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Posted by Brian Stevens on
the Radio-Info.com message boards.
It's a good guess that I was the
only
13 year old in Greenfield Indiana
who listened to Jim O'Neill on WLW before school each morning. My dad
was a teacher. He needed to be at school earlier than I did. But I'd
get up early, ride along to school with him and then wait in our '71
Olds Cutlass - doing some late homework and laughing to JFPO's "As Your
Stomach Turns" before the start of class.
What a quirky sense of humor.
Mixed
with the true gift of finding just
the right words to paint a "theater of the mind" picture of the
mythical Shady Corners. JFPO made it so easy for me to see that house
and its residents. You felt like you knew them. Like they were part of
your family...or your town. Or at least a part of the small town you
had always dreamed of living in.
Other radio stations had morning
DJs
who did impersonations...but did
them poorly much of the time. They seemed to use them in low humor
parodies that basically wrote themselves. Find the cheap laugh, hit the
production room after the shift, and record the bit to cart for the
next day.
But if you listened to JFPO for
long,
you'd come to a marvelous
conclusion. JFPO was doing his character bits on the fly. Live. Not on
cart. And unlike the many DJ's of his era that did easy parodies with
bad impersonations, JFPO had created his own, unique and very special
Shady Corners world. With depth. With wit. With charm. I'd listen with
awe as JFPO easily moved from voice to voice in those 60 seconds
bits...never stumbling in doing so.
In the 80s my dad asked me if
I'd
heard this guy on NPR named Keillor?
Only Lake Woebegon came close to reminding me of those halcyon days
when JFPO took us to Shady Corners each morning. And I've always
wondered about who might have influenced who, knowing of JFPO's days at
KDWB Minneapolis prior to his move to the Queen City. Only Keillor, and
to a degree Jean Sheppard, came close to JFPO.
Yeah. I was a fan of James
Francis
Patrick O'Neill.
I'll always remember the last
time I
heard JFPO on the radio. The day
Bob Braun died. JFPO had retired from WSAI months earlier. That
afternoon he was sitting in with Wirt Cain...but really not adding much
to the discourse. Age seemed to have taken that mischievous sparkle
from his voice. You could hear the rattle of emphysema with every
breath. For the kid who so fondly remembered those days in Shady
Corners, it was painful to listen to.
I was about to turn the radio
off when
Bonnie Lou from the Paul Dixon
Show called in. Cain sat back and allowed she and JFPO to talk about
the old days at 9th and Elm. About Braun. About the mutual humor they
found in old country song titles. About Paul Baby. As Bonnie Lou was
ending the call, she mentioned that every morning before sunrise she
still listened from Florida to Nick Clooney and WSAI via that big sky
wave signal.
Then it happened. Bonnie Lou
made a
simple innocent offhand
comment...that "she had Nick Clooney 'til the sun comes up." Most
people probably missed it. And more so, probably missed what came next.
But if you were listening closely you heard it. JFPO's quick
reply..."well there's a country song title right there."
Was it the funniest thing I'd
ever
heard JFPO say? No. But it still
made me laugh. And I made a mental note of it. Because for that brief
second, that different way of seeing things...that quirky sense of
humor...that mischievous sparkle that made JFPO worth listening to
every day before school had showed itself again. I cherished the moment.
Then I turned the radio off. I
knew
that I'd likely never hear O'Neill
on the radio again. And that was okay. Because I knew that at least for
me, James Francis Patrick O'Neill had ended things with a laugh.
Thank you Mr. O'Neill
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