dead air (noun): a period of silence
especially during a radio broadcast
—Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Radio is illusion, and the sound of a voice can hide many things, as exemplified by all those radio deejays from the 1960s who soldier on with programs on oldies or classic rock stations today, sounding very much as they did in their heyday, their voices the one element of their beings able to resist the ravages inflicted on their corporeal forms. Think of the scene in American Graffiti in which Richard Dreyfuss’s character, Curt, walks into the radio station to visit the legendary Wolfman, and doesn’t recognize that the Wolfman is the fat guy in the Hawaiian shirt sitting right in front of him.
Radio is often able to disguise and distract what’s actually going on in the studio. Alexander Woollcott, the critic, commentator, and member of the group of cultured wits known as the Algonquin Round Table, was on the air in CBS Studios in Manhattan on January 23, 1943. He was part of a nationally broadcast panel discussion about Hitler when he passed a note to a fellow participant that read “I’m feeling sick.” The broadcast continued, and the radio audience was unaware that he’d suffered what would be a fatal heart attack at fifty-six—although a few listeners did call the station to ask why he was suddenly, unusually quiet. (One of Woollcott’s most memorable quotes was, “You haven’t lived until you died in New York.”)
What appears to have been the first death on the air behind the radio microphone took place in the studio of radio station WHIS in Bluefield, West Virginia, on the evening of March 12, 1935.
Kid Canfield, a former gambler and conman and current star of vaudeville stage and silent movie screen, was in town for two days of shows at the Rialto Theatre and making his first-ever appearance on the radio. The ads that ran in newspapers as he made his way through theaters in the South summed up the show:
The notorious gambler
On our stage and on the screen
Kid Canfield who has cut cards with noted gamblers
such as Arnold Rothstein, Al Capone and Legs Diamond
will bare to the public all the crooked devises of the underworld.
He will convince you that you cannot win!
The notorious former gambler—a reformed self-professed cheating gambler, one should add—had an arsenal of loaded dice, marked cards, and an ability to deal from the bottom of the deck.
Born George Washington Bonner, the Kid worked as a shell gamesman at circuses and an expert at the unwinnable three-card monte before setting off from sweet home Chicago at seventeen to travel the country in search of big card games, facing down the most extravagant and feared gamblers and always, in his telling, coming out on top. Among his pigeons was Arnold Rothstein, the New York City mob kingpin who’d go on to fix the 1919 World Series. Kid Canfield claimed he took the racketeer for $350,000 in one sitting. He said it was no gamble—the cards were marked. The only chance he took was making it out of the room with his ill-gotten pot of winnings.
According to the legend he recounted so many times, Kid Canfield’s notorious gambling career came to an end after he cheated several thousand dollars out of a sucker at a poker game in San Francisco. The beaten, depleted sap stood up from the table, pulled out a gun, placed the barrel to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger. That mark, Kid Canfield would reveal, turned out to be his brother.
The remorse led the Kid to turn his life around, denounce his past, and dedicate the future to exposing his crooked, crooked ways. He hit the vaudeville circuit with a warning about the fruitlessness of gambling, an exposé of underworld gambling houses, and a demonstration of all his best cheating methods. It turned out to be a pretty entertaining show.
In 1912, Kid Canfield starred in a silent two-reel short, split between the story of his gambling days—ending with that brother suicide scene—and a demonstration of his dishonest methods and gimmicks. Ten years later, he directed and starred in a full-length silent western. Kid Canfield, the Reform Gambler told very much the same tale.
In 1935, Kid Canfield was on the vaudeville circuit with that movie and his stage show. Now, instead of stopping into taverns or backrooms to bilk some of the local mutts out of their hard-earned cash, he’d stride into the newsroom of the local daily paper and challenge the assembled journos to give him a write-up if he proved to be good at his game.
That’s what he did on Saturday afternoon, March 9, at the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. He went on to flummox the ink-stained wretches with three-card monte, then dealt a game of poker after letting one of the reporters shuffle. The first man drew four tens. The next drew four Jacks. Kid Canfield drew four aces.
