GREETINGS FROM THE DINOSHIP

I’ve never had anybody ask to interview me to write a book. I thought, “Wow! I’m gonna get a book?” It’s very exciting, really! What can I say, I’ve been in magazines and things, and here I am in a book! [big laugh]

Your career has taken a lot of interesting turns over the years. What was the biggest surprise for you?

I think the biggest surprise was to find myself doing this show that ended up in New York with the old movies. I had been on the air in Philadelphia on a live cowboy show called Action in the Afternoon, and that went on for a year and about two years later they called me out of the clear blue sky and said, “Hey, here’s something - do you want to do this? You‘d be the host of the old horror movies, we‘re going to show them here on this channel.” It was Channel 10 in Philadelphia which was part of CBS at that time. And suddenly I found myself dressing up like an old ghoul! I think that was the biggest surprise of my life.

Were you ever trying to scare the people who stayed up late to watch the horror films?

We were trying to take the edge off the movies by kind of teasing around the stories. People express to me their feelings about when they first saw the scary movies late at night, and they thank me for making fun of them all the time.

There are adults in all walks of life who look back on their childhoods with very warm memories of you. Many of them even say you were a seminal influence on their lives and personalities. Any thoughts on ‘warping’ a generation?

I joined that generation is what happened to me. I went from the horror movies late at night to the dancing show where I caught on to all the music that was coming out in the mid-sixties, and from that I jumped to FM radio. People who were watching the TV show, either the horror movies or the dancing show were all at least 25 years younger than I was. I never saw the movies when I was a kid, I saw them just like everybody else did, on a television set in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. And then the dancing show came along and I’m playing the current music of that era. I was raised on big band music some 25 years earlier. I loved all the rock music, I loved the whole thing. So all my friends are of a younger age and I don’t know anybody my own age. I always tell people I try to avoid them! [big laugh]

Where did you first get the idea of ‘popping’ into the movies yourself?

Popping into the movies happened in Philadelphia. Ed White was the guy who dreamed up having a host in Philadelphia. We used to watch the films to see where we could have some fun at commercial time, making note of what the last words in the film segment were and the first words in the next segment, and in between we’d do some crazy experiments. Three or four of us would sit there, watch the movies and make comments and take the funniest comment and write it down. One of the films was THE BLACK CAT with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and old Boris was up there holding forth in like a séance or something, and there were some people looking up at him in adoration, and Ed said, “Why don’t we pop you in there as one of the people in the crowd?” That’s what we did, and it was live television and we had to do it as the film was running, and we were so excited about that that we used to sit and watch the films much more carefully to find places where we could jump in and make me be like an extra in the film. That’s how it happened, always looking for some fun.

We all loved the amoeba! Where did that come from? How was it made?

We had all kinds of props. We used cauliflower for brains when I was doing a brain experiment, and if there’s anybody out there who needs a brain transplant, I can do it in a minute! For “nerves” we used spaghetti, for a heart we used liver. One day I was having lunch at a diner in Chestnut hill in Philadelphia and somebody had ordered a bowl of Jell-o and a guy pulls out this big tray of Jell-o, and I thought, “Wow, I ought to get a big bunch of Jell-o and play with it.” I went home and used a dishpan that would hold a bucketful of Jell-o and I took it to the studio and at the right time I turned it over and let it slip out and sit there on my “operating table.” They took a close-up of it and the “amoeba” of its own weight split open, and it was such a great effect we decided to keep using it. Then we put a cheesecloth around it and tied a knot in the back of it to give it some “skin.” That was the way the amoeba started.

You actually managed to work a balance between being a figure associated with horror movies, and also a radio personality in the rock ‘n roll world. How do you think the music industry has changed?

The music that came out from the ‘50s and kind of slipped into the sixties was rock ‘n’ roll with lots of amplification that we had never heard in the earlier days - loud, loud music. There were a lot of political things going on also, the war in Viet Nam and all, and people were writing songs, some were for the war but most of them were against it, and when it got into the ‘70s, Pete Fornatelle, my “co-conspirator” at WNEW-FM said that the best time for new music was from 1965 to 1975, and I think he was right. From then on, it had less interest for me. I’m kind of stuck now in what they call “classic rock” which is from that ten-year period. Disco came in in the mid-’70s and that was a great, great change. Then “rap” came in and with a lot of what came along it was very hard to understand the lyrics and so on - a great big change.

Many East Coasters have fond memories of Disc-O-Teen…

That was another surprise! I was working at Channel 11 in New York doing late night movies, and before that I was doing a children’s show in the afternoon, kinda crazy, wearing the ghoul costume and all that. But they then decided I should be doing the horror movies again, which was the way I started, with this character I was playing. That ended and I was lucky enough that one of the floor managers had the idea of going over to Channel 47, a new UHF station in Newark, and having a dancing show called Disc-O-Teen. He went over and plugged himself and me as a host for the show, and there I was again, this time with the audience right in the studio with me. They had been watching the other shows I had been doing. I wound up working with music that, as I mentioned, eventually led me into radio.

Anything you want to say to the fans?

Just that I’m glad you’re out there! I keep meeting them at the conventions where I appear, where this book will be introduced, by the way. It’s just been great because they tell me how they used to wait until their parents went to bed and they would sneak downstairs and turn on the TV. Occasionally they’ll tell me that their father or mother would sit with them and watch the movie and because we were having so much fun with the films and were not scaring their kids, watching the show was no problem. It’s wonderful to meet all these folks. They followed me and I followed them, to tell the truth. When I started on TV I was in my late thirties, and suddenly I was doing stuff that attracted teenagers. So we’ve always had this gap in our age groups, but I really enjoyed being a sort of teenager again when I first started. It may sound like I’m exaggerating, but it’s true, it’s really true.

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