The 1960s - The Heyday - Part 3

During the mid and late 1960s, listeners heard Marty Hall on the overnight show. Marty left for the army near the end of 1966 and was replaced by Greg Rose. In 1967 the lineup also included a guy who went by the name of John Galt. Nobody remembers John's real name, but his air name came from the Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged" which begins with the line "Who is John Galt?"

A local outdoor advertising firm was running a campaign to see who noticed advertising. Billboards that said "Who Is John Galt?" went up all over Roanoke. So, figuring he would ride this free publicity, "John Galt" became his air name. He even had the slogan painted on the side of his car. As it turns out, the guy was AWOL from the military and MPs showed up one day at the station and arrested him right off the air.

Sammy Russell was Music Director in 1966 - 1967 and did "BAAAAAAAT Granny!"

Sammy Russell worked middays and was WROV's music director from 1966 to early 1968, and is perhaps best remembered for his Batman & Robin take-off "Bat Granny." Sammy came from Marion where he began working on WMEV on his sixteenth birthday. He later worked at WOLD, then briefly Charlotte, NC at WIST before coming to WROV at age 22.

He recalls the day he got the job: "When Fred called me to offer me a job at WROV after he had listened to my aircheck, he didn't say hello; he just yelled into the telephone, 'Baaaaat Grannnny!!' I knew then he was a super guy." Sam went on to become the GM of WMEV FM94! in Marion and, with his partner Hugh Gwyn, turned it into a regional powerhouse when everyone said it couldn't be done.

Sunday afternoons featured "The Towers Top Ten Show" which played the local hits and was usually hosted by Sammy. It began with an introduction produced by Fred with lots of sound effects that went "(tympani roll) Tabulated from record sales.... (tympani roll) Tabulated from record requests.... (tympani roll) Tabulated from jukebox plays.... (tympani roll) Tabulation complete! (brass fanfare) Spotlight on the WROV Top Ten Songs Of The Week! (lion roaring) Tabulated through public viewpoint. And now here are the tabulation results of this week's top ten songs !" after which the DJ would rip into the number ten song.

The WROV MUSICARD from September 11, 1967 (See more on the musicards page).

WROV in 1968 was "The Castle" of Fred King . Fred did the night shift in 1968 and was energetic and hilarious. Fred was the guy with the "Yes Mastah!" sounder that he regularly dropped into his show in approproate and funny places. One of Fred's biggest sponsors was Lendy's and Fred's show featured the Lendy's "Drive In" game. Listeners called in and were put on the air to guess which Lendy's food item the waitress was going to bring out to their car and if correct, won it.

Fred is perhaps best remembered for an infamous promotion of the late sixties called "The All-Gone Machine," a sound effect of a big loud machine that made stuff disappear. Each night, listeners went on the air live and listed items such as their school books that they wanted chucked into the machine. This was discontinued after some racist called in and said he wanted to put "all of the (N-word)s in Roanoke" into it (remember, these were the turbulent late 1960s).

In 1968, WROV hired the man who would become the face of the station throughout the next decade and one of the region's most respected radio stars. Bart Prater started working for WOLD in Marion, VA in 1963. After a fire had destroyed much of the station, the owner ran an ad looking for a few high school kids who wanted to make a few bucks by helping clean up the mess.

According to Bart, "the owner had a bunch of kids shoveling ashes and I told him I could do more than that." Bart says he was handed a leaf switch from a radio station control board and told that if he could fix it, he'd be hired. Bart loved electronics, made it work and "he had me fixing stuff at $1 an hour. I helped rebuild the transmitter and the control board and got on as an engineer and finally as a DJ."

Fred King in the Castle, 1968.

Bart started as "the morning DJ at WOLD" which had nothing to do with the Harry Chapin song. "The song was about a DJ who was getting 'OLD' and had nothing to do with the station, but when it came out the owner of the real WOLD tried to sue." He followed fellow Marion jocks Frank Lewis and Sammy Russell to WROV because of its reputation as the station of air personalities and because of his respect for owner Burt Levine.

