KFAC (defunct) - Humorous Anecdotes About KFAC

Humorous Anecdotes About KFAC

These recollections are by former announcer Doug Ordunio.

One of the funniest moments on Luncheon at the Music Center occurred during the tenure of host Thomas Cassidy. Since the program was run live and without tape delay, the guests needed to be on their best behavior. Cassidy was a strict Roman Catholic. One day when composer/conductor Lukas Foss was a guest on the show, he suddenly spouted out this uncensored remark. “There is always that wonderful story told about Beethoven who wrote a letter to a music critic, saying ‘What I shit is better than what you write.’” Cassidy was stuck because nothing could prevent the offending word from being broadcast.

After Martin Workman took over the program, another wonderful occasion was his interview of the guests who were in the current LA production of A Chorus Line. For music, Workman needed to play the Original Broadway Cast recording. However, he didn’t audition the recording for lyrical content, and so all the songs with bad lyrics (from the T and A song on down) went right over the air, much to the consternation of Workman.

Thomas Cassidy was like a ghost. One never saw him in the halls of the station. He would arrive in the middle of the night, record and leave the LPs for the next week’s shows and disappear back to the SF Valley. He always prided himself on his consistent professional deportment on the air. One night I decided to tune in the Gas Company program as I was driving in my car. the familiar Tchaikovsky theme was heard. Cassidy usually said, “Good evening, friends. This is Thomas Cassidy…” However, this time we heard “Good evening, friends…What the hell’s going on here?” Then I heard the volume turned down on the voice track. When the engineer Susan Rouzer deemed it was OK to proceed, she warily turned the track back up. Cassidy’s final word before the first front announcement were: “You get a lot more than gas, from The Gas Company.” I immediately pulled over and phoned the station, telling Susan, “Don’t let that voice track out of your sight. That is a keeper! Put it on my desk after the show.”

Tom Franklin, (called “the dean of Southern California business news reporters”) who hosted Executive Report on KFAC AM-FM for many years was the best man for the job. He was often gone on sponsored press junkets around the world, and he spoke with many top people at corporations everywhere. His show was the source of many intentional as well as unintentional bits of humor.

He was also a notorious tippler, and it was noted that he was probably one of the few people who fell down the stairs in the posh Wilshire Blvd. restaurant Perino’s without spilling a drop of his gin and tonic. His reputation was shared with Doug Ordunio and engineer Richard Nielsen (who worked the morning shift). For several years the trio kept a collection of all the empty liquor bottles whose contents they had consumed on the station premises. These were place on top of the record shelves in a location that could not be seen by the general public. When they were finally discarded after several years, they filled a LARGE trash can.

One of the funniest intentional moments on the show was when Franklin interviewed the owner of the Dutch liqueur company, known in that country as Wyn and Fokking. Tom got the executive to explain the company’s transition to the US market, and the owners were warned that they needed to change the name due to the similarity of one of its names to an obscene word in English. Their solution was to change the name to “Bols” (which when spoken by the Netherlander seemed very similar to the English slang word for “testicles”).

Franklin was also known for breaking into laughter on the air, so uncontrollably that it would take him minutes to recover. This happened quite a number of times, so much so that in the Master Control room, a tape was kept which was labeled “The Tom Franklin Memorial Reel.” The story he loved to tell was one from his earlier days, when in the middle of a longer scripted segment, he heard a click on the desktop next to him. When he glanced up to see what it was, some person had placed a tall drink glass partially filled with water and a handful of Alka Seltzer tablets. A condom had been stretched over the top and as the tablets fizzed away, the condom rose to an erect position. Franklin lost it again…

One of the funniest things in which almost the entire staff participated was a video project that was created as a parting gift to the station manager George Fritzinger and his exceptional German secretary, Regina Sears. It was a station tour, conducted by the longtime KFWB news announcer Dan Evey (who was married to a member of the station’s sales department, Michelle Davis).

The search, which visited all areas of the station, was to find the office of salesman Courtney Thompson (which was actually placed far into the recesses of the record library) near the offices of music director Clyde Allen, FM Programmer Doug Ordunio, and assistant programmer Steven de Mena.

All of the staff participated and along the wayward path, gave their farewells to George and Regina. Obviously, the staff members who had the greatest senses of humor provided some of the funniest moments on the tape. Perhaps the most audacious segment came near the end when the camera visited the FM studio, where Doug Ordunio was (apparently, but not actually) on the air. He was seated behind the mike and before he was about to talk on the air, he arranged some mysterious white powder (actually powdered sugar) on top of a large square mirror, and with a straw, pretended to snort cocaine.

After doing this, he seemed to open the mike and begin cursing wildly, as he announced a piece of music. The white powder was covering his nose. When this tape was shown at a reunion of the staff given at Sportsmen’s Lodge on Ventura Blvd, this spot provided one of the biggest laughs of the evening.

The tape concluded with the actual homeless man who often reclined beneath one of the shade trees outside the station with his dog, waving and saying his goodbye to George and Regina. Those two left before the notorious firing of New Years 1986. (Actually as salesman Courtney Thompson left the station after having been let go, he said to the library staff who were in their offices, "Watch out! There's blood spurting everywhere!")

One of Doug Ordunio's favorite tag lines for a station ID was: "KFAC-FM, Los Angeles--the bastion of sanity for Southern California."