There was a time when I would have killed to get into talk radio. As luck would have it, I didn’t have to.
The name Herb Elfman probably doesn’t ring a bell, and there’s no reason it should. His name is but a small, sad footnote in the history of talk radio, but a very important one in the history of yours truly. In fact, it can fairly be said that I owe my entire career to this long-forgotten pioneer.
Bear with me, now, while I put you through a short course in radio history. Don’t worry, it’ll get interesting.
Elfman, like many of us who eventually landed our own shows, actually started out as a caller. Way, way back in the 1960s, Elfman lived out in Los Angeles. For years he worked as a salesman,1 apparently for a portrait photography company. And he loved listening to a local blowhard on KABC named Bob Grant.
Yes, that’s right, the Bob Grant—the one who’s been called “The King of Talk Radio.”2 Controversial, opinionated, and wildly popular, Grant went on to become a living legend at WOR in New York, blazing a conservative yet independent trail for more than a quarter-century before retiring not too long ago.3 Grant was years ahead of nearly everyone else in the business. Even Howard Stern has credited him as a strong influence. WOR’s website goes so far as to call Grant “the inventor of controversial talk radio”—which is somewhat truer than Al Gore saying he invented the Internet.
But still, I must humbly set the record straight. The fact is, Grant learned the ropes from the meanest guy in the business.
Grant had been working as a radio newsman since 1949, but it was when KABC hired him as sports director in 1962 that he met Joe Pyne, the station’s headliner. By all accounts, Pyne was a miserable guy, on and off the air, and his show was a train wreck: People listened because they just couldn’t help themselves. This guy was so nasty, he used to tell callers, “Go gargle with razor blades!”
From time to time, Joe Pyne allowed Bob Grant to substitute for him. Then, in 1964, when Pyne left KABC for an equally noxious television gig that lasted several years on NBC,4 Grant eagerly stepped in to fill his footprints.
Isn’t it nice when things work out like that? I couldn’t tell you from experience—my own big break wasn’t anything like that. Which brings us back to Herb Elfman.
Elfman was one of Grant’s devoted listeners in L.A., and became one of his infamous “pest” callers.
Now, you’ve got to understand, talk radio in the 1960s wasn’t what it is today. It just wasn’t a very popular format; the hosts literally had to beg for calls. So even a pest like Elfman had no trouble making it on the air.
For a while, at least.
Eventually, Elfman grew enamored of his status as a minor celebrity, and became increasingly strident in his opinions and on-air arguments with the host, until Grant finally had to ban him from the show.
Undeterred, Herb Elfman then decided to become the host of his own talk show.
As fate would have it, Atlanta was one of the last major cities in the country to come around to having an all-talk radio station, and nobody was expecting much when it finally happened in late 1967. WRNG—“Ring Radio,” as it was known—was located at 680 AM, the last available spot on the dial.
“Radio does so many things bad that it is hard to know where to start,” columnist Paul Hemphill wrote in the city’s evening newspaper when the news was announced.5 And, fact is, he was right. Given what had come before, who was really expecting much from a new talk-radio show?
“There will be no music, just talk,” explained another article in the Atlanta Journal just before the station’s inaugural broadcast. “On-the-air personalities will discuss news events, feature interviews with people in the news, offer household hints, sports analysis and the like.”
By then, Joe Pyne was a household name—and not a good one. “A lot of people have the idea that all-talk radio features a great deal of syndicated shows of the Joe Pyne caliber,” the article continued. “But this is something that WRNG will steer clear of.”6
And so it did.
For a while, at least.
WRNG tried hard to play it straight—so hard that two of its hosts, Micki Silverstein and Teddy Levison, actually won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for a documentary on police brutality.
Then, in February 1970, Herb Elfman came to town.
Until then, the closest WRNG had come to genuine controversy was a guest appearance by famous LSD advocate Dr. Timothy Leary—a hippie-era nutcase who would have come across as sane and reasonable next to Herb Elfman.
Yet, somehow, Elfman ended up on the morning show on Ring Radio. Not as a caller—as the host.
I was out there listening. I can’t quite remember what I was doing at the time—either selling chemicals or writing speeches for the governor—but I was an Elfman fan. I was completely fascinated. So were a lot of other people.
I recently came across an old newspaper clip saying that Elfman “wooed his audience with conservative zeal,” which explains, I suppose, why he appealed to me. “A churchgoer with a patriotic passion, Elfman castigated critics of the nation’s institutions.”7 But that hardly captures it. Elfman was a wild man on the radio—driven and unpredictable.