Sammy recalls "Bart once built a 1KW AM transmitter from some old burned-up parts and a thousand pound ball of steel wool. I remember him asking me, 'Do you think I would have a chance of getting a job at WROV?' I said, 'Just send them a tape and have your bags packed.'" In the late 1960s, Bart generally worked the 7pm - midnight shift which then started with the "Coke Club," a 15-minute oldies show broken up by two 90-second Coke commercials.

Bart was trained by another WROV legend, Phil Beckman . Phil was one of a few Bedford radio personalities who made it to WROV, along with Jack Shields, Chuck Holloway and Vince Miller. Phil started in radio at WBLT, Bedford his first day out of high school in June, 1966. Fred Frelantz hired him to do middays on WROV in August, 1967 and he was just "blown away" over getting a job there.

Fred King at the WROV reception desk. Prior to remodeling, it was in the big open area outside of the control room, under the window.

But Phil's interest in WROV went back much farther. In late summer, 1962, Phil recalls a day when he was in Roanoke with his mother shopping for school supplies. He wanted to see the station so he got a cab and said "Take me to WROV." He recalls meeting WROV GM Bernie Mann , who couldn't believe a kid would take a cab just to visit the station and looked out the window to see if there really was one in the parking lot.

Phil recalls seeing the "quonset hut" building, Jerry Joynes on the air and the engineering room. He saw the radio licenses hanging on the wall and realized the most of the WROV guys didn't use their real names. While there, they gave him some 45s that he still has today. He later wrote Bernie a letter thanking him and requesting autographs from the guys, a few days later he received a letter from Bernie which had them all.

Phil Beckman just after he left WROV in 1973.

Phil recalls what it was like back then: "the Gates Diplomat was the board, and we had three RCA front loading cart machines. Middle one held the 'format' cart (chimes, news intro, etc.) The 'WROV' girl was on a separate cart which frequently sat in the middle machine. When I would follow Fred Frelantz on the air, he would try to see how high he could stack the spot carts before there was a repeat.

"The 45's were in 4 bins: A,B,C and D. Oldies (no shucks) were on a shelf next to the bathroom. Once an hour, we visited the 'cobweb corner', complete with Jess DuBoy's intro. One shift I did when first at 'ROV was Midnight to 8AM on Sundays! Jack Fisher followed me and he was always late. He would try to get me to go get breakfast for him at Garland's Drug Store."

WROV started off 1968 by celebrating the Chinese New Year. One of the announcers did the all-night show as "Confucius" (we're still trying to figure out who this was). An hourly contest gave listeners a chance to call in with "Confucius sayings" and win everything from La Choy Chinese dinners to one of three genuine rickshaws and rickshaw race contests were held on the air.

Fred King with Paul Revere & The Raiders in the WROV Studio, 1968.

During the summer of 1968, they did a promotion that involved Pillsbury's Gorilla Milk Instant Breakfast . The commercial jingle sang "You'll go ape for Gorilla Milk." Stores gave out "Gorilla Club" cards and winning numbers were announced hourly on WROV. The promotion culminated with Jack riding Lakeside's Shooting Star rollercoaster with a gorilla. The gorilla was really a college football player in a gorilla suit who confessed to Jack that he'd never ridden a rollercoaster before and was scared to death, and during the ride he nearly choked Jack as he held on for dear life.

And who can forget going out on October 31 to try to find the WROV Halloween House? Roanoker Twig Gravely: "I remember back in the 1960s I actually went around asking everyone on Halloween the "are you a WROV Halloween House?" question, and found one. I think I got a carton of Diet-Rite cola and some WROV doodads."

Or WROV's many phone contests. Whether it was to answer a trivia question or be "caller number 10 at 343-4444" to win an album, the station's phone contests sometimes generated so much response that they would actually announce on air for people to quit calling because the phone company was having problems due to the call volume.

