoke's first BIG rock show, featuring Gene Pitney, the Shirelles and a group that was just about to hit the big time, The Supremes.

Jack Fisher in front of the WROV studios on 15th and Cleveland, 1965.

At the time of the show, Gene Pitney's "It Hurts To Be In Love" was topping the charts, and the Supremes had just released their first of five consecutive number one hits, "Where Did Our Love Go." The show was sponsored by WROV and was hosted by personalities Glenn C. Lewis, Jack Shields, Dick Brown and Dave Rinehart ( more... ).

The following year's "Caravan" was to be even bigger but became a disaster. It happened on May 21, 1965 at Victory Stadium and Roanoke promoter Pete Apostolou called it his "biggest fiasco." The show was to include Bobby Vee, Freddy Cannon, Little Anthony & The Imperials, The Detergents and Herman's Hermits.

At the booking time, the Hermits were relatively unknown but by then they had two songs in the Top Ten and a third on the way. The newspaper ad proclaimed the show would be on "rain or shine" and over 10,000 advance tickets were sold. WROV heaviliy promoted the show and ten fans won dinner with the Hermits. Fisher & Frelantz were to be the MCs.

Jan, Fred, Jack, and Buddy O'Shea with the letters to the troops.

Then it started raining. And raining. And raining. Pete had asked for a wooden stage with a roof to be built the day before but the carpenters didn't show up. So the stadium crew set up a metal stage and by showtime wires to connect instruments and amplifiers were running everywhere. And the artists, afraid they would be electrocuted, refused to go on.

The soaked crowd waited two hours, encouraged by frequent PA system announcements that the show was going to start "in 15 minutes." But it never happened, Pete lost about $5,000 and most of the crowd was disappointed and MAD. Happily, the Hermits, who were managed by Ron Sunshine, returned for a make-up show on June 13 ( more... ).

WROV in the 1960s was as well known for the personalities and their stunts as it was for the music. One involved Jack Fisher and Fred Frelantz and two motorcycles. Jack recalls "in a never ending quest to make money WROV management came up with the idea that a motorcycle could get better gas mileage than a car. Brilliant thinking. To parlay this into cash they talked the owner of Butterfield Cycle into letting Fred and I ride a couple of their motorcycles all over Roanoke as part of a contest, calling in from various points to report our progress.

The WROV DJs & Herman's Hermits in May 1965 the day of the Rain-Out Show. F: Lek Leckenby, Barry Whitwam, Peter Noone, Keith Hopwood, Karl Green; R: Fred, Ron "The Weird Beard" Hart, Jim White, Jack, Gale Henley.

"The idea was to see which one of us would run out of gas first. I thought it might be which one of us would get killed first. Within the first three blocks Fred fell off his cycle three times, once per block. Once we got the hang of it we went off in different directions and filed our phone reports.

"I remember speeding along one of the major roads and suddenly realizing I really did not know what I was doing, and this was before helmets, too. Well , I think we both ran out of gas at about the same time, the cycle shop came and picked up their machines getting the benefit of a lot of publicity which I am sure they paid WROV for. What did Fred and I receive? The gratitude of owner Burt Levine and the opportunity of course to spend several hours as human kamikazes."

Another involved Fisher & Frelantz "hiding the Ide." The theme was "The Ides of March" and the contest was to last the entire spring ratings period. The Ide was a small stuffed animal with a sign on his side that said "I am an Ide." Fred was given the job of hiding him and he chose the railroad trestle on Franklin Road near Brandon. Clues to his location were written and the finder would win $1000. Jack remembers "the first clue was given around 6:30 AM."

Like, This Was the WROV Musicard logo in the Late 1960s. Surveys featured this logo, this little guy, psychedelia and Dr. Pepper ads. (See some on the musicards page).

"Guess what? At 6:35 we got a call on the contest line that the Ide had been found. This contest which was just 5 minutes old was over and the lucky listener had just won $1,000. Believe me this is not how it was supposed to be. Apparently, a train had come by knocked the Ide off the trestle and it was found by a college student who just happened to be the only car in that intersection at that time of day." Burt was furious.

The station also continued its emphasis on public service and public affairs programming. Much of this came from Burt's strong sense of family and community. He once said "I've always felt that part of the influence of a station is that you can really educate people, especially if you do it through entertaining them rather than lecturing to them.

"We always felt our role was to bridge the fear of the unknown." An example of this was the station's many live call-in shows on controversial issues. One of the first came in 1966 when John Lennon said that "Christianity would vanish and shrink" and that The Beatles were "bigger than Jesus."

Jack Fisher, Gale Henley and Jim Carroll, 1965.

The resultant storm of outrage saw the station taking many calls from angry people. Some advertising clients cancelled because they didn't want to be on a station that played Beatles records. With a looming public relations disaster on his hands, Burt decided to do a call-in show about the subject featuring Rev. Harry Gamble of Roanoke's Calvary Baptist Church.

Burt recalled "His comment was, 'They're absolutely right, they do have that influence.' You can imagine the reaction of all these angry people tuning in hearing one of the most familiar people in the area giving his view. That just toned everything down."

1966 saw the end of the unforgettable WROV Chimes format (though for a few years they continued to use a modified version that did not chime the hours). About this time, a very short, fast "WROV" jingle was used.

Then in 1967 the "Get With The Winners" jingle package was unveiled. They were written by Jan Wilkins and recorded by a production company in Richmond and included "If you want to win, you've got to get with the winners!", "The wonderful weekend's here" and "A winner's wonderland at 1240." The station made much use of the "winners" slogan, which also appeared on promotional material and stationery.

