Re: WHIL and country

[dan.strassberg@att.net]

Are you sure you're not off by a year? I can picture the 
little kitchen in our apartment in Belmont in my mind's 
eye and I can hear Schwartz saying that he was going to 
Lewiston tomorrow night for the fight and somebody (Bill 
Hahn?) would be filling in for him. He sounded very 
dejected, and we would later learn that he had been 
fired. One of the boxers in the heavyweight title bout 
was Sonny Liston, but who was the other one?

The deed to my house proves that we really did pass 
papers in November of 1964. And we started moving in on 
the day we passed papers. If I recall, the car was 
loaded with some of our posessions when we went to the 
bank in Harvard Sq for paper passing that Tuesday 
morning. I'd never do that today for fear that when I 
got back to the parking space the car would have been 
towed or stolen--or at least broken into.

As vivid as these memories are, I suppose I could be 
wrong. Maybe the picture and the sound have gotten out 
of sync.

By the way, I do now remember the name of the guy who 
ran the awful talk show on WHIL-FM when the station was 
just starting out. (I posted about the show yesterday.) 
It was Marvin Burack. Marvin and his wife must surely be 
the least-remembered and least-talented husband-and-wife 
on-air duo in the history of Boston radio.

They were immeasurably worse than Howard Kaplan and 
Patricia Davidson, the couple (he's a conservative 
Republican; she's a liberal Democrat) that has been 
doing Sunday mornings on WMEX. At least K&D sound half-
way intelligent. But the tendency of Davidson's voice to 
climb to a supersonic squeak when she becomes agitated 
is unbelievable. It sets my teeth on edge--like 
fingernails on a blackboard. If anybody knew who K&D 
are, some female comedian could really break people up 
with an imitiation of Davidson. I wonder whether Prozac 
might help.

> The fight in Lewiston, Maine happened on May 25, 1965.
> 
> My dad was working for ATT long lines then, and this fight a logistical
> nightmare. Back then it was a major feat to get live pictures into the
> system north of Portland, there simply were not the facilities in place.
> Plus all the extra audio hookups and phone lines for the print media was a
> nightmare for New England Telephone in a small Maine city.
> 
> Why the fight ended up in Maine is one of Boston's great mysteries. It was
> supposed to be at the Boston Garden, but then Suffolk County DA Garrett
> Byrne implied it was fixed and the promoters scrambled to find a high school
> hockey rink in Lewiston at the last minute. Based on what happened in the
> ring, the Suffolk DA was properly correct.