The Kid threw in a demonstration of his loaded dice. After everyone rolled snake eyes, the paper gave him a write-up. “Kid Canfield,” one of those reporters wrote, “with his long tapered fingers, resembling a piano player’s, could manipulate a deck of cards so fast that the eye was unable to follow his movement.”
The following Tuesday night, he was at WHIS to promote his Thursday and Friday shows at the Rialto. Kid Canfield had faced brutal mobsters on the other side of a hand of marked cards, spoken to crowds numbering in the thousands, and held hundreds of theater audiences in thrall, but this was his very first appearance on the radio. With twenty or thirty spectators watching, and that big microphone looming in front of him, he was feeling a little nervous. He told announcer Mel Barnett so, but then the red light flashed and something lit up in Kid Canfield. He went into his stage patter.
“Boys of Bluefield, take it from the man who has gambled with the best of them. It is a crooked game, and the sucker has no chance!” He roared the words, so loud that the microphone kicked back with overmodulation. The engineer at the transmitter lowered the volume. The Kid was off and running. “Gambling does not pay! It is a game run by professional crooks. Boys, let me tell you a story—”
And with that, Kid Canfield fell over like a stack of poker chips. He managed to pick himself up, but then he dropped like a marked card onto the scarlet rug of the studio floor. The microphone came crashing down with him.
Mel Barnett jumped up. Staffers ran in and carried the Kid to a couch while somebody called a doctor. Kid Canfield continued to breathe for about a minute. Then he stopped breathing altogether. Kid Canfield was dead of a heart attack at fifty-seven.
Meanwhile, after a brief period of confusion, the producers threw on a record—dance music played by an orchestra. WHIS listeners knew something had interrupted Kid Canfield at “Boys, let me tell you a story—” They had no idea it was death, but they knew something was wrong at WHIS. The same song kept playing, over and over again, until midnight.
Carlton KaDell was an all-American boy from Danville, Illinois, who got his first radio job at WJJD in Chicago in 1931 and became a radio star a few years later after migrating west and joining NBC’s Pacific Coast staff in Hollywood. He announced or acted in radio shows and serials, including Amos ’n’ Andy; Big Town, with Edward G. Robinson; Mayor of the Town, with Lionel Barrymore; the Jack Carson and Edgar Bergen shows; Chesterfield Time, with the Hal Kemp Orchestra; and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. He even played the title role on Tarzan.
In 1949, he was forty-three and announcing NBC Radio’s popular Sealtest Variety Theater starring Dorothy Lamour when his career almost came to a sudden, embarrassing halt. The crisis began in a bar on Vine Street in Hollywood, one of those bars that were frequented by all kinds of characters, most specifically men of a certain persuasion that in 1949 needed to be kept under wraps.
Carlton KaDell got to talking to a fellow in that bar. The two of them seemed to hit it off, and in the code that those men of a certain persuasion used in those days, Carlton supposedly asked the chap if he wanted to have a good time.
The gentleman replied that he certainly did. The pair got into KaDell’s car and headed toward his home in Reseda, about seventeen miles away in the San Fernando Valley. They got as far as Cahuenga Boulevard, about a mile and a half north of the bar, when the fellow instructed KaDell to pull over. It wasn’t for a roadside quickie. The fellow, it turned out, was Officer T. C. Lindholm of the Hollywood vice squad, one of a squad of undercover LAPD officers who posed as gay men for the purpose of entrapment.
Many of these vice officers were muscular, handsome, even pretty young men who couldn’t find acting roles in Hollywood. The LAPD trained them to take on the mannerisms and language of the homosexuals and then sent them into bars and other gathering spots like Pershing Square with a quota to trap “perverts.”
Typically, these vice boys would offer someone a ride or accept a ride. Sometimes, they didn’t even wait for the gay man to make a pass. It didn’t matter. Once he slapped on the handcuffs, the cop’s word would be taken as gospel. The gay man would be desperate to avoid publicity and get this thing over with, and agree to pay a fine.
That was the case with Carlton KaDell. Officer Lindholm claimed he’d made “improper suggestions” inside the auto. KaDell protested that he’d only offered the fellow a ride home to the Valley. Lindholm and his partner J. C. Parslow, who was following KaDell’s car, busted him on a morals charge.