Marty Hall was the WROV "night owl" for most of 1966.

Also, 1966 saw the beginning of the Fisher Frelantz Show. Two-person radio shows were almost unheard of in the 1960s and WROV broke new ground with the "Fisher Frelantz Fling," a title which came from a jingle Fred recorded to the music of a Kellogg's commercial.

Team shows take a lot of work and theirs was no exception. Fred and Jack spent hours writing and producing hilarious material including their classic "Bonsack New Years Day Parade" which "took place in June to cut down on crowds." They did fake "Whirly Bird" helicopter traffic reports, reviewed plays at local theatres that they'd never seen, and made so much fun of local school lunch menus that school officials regularly complained.

They also did a local version of 93KHJ Los Angeles' Real Don Steele's "Tina Delgado Is Alive" routine. And they established "The Fisher Frelantz Freeloader's Club" where they invited local clubs and organizations to invite them to dinner. Takers of the offer usually had high expections and assumed Fred and Jack would speak and entertain, but much to their chagrin Fred would usually tell one joke, then they'd eat dinner and leave.

To get his money's worth, owner Burt Levine had Fred and Jack do both the 6am-9am and 3pm-6pm slots. Fred once said "people would hear us on the way to work and again on the way home and thought we were there all day."

The Enormous Jack Curtiss & Boom Boom Branegan. Jack spent two months at WROV in Summer 1966 then left WROV to go to Radio England....Boomer came from Radio England to WROV.

The summer of 1966 also brought another huge WROV contest. On the heels of Jack Fisher's failed campaign to bring the Beatles to Roanoke in 1965, the station decided to take some of Roanoke to see The Beatles. A busload of tickets were given away and winners were escorted by Fred Frelantz to the Washington, DC Beatles concert of August 15, 1966.

Judy King, a writer for the Roanoke Times & World News, posing as a "friend of Fred's," covered it for the paper. The winners, mostly ranging in age from 11 to 14, carried Beatle songbooks, radios, cameras and food along for the six-hour trip. Upon arrival, they found their seats, saw the opening acts and finally the Beatles, though some were disappointed that they couldn't hear the music for the noise.

During the show, a 16-year old jumped out of the stands, ran up on stage, touched John, George and Paul then was grabbed by the police while the group, unphased, kept on playing. One person apparently brought along his pet frog Clyde, who escaped on the bus. The tired crowd arrived back in Roanoke at 5:15 am. Roanoker John Gibson, Sr. went on the trip and remembers "I do remember the reporter as I thought she was asking too many questions. I talked her into massaging my neck...One thing I do remember is that the sound system was terrible, but that was 38 years ago!"

John Gibson's Beatles Ticket

In September 1966, WROV began celebrating twenty years of being on the air by having a $20,000 Sweepstakes contest which was, at the time, the largest contest ever presented in the metropolitan Roanoke area. Prizes included a brand new 1967 Austin Healey Sprite sports car, $1000 worth of furniture from Reid & Cutshall Furniture, a refrigerator - freezer, an "Autumn Haze" mink stole and a 21-inch Philco color TV along with hundreds of smaller prizes. The contest, according to Burt, was "a 'Thank You' to Roanoke Valley listeners and advertisers for their 20 years of support and for the warm acceptance they have given to WROV personalities and programs."

1966 also saw WROV faced with credible competition. "Channel 91" WHYE became WPXI "Pixie Radio." Pixie came on in the summer of 1966 with the idea of kicking WROV's butts and during the day, they cut into WROV's audience. Though Pixie was only a daytime station, they played a strict Top 40 format with killer jingles, great promotions aimed at teenagers, and talented disc jockeys including Bob Evans, Perry Woods , Johnny Angel, deep-voiced Bob Dale, and Boom Boom Branegan.

"Boomer" had worked for Swinging Radio England, the offshore "pirate" station that competed with the BBC by playing rock music from a ship. Boomer worked briefly for WROV prior to joining Pixie in 1967 and was killed shortly afterward in a motorcycle accident two blocks from the station. Perry came to WPXI from a gig in Nashville.

Marty Shayne & Boom Boom Branegan with the Pixie Girls in 1967. Boomer worked at WROV then WPXI. Marty worked at WPXI in 1967, then WROV during the summer of 1969. Doesn't that kid look just like The Beaver?

Pixie called themselves the "Home of the All-Americans" and had a lot of chutzpah. When they went on the air, they continuously broadcast the message "it's coming to Roanoke, it's coming to Roanoke" for days. Then they sent funeral wreaths to all the other stations in town. Fred Frelantz recalled that "we kept ours and when they were going out of business, we sent it back to them!"

Pixie's then-modern sound undoubtedly led to WROV retiring the Jess Duboy chimes format. According to local radio veteran Ray Bentley, "Pixie made the market sit up and take notice. I think Pixie was the one that really made rock & roll respectable. They were dynamite."

But by 1967, Pixie was losing money and employee paychecks were often bouncing. This prompted Perry to take a job at WROV, saying "I took a rather large cut in pay to go to WROV but then again, as I wasn’t getting paid at WPXI in retrospect it was a step up." Soon afterward, Perry was offered a job doing afternoons at WNOE, New Orleans. But by then he'd decided he'd had enough of the insecurity of the radio business and took a job selling cars.

By 1968, Pixie finally was evicted from their downtown studios near the corner of Elm & Franklin and spent their last days at the hillside transmitter site in SE Roanoke.