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Actor/Actress Passings That Don't Warrant A Thread


Larry Rydell

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This maybe doesn't fit here, but one of my fondest memories when I lived in Baltimore back in the mid 90s was listening to The Big Broadcast on WAMU FM on Sunday nights, their weekly "Old Time Radio" show that played episodes of old radio dramas and comedies.  Four hours of Jack Benny, Gunsmoke, and every other crazy old radio show every Sunday evening.  It was heaven.

 

The show had been running since 1964 and Ed Walker had been the host since 1990.  Back in the 50s and 60s he hosted a radio comedy show with Willard Scott...WILLARD SCOTT!!  He was born blind and I don't know why I feel like I need to mention that...and he had been in radio since he was a teenager when he apparently set up one of the country's first ever pirate radio stations.

 

I always loved the Halloween episodes, so I went to their website to hear last Sunday's episode only to see it listed as Ed Walker's final show.

 

Apparently, he recorded last week's show from his hospital bed after being diagnosed with cancer.  He died three hours after the show aired last Sunday night.  He had already made up his mind that it would be his final show and so the show itself is his farewell to the medium he loved and lived in and supported and created new audiences for.

 

"Goodbyes are very hard to do, especially when this has been a labor of love. More than anything else, my thanks go out to all the people at WAMU who've helped me over the years,"

 

Made all the more poignant by the fact that these words would stand as his goodbye to life as well as to his audience.

 

WAMU's tribute site:

 

https://wamu.atavist.com/remembering-ed-walker

 

It kind of hit me even though he was always "that super old radio guy" and that was 20 years ago.  But man was he a comfort on a cold dark January Sunday afternoon and it was still a comfort to be able to click over there in the ever so slightly harsher world of 2015 and still hear him on these ever so slightly colder and darker Sunday nights when I'm listening in my mid 40s instead of my mid 20s.

 

Here is he being interviewed about his life in radio at the National Archives when he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame:

 

 

Here's an NPR piece about him and the show:

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/06/283115394/a-lifelong-radio-man-wins-new-fans-with-big-broadcast

 

 

Damn.

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So just a week after hearing that Ed Walker, the guy who hosted the radio show that I listened to the most for nearly a decade in Baltimore, died (see post above), I hear - months after the fact - about the death over the Summer of Don Joyce, the guy who hosted the radio show that most defined the nearly a decade I spent in Oakland.

 

http://blog.sfgate.com/loaded/2015/07/23/don-joyce-radio-maverick-and-member-of-negativland-dies-at-71/

 

I only heard about it because they just uploaded 30 years (over 5000 hours) of "Over The Edge Radio" the insane collage of electronic composition and live improv (including whoever called in to the open phone to make whatever noise they wanted) for 3-5 hours at midnight every Thursday night on KPFA.

 

The whole archive can be found here:

 

https://archive.org/details/ote&tab=collection

 

Some of you may have remember Don Joyce from his days and legal struggles in Negativland, including being sued by U2 for titling their debut EP "U2".

 

His work was a massive influence on like two generations of people who grew up learning to hear the noise of commercial culture around then, grab it, manipulate it, and turn it back on the airwaves.

 

The first thing I did when I got an Mp3 player was load hours and hours of "Over the Edge" to be my surreal soundtrack on my long BART/CalTrain commutes.

 

I hadn't bothered to try listening to the livestream of the show lately since I'm 3 hours ahead and it would be starting at 3 AM.  So I didn't even know he was gone until the internet archive announcement.

 

Here's Don at work in 2010:

 

 

sigh.  All my radio heroes are dying.  I swear to God if anything happens to Phil Hendrie....

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