The arrest made the papers. Lindholm was quoted, alleging that KaDell had moaned, “The publicity will ruin my career. Drinking is probably responsible for the whole thing.”
Ten days later, Carlton KaDell had more of the publicity he dreaded and his photo on page three of the Los Angeles Times. The paper reported that Municipal Judge Edward Guirado had ordered KaDell to pay a fifty-dollar fine or serve twenty-five days in jail for “disturbing the peace.” He paid the fine.
Carlton KaDell’s career survived. He continued to work as an announcer and star on big radio shows, though it’s not clear whether his arrest and the ensuing publicity led to his move back to Chicago in the 1950s, where he starred, somewhat ironically, in WMAQ’s (NBC Chicago) 1954 dramatic radio series Case Dismissed with Carlton KaDell. It was developed as a public service to lay out “the story of your legal rights.”
More than twenty years later, he was still behind the microphone in Chicago, hosting the 3:00–7:00 PM Classical Kaleidoscope show at WEFM. On Friday evening, March 14, 1975, the station’s general manager George Stone stopped into the booth to say goodnight, just after KaDell had finished the 6:00 PM news spot. The announcer was definitely in distress.
“He told me he would appreciate it if I would call another announcer because he had had some chest pains,” Stone told the Chicago Tribune. Stone assigned a station staffer to accompany the announcer in a taxicab to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. They never made it. The chest pains he’d experienced were signs of a heart attack. Carlton KaDell had another heart attack in the cab. He was dead at seventy.
The Tribune article mentioned KaDell’s past glories, but not his 1949 arrest. He was quoted saying, “I’ve done what I wanted to do. I’ve had a good life.” The Trib described him as “a bachelor.”
They called Scotty O’Neil “Las Vegas’s own Ed McMahon.” For more than a decade, the veteran radio deejay was the announcer and sidekick on The Dennis Bono Show, a live radio variety show taped onstage before a big audience in a real Vegas showroom. First broadcast in 2000 from Club Madrid at the Sunset Station Hotel & Casino, about ten miles southeast of the Vegas Strip (and actually in the town of Henderson), the show moved five years later to Sam’s Town Hotel & Gambling Hall (only seven miles east of the Strip on the edge of the desert on Boulder Highway), and five years after that to the South Point Hotel Casino and Spa on the Las Vegas Strip—well, on Las Vegas Boulevard, at least, but far out on the edge, a little over six miles south of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, where the Strip officially begins. The edges are where old-school Vegas performers worked in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Jerry Lewis broadcast his last five Muscular Dystrophy Association telethons from the South Point), and The Dennis Bono Show was definitely an old-school Vegas show.
Bono’s show was a throwback to the days of Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas, or even The Frank Rosenthal Show, the late-1970s TV program hosted from the Stardust by mobbed-up casino exec Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. The Dennis Bono Show consisted of interviews, music, and comedy acts, all featuring the Vegas performers who played the remaining lounges, afternoon shows, and small rooms in off-market casinos downtown or off the Strip, and occasionally showrooms that had a decidedly old-Vegas feel.
When a top headliner did visit, it was a star along the lines of old-guard performers like Rich Little, Steve Lawrence, Tony Orlando, and Charo. Bono, a standards singer who was once managed by Frank Sinatra’s pal Jilly Rizzo and opened for Don Rickles, launched each episode with a song and a monologue, followed by some repartee with his second banana, Scotty O’Neil.
Scotty was well suited for the role. He was a longtime radio personality in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. He’d left his last deejay gig at KJUL-FM six years earlier, when the station changed format from standards to country, but maintained a large, if elderly, fan base.
Corrie Sachs was the third component of the on-air team. The vivacious singer was a veteran performer who, as a teen with the group the Lemon Twist Showstoppers, often opened for Dick Shawn. She had a regular gig impersonating Reba McEntire in the Country Superstars Tribute at the Golden Nugget. Sachs describes the show: “It was a lot like the old Johnny Carson Tonight Show but without the desk. We all just kinda clicked off each other, and most of the time we winged every show. We’d maybe have a few things we knew we wanna talk about, but then we’d just go for it. Once it’s showtime, we’d just kinda ad-lib our way through, just try to have fun.”
