KABC TURNS BACK DIAL TO MARK ANNIVERSARY

Before Ken ever met Bob, Michael Jackson ever rang up Michael Reagan for a morning chat or the Dodgers ever batted KABC-AM (790) to the top of the radio ratings heap, there were Ladybirds, the late Joe Pyne and all-talk radio 79.

Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 1960, KABC ditched music for gab. Station officials quibble over the exact conversion date, but for nearly a full year, KABC has been promoting and celebrating its 25th anniversary with the fervor of a Third World junta.

The ultimate anniversary promotion is scheduled to begin at 5 a.m. today, during the “Ken and Bob Show,” with a daylong nostalgia broadcast that promises to take KABC loyalists back to the year John Kennedy was elected President, Lucy divorced Desi and Milton Berle became the TV host of a mercifully short-lived program called “Jackpot Bowling”.

“Twenty-five years later, we talk with you rather than to you,” said KABC Program Director Wally Sherwin. “That’s how we’ve really changed and that’s the key to our success.”

Celebratory KABC press releases on “Celebration 25” letterhead have been regularly appearing in Southern California newsrooms all year long. They generally hark back to a simpler, more pastoral time when gasoline was a quarter.

“The atmosphere and times were a lot different then,” Sherwin said. “In 1960, for a family of four, the actual price for a Thanksgiving Day dinner with all the trimmings, including a 20-pound turkey, was $13.08. And all the stores were closed on Thanksgiving. Times have changed.”

Today’s programming, which Sherwin plans to intersperse between the regular talk shows throughout the day, will also deal with the harder issues of 1960, too.

“What we’ve done is a retrospective of national, Southern California, sports and Hollywood headlines of the day,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to hear, for instance, that in 1960 there was a Summit Conference planned and, five days before it was to occur, Francis Gary Powers was shot down by the Russians. When Eisenhower showed up, Khruschev used the incident to berate the U.S.”

Sherwin pointed to the recent Reagan-Gorbachev summit, preceded by the now notorious Vitaly Yurchenko spy affair, as evidence that, “we really haven’t come all that far in 25 years.”

One other promotional highlight of KABC’s 25 years of talk came in 1967, when two unknown young women broke into the theretofore male-dominated world of on-air radio. It was during that year that about 300 young women answered full-page KABC newspaper ads, seeking two Ladybirds to become the first female helicopter traffic and weather reporters over Los Angeles freeways. The 6 to 9 a.m. shift was eventually won by “Dawn O’Day” while the afternoon drive-time shift, from 4 to 6 p.m., was held down by “Eve O’Day.”

For more than two years, the two women in their tight-fitting silver lame jump suits paved the way for today’s less-exploited women deejays and announcers. Dawn was actually Kelly Lange, who has since gone on to KNBC-TV Channel 4 as a news anchor. Eve was actually Lorri Donaldson, now an executive secretary with a Hollywood film production firm.

“It started as sort of a college gag,” Donaldson says now. “They ran huge ads showing a lady in a spacesuit with a helmet. I was working at 20th Century Fox at the time and I thought it was the funniest thing I ever saw.”

Her slightly hoarse voice won over the station’s promotion director and soon, she and Lange were appearing in sexy KABC ads and on billboards with ad lines like “Our traffic figures aren’t dated.”

“I didn’t know one freeway from another,” Donaldson recalls.

But she and Lange went into the air on Valentine’s Day, 1967, and remained KABC sweethearts until 1970.

“Kelly had a BA degree and could write and was able to go on, God bless her,” Donaldson said. “I went back to what I knew, which was film. I didn’t go on to the fullest degree I could have.

“But I do believe that ladies in radio now have just as good positions as the men. Maybe we helped pave the way.”

Sherwin agrees.

“When you talk about Kelly and Lorri in their shimmering, sexy spacesuits, you’ve got to remember the times,” Sherwin said. “Everybody smoked in the movies then, too. You smoke today and people look at you like you’re crazy.”

Summit conference politics and saber-rattling may not have changed much for the better, Sherwin concluded, but some progress has been made for the better.