Joe Smith

[Donna Halper]

At 07:13 PM 7/6/2006 -0400, Dan Strassberg wrote:
>Well, he DIDN'T BEGIN at WMEX, and if he said that to whomever wrote the
>article, he was LYING.

I realise somebody really wants to prove google right, but I doubt it's 
gonna work in this situation because none of the google citations come from 
Joe himself.  As for the most recent one, I doubt Joe wrote the 
introduction to whatever event that was-- somebody pulled it together and 
read it and then it got printed.  I've seen this happen often, where some 
well-meaning person writes an intro for a famous speaker and doesn't check 
with the speaker first.  Usually, the speaker is too polite to humiliate 
the person introducing them...  Anyway, I have a large file of articles by 
and about Joe Smith, from the Christian Science Monitor, Globe, Herald, and 
elsewhere.  In NONE of them does he say he started at WMEX and in none of 
them does he even mention working there.  He mentions two stations-- first 
WVDA and then WILD.

In a 1989 interview Joe did with Steve Morse of the Boston Globe, for 
example, he says he started as a d.j. on WVDA, doing a 7 and a half hour a 
day shift (!) -- which matches the newspaper clippings I've found with 
radio listings for 1956.  He could not have started at WMEX because WMEX 
did not go top-40 till the Richmond Brothers took over the station from 
Bill and Al Pote in August of 1957.  Joe was already on the air at 
WVDA.  Case closed.