Jack Fisher giving away a genuine back seat from a car and 100 gallons of gas from Sunoco on Franklin Road, 1968.

During the mid and late sixties, Fred and Jack were the emcees of every major rock and roll show that toured Roanoke. This included James Brown, Tom Jones, the Beach Boys, the Happenings, Ray Charles and many more. A few were disasters. There was the 1965 Herman's Hermits rain-out. Then in early 1968, in what was to be the first concert in the brand new Salem Civic Center, The Four Seasons were to appear but never showed up.

The Vikings were opening for the Four Seasons and ended up playing several hours as people waited for the headliners, who went instead to Salem, WEST Virginia (a small town between Parkersburg and Clarksburg) instead of Salem, Virginia. Jack was the poor soul who had to tell the thousands of angry people the news. So the Vikings ended up being the act that christened the new civic center. Ray Charles appeared a few weeks later and the commercials featured Ray himself promising he was going to come to "Salem, VIRGINIA, not Salem, West Virginia!"

The Vikings V in 1967: Allen, Lane, Steve, Fred, Tommy. More here...

Another fiasco involved an artist who gained fame through his appearances on the TV show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Tiny Tim. Jack remembers: "Because Fred Frelantz and I were considered the pundits of rock and roll in Roanoke at that time, our opinion on music and acts had a perceived value. Pete Apostalou, who promoted the soaking wet Herman's Hermits show, was the primary promoter of touring rock acts and wrestling in town. Apostalou was quite a character in his own right.

"One day he came by WROV and asked our opinion on a show he wanted to book. He asked Fred and I who would be a bigger draw—the Fifth Dimension, who at that time had only one hit; or Tiny Tim, the ukulele strumming warbler who was a featured act on TV'S Laugh In. We voted for Tiny Tim.

"Of course a few months later just about the time the show was scheduled the Fifth Dimension had scored with such all-time classics as "Up Up & Away" and the "Age of Aquarius" How were we to know? I emceed the Tiny Tim show which bombed bigger than Nagasaki. Tiny Tim was just as eccentric in person as on TV, he kept following me around calling me Mr. Fisher and asking me questions every 10 minutes. The moral of the story, when given a choice never book dogs, kids or long haired, squeaky voiced ukulele players."

After this, Apostalou felt Jack owed him one and talked him into being emcee at a Starland Arena wrestling (in the South that's pronounced "RASS-lin'") match. After introducing the bad guys, Rip Hawk and Swede Hansen, Jack had to hide in the office from the emotional crowd that included one old granny lady who stabbed somebody with her knitting needles.

The Jack Fisher In Club. If you go out of your way to be IN, you'll be too far out to get IN.

In 1968, it seemed that everything was either "far out" or "in." The Mamas & The Papas and Dobie Gray had recorded "I'm In With The In Crowd", there was "Laugh In" and all over the place events were called "be-ins." Jack decided to have some fun with this phenomenon by creating the Jack Fisher IN Club. Members received a card bearing the club's motto "If you go out of your way to be IN, you may be too far out to get IN."

According to Jack, "the IN Club was created to take advantage of the rebellion against conformity that was popular during that time in the 1960's and was designed to poke fun at all of the things you needed to do to be IN. There were over 3500 card carrying members, many of whom probably still retain their card today." Members of the IN Club didn't get any special prizes or discounts. "The IN CLUB was just that a card carrying club that was cool to belong to" says Jack, "Giving things away would not have been IN."

WROV billed the decade's last summer "Super Summer 69." Special IDs by Bob Barron were used and many promotions were based on the idea. Marty Shayne was the all-night guy that summer and remembers "it started as 'Super Spring 69' which is what they were doing when I returned from Vietnam and re-joined the ROV staff in May of 1969. After saying 'Super Spring Time' and 'Super Spring Temp,' etc, the promotion tuned into 'Super Summer 69.' And if you slipped up and said 'Super Spring' you were fined 20 bucks. I will not relate to you what Fred said when told about the fines. LOL!"

