KFAC: Requiem for a Radio Station; Part 3

That was the third movement marked Allegro Caprioglio froma concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, Bilaal Schifrin, the featured soloist, Angela Romero with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Hesus Lopez. Cobos, Fred, you did that for 39 years. Am I correct? Okay. Well, I didn't exactly do that for thirty nine years. When I first started with KFAC, it was all like 1947 and we started a program that had three segments. Nicholai It was first, it was called Midnight Serenade, and it was sponsored by the Hollywood ranch market, known to have 364 different kinds of cheese. Now, we played a little cheesy music and that added to 365 that let us have a different cheese for every day in the year. Actually, it was a very light piece of music and I would go into the station, I would take the lucky luck dance time off my remote from Glen Wallach's Music City.

Do you remember that? Heard if you heard about IRA Cooke. IRA Cooke and I had been in radio school at Mike's Reinhart's together. IRA used to sweep up at a radio station so you could have a morning program before a disc jockeys were there together. And I used to take him off the air and we'd play that. That was Midnight Serenade. Then we would go to then we'd go to Symphony out of the night and that was the next segment. And that had a different piece of music to. And then we had Overture to Don and the overture to Don had a beautiful, beautiful theme. It was The Shepherd's Pie from the Lyric Suite by Edvard Green. And people used to just love that. And we take that on into the morning. I think I had a crush on the voice of Symphony out of the

night, I would listen to it in the car driving to a newspaper office where I was a young reporter on the very early predawn to midday shift. And very often I would just hear a part of a symphony. I would get to the newspaper office and I would call the station and I would say, what is that you're playing? And got to have a rather friendly conversation with the gentleman who I knew from his ID was Fred Gray. And he never knew my name and he didn't know that. I thought that he was something very special. But the musical programs, I do remember and they were special. That was when we broadcast from the Mariposa and Willshire Studios, where the

so-called Penthouse studios of KFAC were not really Penthouse studios, they were called Pigeon Roost underneath the big mossy Iraq, about a stone's throw from the Ambassador Hotel, the Chapman Park Hotel was down that beautiful cottages over across Mariposa, the Wilshire. Now they have those huge buildings that are there across the street on Wilshire Boulevard, used to be a driving range. And Freddy Martin was going full blast over at the Coconut Grove. And that was a long time ago. That was just before the year of the Hegira. What made you stay there for 39 years? That's a long time. I like the music. It was it was a very rewarding experience. Why did you go into classical announcing back when I was a kid and that's going back again to my mother, bless her heart, used to make me listen to an old Atwater Kent Highboy radio.

And I listen to Walter Damrosch and the great Arturo Toscanini. And I would listen I would listen to the Metropolitan Opera, which we later broadcast from KFAC, in which and the beat goes on, as they say. So you became pretty conversant with the classical music. And in just like everything else, exposure is something that eventually creates a desire for love for you. I mean, you become familiar with it. Your interest eventually grows and grows and grows. As you were exposed to this, all you have to do is be exposed to the music and have a love for it and it reaches out and touches you. It has I like to call it an ineffable essence of something explicable, something that makes one enjoy the music. It moves you, it gives you goosebumps the size of apples when you hear it.

And it's worthy of listening over and over again, that's why it has lasted

so long. The only thing that concerns me is that there will be many out there who will not hear it. And if they don't hear it, there isn't much chance of it in the last night except the select few. Your group at Campisi had a very special relationship with your audience. Why do you think that is? Well, number one, I believe that most of us enjoyed what we were doing. And it becomes patently clear to a listener that you enjoy what you're doing and it isn't ho-hum and it isn't a chore. And we wanted to communicate with them and we wanted to please them because there's a lot of satisfaction out of pleasing someone and being like, that's a very basic human

need. Sometimes I worried whether they were there or not. I didn't know you got into this little room in the room, got smaller and smaller, like the post story, and you wondered whether the walls were going to crush you. Hey, so you get that feeling. I mean, imagine that. Thirty nine years, the only thing that was different than the only saving grace was the music. You know that being a classical radio announcer can ruin you. In other words, it can make you very stiff and stodgy. You're going to do some fancy things, you know, like going some we're going to listen to now from Quatro Stargirl, me, something from Shimon to the Lamani Eagle Invention. What the hell? I mean, let's listen to this, Cash-Flow. You were there for such a long time, did you ever think it would come to an end one day?

