A SWEET VICTORY FOR KSDO’S MORNING MAN

Ernie Myers, the outspoken morning man on news/talk radio station KSDO-AM (1130), is No. 1 again.

According to the latest Arbitron radio survey, KSDO’s morning news show, which Myers co-anchors with program director Jack Merker, is the most listened-to program in the 5:30 to 9 time slot.

What makes this victory even sweeter for Myers is that for the third straight quarter he’s managed to beat longtime rivals Hudson and Bauer, the gregarious morning team on adult-contemporary (A/C) station KFMB-AM (760).

The rivals originally ousted Myers, a veteran of the local airwaves for more than 30 years, from the No. 1 position nearly a decade ago.

And they’re the ones that Myers, who moved to KSDO six years ago after 19 years at A/C station KOGO-AM (now KLZZ-AM, 600), has been trying his darndest to topple ever since.

“They’re not too happy about that, I guess,” Myers said. “But naturally, I feel great--especially since the trend for news stations around the country continues to be on a down tick.”

Myers believes the most important reason for the victory is the tendency to not just read the news as it rolls off the wire but to “lighten it up.”

And each weekday morning, Myers said, he sets out to do exactly that. With Merker acting as his straight man, Myers interjects the basic news delivery with everything from humorous, and often irreverent, commentaries to impromptu phone interviews with offbeat newsmakers from around the country.

“I’m sure every news director in the country would turn over in his broadcast booth if he heard this, but 90% of the time the news is boring,” Myers said.

“You can go weeks without a major news story. So you have to catch the listeners’ interest in some other way, and what we do is try to inject a steady dose of humor to lighten things up.”

Generally, Myers said, the interviews work best.

“Each morning before we go on the air, we read newspapers from all over the country,” he said. “And if something strikes us as particularly funny or unusual, we do more than simply report it--we try to get the main character on the air for two or three minutes.

“For example, every year when the buzzards come back to Hinkley, Ohio, we call the mayor of Hinkley and put him on the air. And one time, we called this guy who had won the hog-calling championships in Spivey Corners, N.C., so that San Diego listeners could hear his winning hog-call live on our station.

“You can’t do things like that all the time. When something like Chernobyl comes around, you go into high gear and just report the news. But on days when the news is light, you can pretty much do anything you want.

“In fact, to stay ahead of the competition, you almost have to.”

Myers, 52, grew up in Glendale, Calif., and spent much of his early teens working as a stage actor. Even before he graduated from high school, he had graduated to the silver screen, landing bit parts in such Hollywood westerns as “The Adventures of Don Juan,” which starred the late Errol Flynn.

In 1950, when he was just 16, Myers moved to New York to join a theatrical troupe on an East Coast tour. That same year, he unexpectedly made the switch to radio.

“The director of a play I was in asked me to audition for the lead role in a radio soap opera on New York’s WNBC, one of the early giants of the broadcasting industry,” Myers recalled.

“I got the part and I’ve remained in radio ever since.”

Indeed, Myers’ career history from that moment is the stuff of every aspiring deejay’s dreams.

After a year on WNBC, he spent three years as a reporter with the Armed Forces Radio network in Korea--using the same broadcast booth the legendary Tokyo Rose had used--and reporting news from the front to a worldwide audience of more than 20 million.

When the war was over, Myers returned to California and, in 1954, he became one of the first rock ‘n’ roll jocks in the country when he signed on with San Diego Top 40 station XTRA-AM (the Mighty 690, now oldies station 69 XTRA Gold).

By the time he left for KOGO in 1961, Myers was the highest-rated deejay in the city--a distinction he enjoyed for nearly two decades, and one he’s only recently regained.

“My years with KOGO is when I really began to recognize the importance of humor in radio,” Myers said. “And since I was playing mostly middle-of-the-road music on the air, I had to do most of my lightening up on the street.

“For most of those years, KOGO was owned by Time magazine. And those folks let me do just about everything I wanted to in the way of promotions, from leading what I called the ‘world’s worst parade,’ with 12 brown cows out in front, down Broadway, to setting the world’s speed record for a golf cart on the Firecracker 500 Speedway in Daytona, Fla.

“Then, in 1979, the station was sold and the fun went out. A year later, I came to KSDO, and ever since I’ve been trying to be be No. 1 again by doing what I’ve always believed in: lightening things up by simply having fun.

“And finally, it’s paying off once again.”