One day I picked up the phone, dialed the number for WRNG, and Elfman put me on the air. Before long, I was a regular caller.
There was always something in the news, something to talk about—one side or another to argue. Richard Nixon, still in his first term, was struggling with the war in Vietnam abroad and rebellious youth on the home front. William Calley was being court-martialed in connection with the My Lai massacre. NASA was trying to figure out just what had gone wrong on Apollo 13. A grand jury was looking into Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s conduct in connection with an automobile accident and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Airplanes were being hijacked—a lot. Women were burning bras. Sex was being discussed more openly than ever before. And Yoko Ono was breaking up the Beatles.
What a great time to be a talk radio host—and how I envied Herb Elfman!
We never actually became friends, but Elfman eventually invited me to a speech he was giving, and after that we had lunch together several times. This was long, long, ago, and memory fades with the years, but as I recall, he was a little pudgy, though his face had very sharp, well-defined features, and he wore his hair in a sort of buzz cut. He had only a little formal education, but was very knowledgeable about a wide variety of topics. Sadly, I can’t say he had a particularly pleasant personality.8
Nevertheless, I invited him over for dinner one night. He came, alone, and the result was one awkward foursome: me, my wife, Herb Elfman, and Herb’s personality. I’ll never forget it: When he finished eating, Elfman pushed his chair back, stood up—and proceeded to deliver a speech, right there in our dining room. I can’t reconstruct exactly what he said. But when I saw the movie Network a few years later, Peter Finch’s Oscar-winning performance as lunatic anchorman Howard Beale reminded me of Elfman that night. We just sat there, agape, watching him orate at great length to his small and captive audience.
By then his radio audience was considerably larger. I know that because WRNG made the mistake of firing him. Elfman ran his mouth on the air about a contract dispute, complaining very publicly about negotiations the station considered private.
Big mistake—but not for Elfman, as it turned out. His loyal fans, who were legion, marched on the station and flooded the Ring Radio telephone lines as never before. Within a week of the dismissal, Elfman was rehired. He was popular enough to say and do as he pleased.
Until then, no one had imagined that talk radio could have such influence.
A very short time later, I was watching the late news on television, probably after The Engelbert Humperdinck Show, and one story caused me to bolt upright in bed.
Local radio personality Herb Elfman was dead. A suicide.
As it turned out, Elfman had made a surprise trip to L.A., where he put a .22 caliber revolver to his head. Earlier that day, his wife had served him with divorce papers. He left behind four daughters and both his parents. The poor guy was forty-one, and finally at the pinnacle of success. After selling God-knows-how-many-thousand portrait photographs, his entire career at Ring Radio had lasted just a little over three months.
Herb Elfman’s death, sadly, also meant he wasn’t going to be on the air the next morning.9 And I knew they couldn’t run with: “Hey, the following three hours of silence are brought to you on account of Herb Elfman’s suicide.”
Luck is opportunity met by preparation. This man’s death was unfortunate, but for me it was also an opportunity. I was prepared to seize the day. And why not? If it wasn’t me, it would be somebody else. (Even my wife was shocked. And she knows me well.)
And so, the very next morning, when WRNG employees began showing up for work just before sunrise, they were surprised to find a man sitting outside the front door in a lawn chair he’d brought from home. That man, of course, was me.
“What are you doing here?” the station manager asked when he arrived.
“Oh, haven’t you heard?” I asked. “Herb Elfman’s dead. He committed suicide.”
“Yeah, we know. Why are you here?”
“Somebody’s got to do that show. I can do it.”
No doubt shocked, the station manager politely informed me that he’d already arranged for a replacement. “Our afternoon guy. He’s going to do the morning show. But thank you very much, Mr. Boortz.”
I was determined to get a job—to climb over the body of a dead talk-show host, if that’s what it took to get into the industry.
“Well, who’s going to do the afternoon show?” I asked, stopping him again as he attempted to enter the building.
“The afternoon show is going to go off the air before too long because of the end of daylight savings time and the early sunsets,” the station manager explained—rather patiently, all things considered. “So we’re just going to put somebody in there temporarily. But thank you very much, Mr. Boortz.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Put somebody in there temporarily. I’ll do it.”
He regarded me with a look of exasperation. Then his expression changed, just a bit. He knew who I was—a caller—and he knew I’d applied for jobs many times before, without success.
Until now. “Okay,” he said. “Come back this afternoon and you can do the afternoon show. But remember, it’s only going to last about six weeks.”
“Fine,” I said.
About two weeks later, they moved me to the morning show. That was more than thirty-five years ago. And I’ve been doing talk radio ever since.