Well, like I say, nobody has gotten out of this world alive. And you know what they say in Ecclesiastes, you know, there's a time for love and there's a time for hate. There's a time for living. A time at a time for dying. I mean, that's the old story. I ran across an Orwellian figure the other day that's worthy of a quote. Will you permit me the license to say that I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise nor riches, yet to the men of understanding nor yet favor to the men of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. It wasn't his music, it was just this wonderful, smooth

molasses voice, it was this calming kind of baritone that leaked out on the radio like like honey. On a personal level, how do you feel about the fact that Campisi doesn't exist anymore? Well, I I think that the music exists, but for the carrier to to disseminate it and I think those who love music will eventually find a way to have a vehicle for them to listen to that music again. My feelings are a little sad that anything that comes to an end at all and you have to say in part, your request got no say in the matter.

Like I announced earlier, you know, all men must die. This is a story it is a sad statement that things would become so helter skelter, higgledy piggledy, untrammeled are all all mixed up that the value of the almighty dollar would be a game that causes a great many people to be deprived, Horace said in odes and episodes. I believe our modern labors and a mouse is born. Do you think in some way that KFAC, your KFAC, indirectly responsible for the fact of of having a listenership and a community that doesn't care enough to make for there to be an outcry to say this is this is a real problem, Niccola?

It's not only in the radio stations or caring isn't in the radio stations. Kerry has to do with a home and raising children and having beliefs and having moral turpitude and having ethics and all of these things, all of these things that go together. If everything is based on the almighty dollar, then you have a true problem. We can kill our planet. We can kill our time in the weekend. We can burn the Library of Alexandria. I mean, whoever did it before with no reason why we can't do it again. I mean, man and his mores and life that they're they they come back and repeat while the technology starts to change. Now, we used to have a man for all reasons. We used to have the Renaissance man. He would he would study about a lot of things and he would put a lot of input in. Now you have tunnel vision thing and you have a great deal of depth and the narrow subject and to the exclusion of many other wonderful things which enriches a person's life.

It seems a sad statement about Los Angeles that it all happened with so little fight. Well, I'll say like I'll say, like the man says, it ain't over till it's over. You know, Yogi Berra, the fight isn't through yet, but what goes around comes around. Maybe the Phenix will come rise from the ashes again. Well, I hope so. Fred Green, thank you for joining me today. Thank you very much for inviting me. My I've been very pleased to be here with you in front of this strange looking instrument that I haven't seen for a long time. Would you leave us with one last piece of music? Yes. Point a lovely piece of music, one of my favorites. It's just an exquisite piece of music. It is all that is left out of our larger work by Tomaso Albinoni.

And it was arranged by RAYMO Sato. It's a dojo and G minor postering an orchestra satija gramophone recording with the light from carry on conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Here is an daddio by Albinoni. I remember Carl Princi very well, I listened to him every

afternoon at three o'clock when he broadcast the opera. Even when I was working, I had a radio hidden and at three o'clock the radio went on. He symbolized a civilized man. My idea of what excellent radio announcer should be. In his 33 years at KFAC, Carl Perkins, he wore many hats as ambassador of goodwill, he represented KFAC to the community and is the host of The World of Opera. His name became synonymous with the music of his beloved Verdi and Puccini. I went to work at midnight and worked until six o'clock in the morning, and I did that

for the first three months at KFAC and then something happened. I think the man who used to be on nights didn't fare too well in the daytime. He's probably just a typical night man and had to be up at night. And so they put him back on nights and gave me his daytime shift, which included a half hour program at three o'clock in the afternoon, at three thirty in the afternoon at the time, which is called World of Opera. And I guess it's become sort of my signature sense. Yes, it's I've enjoyed everything I think that I have ever done at KFAC. And I think that puts me in a rather enviable position. When you can go to work every morning and thoroughly enjoy that day's work, you actually go home at night, the same mood when you left home to go to work.

It's just it's a lot of fun going back to KFAC and the business aspect today. KFAC, as we knew it, doesn't exist any longer. How do you feel about that? I feel very sad about it. But you don't work for a company for 33 years and do your little bit to help build that company into what we made it and then take its demise very lightly. And unfortunately, there's a large vacuum. That's not to say that there are not stations that play classical music, but there is no KFAC. There is no station that programs the way KFAC did. We had a wide variety of programs and we played a wide range of musical compositions and we enjoyed the a wide audience in that those who loved light music listened to us, as well as those who liked heavy music. And they stayed with us for our light programs and

heavy programs. I have mail that tells me how appreciative people are for the fact that they were able to sit and learn so much about music over the years as they listened to the minute Campisi. Dear Mr. Princi, my husband and I came to Long Beach as newlyweds in January 1946 and shortly running up and down the dial looking for some good music. I found KFAC. That station has been our constant companion ever since the opera our is one of my favorites. And I try to arrange to shop or use the vacuum so that it doesn't interfere with that. Dear Mr. Princi, I came to Los Angeles in 1957 and from the first day I loved my radio station, KFAC. Some of my happiest hours were spent listening to the world of opera while driving in my car where I could sing along with the world's greatest stars instead