Everything was copacetic, swinging, and fun leading up to the taping of The Dennis Bono Show on March 24, 2011. “The day started out normal,” Sachs tells us. “We had our usual rehearsal, which usually starts around eleven. Everything went smooth. We always have a buffet before the show, and as a matter of fact, Scotty joined us for lunch. Everything was fine, normal, the usual.”
As showtime approached, five hundred folks, most of them on the north side of sixty-five, settled into seats in the South Point Showroom, while in a dressing room backstage, Scotty and Bono went over the monologue, finding funny bits to add and good moments to riff on. The two old pros liked the spontaneity and played off each other. Scotty was in particularly good form. The show, which would be aired that evening on various radio stations around the country, kicked off on time, at 2:00 PM.
Scotty announced the guests. Dennis Bono came out and sang a number backed by Bob Rosario’s band, then headed toward the couch for some banter with Scotty. “Then I came on,” says Sachs. “I sang my song and sat over on the couch next to Scotty. It was about fifteen minutes into the show. I sat down, said hello to everybody—said hello to Dennis, said hello to Scotty. And Dennis, I vaguely remember saying some bad joke or whatever. I looked at Scotty, and he looked at me like he was gonna ask me a question. You know how you kinda look up, like you’re trying to think about something? Well, he looked up to the sky, kind of like he was thinking about what he was gonna ask me next. And that’s when it hit him. He just slumped backwards on the couch.
“His head was back. And at first we thought he was just kidding, or reacting to a bad joke that Dennis might have said. We all started laughing, and then I leaned over and I realized he wasn’t breathing, and so I immediately started pressing on his chest. I looked at the audience and I said, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’”
Scotty let out a snoring sound. The director cut to a commercial break for the Bootlegger Bistro. The Italian restaurant, nightclub, and performer’s hangout on Las Vegas Boulevard was two and a half miles closer to the action on the Strip and owned by Bono’s wife, singer and former Nevada lieutenant governor Lorraine Hunt-Bono.
Hunt-Bono was also in the room. “Everyone thought he’d fainted,” she told Las Vegas Sun columnist John Katsilometes. “Even Dennis thought he might have been doing it as a joke, a comedy bit. Everyone was just in shock.”
Corrie Sachs continues: “The way the stage was built at the time, we couldn’t close the curtains. So we proceeded to pull him off the couch and have him lay on the floor. We pulled him onto the floor and had the cast surround his body. We all stood around his body to cover him from the audience. And fortunately, one of the stagehands was a paramedic, and so he was immediately right there on hand, and he knew right away. He just looked at all of us and shook his head.”
Comedian John Padon was backstage waiting to make his first appearance on the show. “Somebody came backstage screaming, ‘Call 911!’ he told the reporter from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I poked my head around the corner and there’s Scott laying on the floor. Security is with him.”
“And meanwhile I’m telling the audience, ‘I’m sorry, we’re not gonna continue with the show,’” Sachs says. “It was so funny. People were like, ‘What do you mean you aren’t gonna finish the show?’ It’s like, ‘Uh, no. We’re not.’” Scotty was gone. The show did not go on.
“Scotty was very well-respected in the broadcast industry,” the former lieutenant governor reflected. “And he was a great sidekick, the perfect Ed McMahon.” Dennis Bono released a statement that evening. It read, in part, “Scotty passed onstage doing what he loved.”
“There’s always been a hole, ever since he’s been gone,” Corrie Sachs says. “You always go straight ahead but we’re always gonna miss him. I enjoyed being around him, and I think everyone felt that way. He was just an all-around great guy. And his voice was gorgeous. He had this beautiful radio announcer–type voice. I never heard him make a mistake. He was a real pro—and irreplaceable. As a matter of fact, we didn’t replace him. Once Scotty was gone, it was just Dennis and myself.”
Scotty O’Neil was sixty-nine.