Jack Fisher having lunch with a cow to honor National Dairy Month, June, 1969.

That summer also saw one of the station's best remembered stunts. June is "National Dairy Month" and WROV owner Burt Levine had an idea which resulted in the station getting national publicity. Burt approached Jack Fisher and asked him if he would like to have lunch with a cow. Jack naturally agreed. So on a very hot day in June, Jack arrived at the Crossroads Shopping Mall on Williamson Road in a limosine, decked out in a tuxedo, for his lunch with the cow.

Jack remembers "A large long table was set up with the cow on one end and me on the other, the cow ate hay, I of course dined only on dairy products. Showing how starved the audience was for entertainment in those days, several thousand people attended this event. As you might expect, the cow did not show all of the proper table manners required for a momentous occasion such as this and went to the potty right in the middle of the meal. She did not leave the table to do this.

Fred, Tommy & John work on a Lendy's Commercial, 1971.

"Sure enough, the next day my picture having the lunch with the cow had made all of the wire services and was featured on the pages of many newspapers in America. As people sat down to enjoy their Sunday breakfast there we were for all to see, the cow and I enjoying a unique dining experience."

1969 also saw a great promotion that was the result of Fred putting his foot in his mouth. Without thinking, Fred made the remark that he wished he had been a housewife because that was a lot easier than doing his job at the radio station. Hundreds of housewives complained. Siezing a great promotional opportunity, the station held a contest in which one Roanoke housewife, Ann Hessler of the Cave Spring area, won the chance to do Fred's show on WROV (with John Cigna helping her) while Fred cleaned her home. Fred did reports from the house and continuously mentioned how he'd not yet managed to find the liquor cabinet.

Fred Frelantz with Paul Revere & The Raiders, 1968. The guy in the background (in the middle) is Mark Lindsay.

The late 1960s saw the arrival of copy writer John Hartmann. Jack remembers he "arrived by motorcycle from Florida with his girlfriend riding on the back." Apparently, John arrived late in the evening, spent the night in a laundromat, then showed up at the station early the next morning. He talked Fred into letting him in the building where he sat at the front desk and wrote up a resume on the receptionist's typewriter.

John could con anybody, and he did his number on Burt Levine the station owner. He had never written a piece of copy in his life and had never set foot in a radio station, but his resume was just short of that of Ernest Hemingway." He got the job and eventually became a brilliant copy writer and promotion director.

As the 1960s came to a close, WROV remained the dominant rock station in Roanoke. The program director was Bob Canada and the airstaff featured Bart Prater, Wally Gator , Jack Fisher (who now was calling himself "The Fisher Creature") and Robert W. Morgan (not the same one known for syndicated radio shows in the 1980s). But the station lost a living legend. Fred Frelantz departed to begin a career in advertising with WROV copy writer John Hartmann at Creative Advertising.

Bob Canada (right, with singer Ray Price) is disdained for firing Fred Frelantz. But give him credit for hiring hiring Dan Alexander.

John later bought the agency, fired the founder, and added another parther, musician Tommy Holcomb. Tommy, whose sister Nancy was married to Jack Fisher, was in The Vikings with Fred Frelantz. As a Viking, Fred is remembered for his rendition of "Mr. Bojangles". Tommy recalls that Fred would forget the words and make them up as he went along, the result was brilliant, and the crowds loved it.

There are varying accounts of what led to Fred leaving WROV; as far as the public knew, Fred was leaving radio because he wanted to make more money but didn't want to move to a larger market. Newspaper accounts also quoted Fred as saying "I need a change, I'm burned out." But several insiders mention that Canada persuaded Burt to fire Fred because he felt Fred "was too old for the audience." Burt was said to have spent days ruminating over the decision and later regretted the way it was handled.

One way or another, and not without irony, Fred Frelantz, the man who was the face of WROV throughout the 1960s, was gone just as the decade ended.