Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Friday, July 05, 2024
Cartoon Articles 1961
Saturday, June 29, 2024
Jim Scott R.I.P.
I discovered the joys of Top 40 radio in 1970, and right out of the gate my favorite deejay was Jim Scott, the morning drive-time jock on Cincinnati's WSAI-AM. Scott was still relatively new in town at that point but had already become the # 1 deejay on the station. Soon enough he would be the # 1 deejay in town.
The cliché of a disc jockey is that the talk fast and they're loud but Jim was neither. He spoke quickly, I suppose, but not fast. He was always very precise. The reason Jim Scott became as popular as he did was...he was nice. Super-nice! It's literally what he was known for for more than half a century in this town.
Even rival disk jockeys liked Jim Scott.
Jim came to Cincinnati from a one year stint in Buffalo in 1968. He was the eleventh person hired to fill that spot on the venerable WSAI. Even he expected to move on quickly, from town to town, up and down the dial." It was the nature of the job that no one stayed in the same town very long.
After a few successful years, in fact, Jim got an offer to make a crazy amount of money as ab afternoon man at WNBC in New York City. It was an offer he couldn't refuse. Like much of the rest of the city, I was heartbroken, but moved on to sexy-voiced Robin Wood on WEBN-FM for my wake up music.
It wasn't easy to replace an act like Jim, of course, so they had weeklong trial stints, eventually settling on Dick Biondi, considered one of the great deejays of '60s radio!
Poor Dick was out just a year later, though, when Jim--unhappy in New York--was enticed by a new station manager to return to Cincy and literally take back his old job.
Jim Scott stayed with WSAI despite format changes up until the station was about to be sold. He switched to the smaller WYYS and soon after to WLW, at one time one of the greatest and most powerful radio stations in America. Jim would remain there until his retirement about 25 years later.
Despite the fact that Jim Scott was always doing personal appearances around the area, I only ever ran into him once and that was in 2008, when I was working at the Airport. It was on the tram that passed between Concourse B, where I was based, and Concourse A, where our second store was based. Other than losing his hair over the years, he looked and sounded exactly the same so I instantly recognized him but he was already speaking with someone else who had also spotted him so I didn't interrupt.
Jim Scott died last night. Rest in Peace, old friend.
Friday, June 28, 2024
DC Special # 2--Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Spencer Milligan, R.I.P.
Monday, June 17, 2024
Monkees-Changes 1970/2024
Saturday, June 15, 2024
Song of the South-1946
Tuesday, June 04, 2024
Comics Artists in Cheri in the 1970s
I was just a few months away from turning 18 when CHERI magazine debuted in the summer of the Bicentennial year 1976. I had never seen a copy of PLAYBOY but I had been buying HUSTLER and HIGH SOCIETY magazines for a while at that point. I had premature grey hair and was never once carded. When CHERI came along, it became my new favorite. Not only was it just as explicit as those other two (probably a bit more so, actually) but it also had work in nearly every issue by some very familiar comics artists!
CHERI was essentially a news magazine, only all the news was about sex. There were photo essays of adult industry events and sex worker protests, reviews of XXX films and live sex shows, coverage of various censorship issues, etc. but there were also fictional pieces in each issue, columns by names in the industry (such as the now legendary Annie Sprinkle and my wonderful Facebook pal of the past decade or so, Jeanne Silver), and, naturally, the life blood of this type of mag, photo layouts.
I was still living at home at the time I was buying these so I couldn’t keep them long for fear that my parents (or my aunt who came down to help clean the house sometimes) might find them. I was, however, reminded of all this today when I ran into the first two years of issues on the Internet Archive.
The comics artists who pop up in these early issues are Marshall Rogers, Russ Heath, Gary Hallgren, Rand Holmes (an article about him as well as a new color strip by him), Wallace Wood, (a small piece on SALLY FORTH and a full reprint of MY WORD from BIG APPLE COMIX), Larry Hama and Ralph Reese along with Neal Adams (a part color reprint of their BIG APPLE collaboration, published originally only in black and white), Clay Geerdes, Robert Crumb (color reprints of black and white underground strips), Bruce Patterson, Frank Cirocco, Mary Wilshire, Bill Plympton, Mary Sativa, Trina Robbins, Paul Kirchner (as Kurt Schnurr”). Bill Wenzel, Lee Marrs, and Billy Graham. Some illustrate articles, some offer gag cartoons, some new comics stories, some reprinted ones, some spot illustrations and a couple are just reprints in small pieces written about them.
By the last two issues of 1977, the familiar artists seem to have largely disappeared, perhaps due to editorial changes. It should go without saying that while these are not fully hardcore magazines, they are 100% NSFW and are at times, more explicit than even stuff on the market today! If you are easily offended, stay away. Heck, if you get offended by things at all, I’d recommend keeping your distance. If you’re intrigued, however, they’re all online.