Feb

5

Cec Heftel and Hawaii’s influence on radio

Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 

The year was 1973. At age 20, I did the news on a kick-ass rock station in Annapolis, Md. My news was hard-driving with lots and lots of really short sound bites, as many as 20 in four minutes.

The jocks played a lot of jingles and gave us a top 40 sound but we also played just enough album cuts to make it fun to listen for a long time. We also did lots of creative contest promotions.

My ideas were always my own, but the jocks were always trolling for creative ideas by listening to tapes from stations in other cities, like WIFL Philadelphia and CKLW Windsor, Ontario. Then Y-100 came along.

In 1973 a company called Heftel Broadcasting bought an FM station that was licensed to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., but also covered Miami for a then-record $1.5 million, began calling it Y-100, and ran the nation’s first $50,000 giveaway promotion.

From then on, it seemed like all the great ideas we harvested came either from Y-100 or from other stations it inspired. There was no more exciting news in rock radio back then than to go to work for Heftel. And it was an exciting moment at our little Annapolis station when its program director Dennis Constantine went to work for Y-100.

The jocks I knew admired the programmers working at Y-100 but I distinctly remember them talking about the owner, Heftel, as a guy who understood the magic of broadcasting. Constantine wrote to tell me that he remembers Heftel built “a palace” when the studios were redone.

That, of course, was Cec Heftel, the former Hawaii congressman, the man who also presided over a golden age at KGMB-TV. Others will remember that, which is why I’m making sure you know that we mainlanders had heard of Heftel, too.

And he’s not the only Hawaii broadcaster to leave his mark on the rest of the country.

Ron Jacobs, who is still with us and recently did a book on President Obama, is well-known to kama’aina for his days at KPOI, his original AM tenure and a nice FM tenure decades later. But he also made a name for himself in California, programming stations in Los Angeles and San Diego that were widely copied across the country. By the way, Ron Jacobs emailed me after reading this and told me something I hadn’t known, that his Obama book was the best-selling book in Hawaii last year.

Hawaii Calls – which I only recently learned was produced by Jacobs in its final iteration – aired for decades across the nation, and was the model for WSM Nashville’s “Grand Ole Opry,” which in turn was the model for Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” as Keillor himself freely acknowledges. Webley Edwards created the show in 1935, as Ron Jacobs reminds me, and he became sufficiently well-known for Bob & Ray, in New York, to create a character named Webley Webster.

A few notes on the occasion of the passing of Cec Heftel, who died Friday in San Diego at the age of 85.

Comments

2 Responses to “Cec Heftel and Hawaii’s influence on radio”

  1. Arline Valmoja on February 5th, 2010 5:56 pm

    Thanks, Howard, for reminding me of those days…Ron Jacobs and Tom Moffat were the DJ’s of the late ’50’s and ’60’s. Akuhead Pupule was the morning show to listen to in those days, also. With the passing of Frank Fasi, it kinda jolts you back to remembering all that happened in those days…good old days, but, not w/o its’ sadness…Mahalo nui.

  2. Bob Publicover on February 7th, 2010 7:37 am

    While I did work for Ron Jacobs at KGB in San Diego, I came close to working for Cec Heftel but just before I was to start he sold his radio stations in order to run for Congress. Learned a lot from both men, but got some of the best advice of my early career from Ron Jacobs. He said, “Remember you are broadcasting but you are really only talking to one person. Make that connection.”

    [The writer is a reporter for WTOP Washington, D.C., and one of the best radio broadcasters I've ever worked with in terms of making that connection. HMD]

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