of getting dear Mr. Princi, I have listened to your program for years upon years. I don't even know how many. And I planned my day around being home for three p.m. to hear all those wonderful and diverse selections, some familiar and some we might never have known of because they were a beautiful moment from an obscure or rarely played opera. When you first started in radio, what age was your audience? When I first started, we had an older audience, maybe between 35 and 65, 40 and 65, but over the years get younger, really. And this was something that pleased us very, very much. There are more young people today listening to classical music than I have ever encountered before. But how do you bring the young people and how do they if you have enough variety in your programing and you can play

music from the American musical theater operators, stuff that is light and airy and and very pretty, very beautiful in some cases, in many cases, slowly, these young people will emerge into an appreciation for the heavier music they'll go from from what I just mentioned, to opera to symphony to concerti. All of that stuff will become something in which they will become increasingly interested. If you try to push it on them, forget. After all, classical music is not something that is just for the elite. Now, I firmly believe that, you know, I've always felt that it's how you present it.

You know, I mean, somebody is always listening to Parker Bowles canon for the first time. It's always fresh to someone and isn't presented that way. Take the example of classical music, the pieces of classical music that have been used to in motion pictures that are used on television commercials today. My gosh, you hear more operatic arias on these crummy commercials, but they use opera to to get the interest of the public. I'm going to interrupt you right here, because I know that one of your favorite pieces of music. Oh, yes. Is used on a tot's commercial. That's right. Right. I've never tasted the champagne, but I certainly love that melody. We'll continue now, then, with the voice of that talented, lovely soprano, Katie Takanawa, in a very special aria that Giacomo Puccini Rowden is Aborigines. Qiqi when the young lady pleads with

her father to please help her and her lover, Arenal Chino, to acquire the kind of money they need to get married. And the father, of course, he is his daughter and he wants to do everything possible. So he plans a ruse and takes care of her needs. The area is Omeo, Bobino, Gado. Oh, my beloved daddy. Susan.

Ray. Oh, Peter.

Gary. What was the hardest thing you ever had to do, leave KFAC? Um, it was very difficult. It was my decision. It was because they made me an offer I had to refuse. And it was the most difficult thing I've ever had to do in my life. What was the most embarrassing? I don't think I've ever been on the air. Oh, I've made mistakes, I guess, in pronunciations and things. One of the most amusing gaffes I ever heard on the air was a luncheon at the music center where Carl Princi was sort of the extra featured co-host because the guest was Carlo Bergonzi, the great Italian tenor.

Martin Workman, as always, was posing the questions. But in this case, Carl Princi would translate them into Italian and Bergonzi would answer in Italian and princi would translate back into English. So it was going very smoothly and it was kind of fun because you could hear that gorgeous Italian, which princi spoke so beautifully and certainly Bergonzi spoke so beautifully. And then at one point, Martin Workman poses a very complex and sort of long winded question concerning Burglarizes affiliation with Maria Callas at La Scala. He said something to the effect of when you worked with Maria Callas, did you find that you had to mold your interpretation to hers? She was such a powerful personality. How did that relationship go? And there was a pause. And Carlo Princi poses the question to Bergonzi this way. When you worked with the Maria Callas at the La Scala, did you find you had to a little mold? You're interpreting so-and-so.

And I sat there in the car and for a good five seconds, I said to myself, I understand Italian. The pattern had been so wonderfully established and had been going so smoothly. Then I realized that what had happened is that he had put on the accent but forgotten languages. And he stopped and they got hysterical, literally hysterical. And I really couldn't drive. I'm going I had to pull over. So that was a lot of fun with. During your years at KFAC, I'm sure you've had some really rewarding relationships with,

well, broadcasting career, you can be a very rewarding career. Yes, I've met some of the most wonderful people in the so associated in classical music performers at all. One of my my opinion most memorable associations was with GovDelivery Giuliani when he first came to Southern California. Remember, he played with the Vienna Symphony in Pasadena. And I met him. I interviewed him and he learned that I could speak Italian. And when he heard me, he was amazed that I didn't speak Italian with an American accent. And I guess that endeared him to me a little bit. And we became very close friends. And it it's something I take a great deal of pride in mentioning. Well, you did a wonderful program with him. That was also one of my most memorable your most memorable experience as well. We'd like to share that with you.