Re: **Kenny Mayer**HELP

[JTyburczy@aol.com]

I'm sure I wasn't the only teenager who lay awake on Sunday nights in the 
1970's desperately searching the radio dial for something to listen to.  
WRKO's "Drug Hotline" was a slight diversion, especially after it became a 
favored target for pranksters:

HOST: This is Drug Hotline, you're on the air.
TEEN: Yeah, I (giggle) just smoked some (giggle) marijuana and I think I'm 
(giggle) addicted.

But mostly the AM dial was barren.  If you searched hard enough, down in the 
lower end of the FM scale, some guy was playing comedy records. It was Kenny 
Mayer. No fancy jingles, station ID's or DJ patter. He was absolutely one of 
a kind.  Like someone's grouchy, irritable uncle.  

KENNY: This is not a request show, so please don't call in with requests  and 
then get upset if I don't play 'em.  I can't fill your requests, especially 
if I don't happen to have that record. Look, if I have it or can get a copy 
of it, I'll play it. If I can't, you won't hear it.  Now a lot of you have 
asked for more Bill Dana.  We just did a show playing nothing but Bill Dana, 
and if you missed it, I'm sorry, you'll just have to wait till we get around 
to it again.  So please don't call me asking for Bill Dana. That said, if 
there's something you'd like to hear, give me a jingle at WO9-89-89. 

To an impressionable teenager living on the New Hampshire border, Mayer was a 
mysterious night owl, and places like "Ken's in the heart of Copley", "Paul's 
Mall", "Lenny's on the Turnpike", and "Lucifer's" were exotic and foreign.  

Perhaps because it's been more than thirty years since Kenny Mayer's gruff, 
clipped cadences pierced the inky night that I now search for an artifact, a 
shred of proof, some scrap of evidence that the man even existed at all.   

To my utter amazement, there is not one fraction of one kilobyte of data in 
all the world wide web that mentions him, even in passing.

Joe Tyburczy