If you lived in Eugene, Oregon in the late '60s and early '70s, there is one daily ritual you shared with 90% of the other residents of Lane County: you listened to the Morning Show on KUGN radio with its crew of announcers that included Wendy Ray, Russ Doran, Dale (Uncle Fuzzy) Reed, Fred Webb, and Dick Cross. All five of those personalities had a humor persona that was off the charts and the material they did from 6:00 AM until 9:00 AM each weekday morning with weather, traffic reports and general commentary on local and national news dominated the airwaves of their big power broadcasting licence.
Off the air that crew was a congenial clique of friends that would get together from time to time and the interaction of those talents made for a rolling tsunami of laughter. My friendship with Wendy Ray who was the radio voice of the Oregon Ducks for football, basketball and track, got me a seat in the room with the KUGN bunch and those were the funniest and most entertaining events of my life.
Once we were at a new barbecue restaurant that a couple of African-American guys opened near the University of Oregon campus. Their grand opening had filled the dining room with mostly friends and family of the owners and we had comp invitations from the management in trade for extra radio advertising on KUGN. After an opening round of salads the server cleared the plates and said to us, "Keep your knives." Fred Webb looked around the room and said to the server in a frightened voice, "We're expecting trouble?"
So many of the times it was, "You had to be there." The re-telling loses the spontaneous spark of the moment with its interaction of the comments from the various individuals. Some wives were along at a seafood restaurant one time when Joyce Ray asked the lady server if her snapper was fresh. Joyce never got an answer to her question because the table was completely breaking up.
Roll the credits...
