Tidbits, quips,
funny bits, rare tapes, mistakes
and deep-dive archives.
KGO Radio’s Ray Taliaferro ruled the nighttime airwaves up and down the West Coast with a booming voice and confrontational style. On this night, he met his match in a “little old lady from Louisiana”
Several of the producers and engineers at KGO spent years collecting embarrassing bits and outakes from the air-air reporters and anchors. One year, our production team strung several of the classics together into what we called “The Mother of All Newscasts.” Here’s Part One.
We sold the tapes to raise money for leukemia research. Here’s “The Mother of All Newscasts” Part Two.
The San Francisco Giants had a bad game and manager Frank Robinson wasn’t happy when KGO’s Monte Stickles asked him about it. This is definitely NSFW.
KGO Radio reporter Steve Walsh loved railroads and he was always talking about his travels by train. Talk show host Lee Rodgers made Steve’s train stories a regular feature on his show.
I still can’t figure out why a four-star general agreed to sit for a 45-minute interview with a 20 year-old reporter for a free-form (“Hippie”) radio station. There’s a lot about the interview that makes me cringe today, but I held my own and asked Westmoreland tough questions about US war atrocities and the anti-war protests.
I didn’t have anything to do with this one, but it’s a radio classic. KMPC’s Robert W. Morgan interviews a very tired L. A. Rams head coach Ray Malavasi.
You want a tough assignment, how about tape recording an interview with a mime. Actually Marcel Marceau was quite talkative.
One of my first assignments for my college newspaper was to interview Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. My friends who were science fiction fans were envious, but truth be told I had only seen a few episodes of the show and I didn’t get what all the fuss was about.