Still Swingin’ After All These Years

The suffix of his telephone number is 1937. By design. “I asked if they had something between ’35 and ‘55,” Chuck Cecil says. “They said, ‘We have 1937.’ I said, ‘Great.’ It was the year (Benny Goodman’s) ‘Sing Sing Sing’ was recorded, and (Bunny Berigan’s) ‘I Can’t Get Started.’ A very good year.”

Cecil, who has bopped around the radio dial some since the cutoff date of ‘55, has landed on KMPC, to the unalloyed delight of those who insist the world’s greatest pop music was played in the ‘30s, ‘40s and (reluctantly) some of the ‘50s. Cecil does not count himself among them. He likes all music, even today’s, though his program “Dance Party” (7 to midnight Saturday nights) centers on the swingin’ years.

Down from Oregon by way of San Luis Obispo, Cecil, now 66, landed his first Los Angeles job in 1956 on KFI. “They terminated me in ’72.” He left? “No, they fired me. The manager said ‘Don’t feel bad; we’re terminating the Dodgers, too.’ ”

It was at KFI, though, that Cecil chanced upon the formula that’s sustained him for 30 years. “Outside of Sinatra, Billy May, a few others, contemporary music wasn’t going anywhere in ‘56,” he says. “Rock was just starting, and KFI wasn’t about to play that. We had a listener poll: One card preferred contemporary; about 100 said, ‘We like the old stuff.’ ”

From KFI, Cecil took his old stuff to KGIL, syndicated “The Swingin’ Years” (42 stations at last count) and finally went to KMPC, where the patter between the priceless platters is unequivocally live. (“We have a request for a good rendition of ‘Winchester Cathedral.’ There’s no such thing.”) “I got a note the other day,” Cecil says, “saying how nice it was to hear a show in such an unstructured setting. . . .”

His own favorites? “Lunceford is so joie de vivre ,” he says. “Goodman: I can hardly wait to play ‘Benny Rides Again.’ There’s times when just the mood of Basie or Miller hits the spot. James gets that heart-cry into his trumpet.

“Really, though, I like it all. They say today’s music is repetitious and loud, but you know, it’s more exciting loud. You’re feeling a little down and you’re driving to work and sometimes all it takes is a little volume.”

‘Share Your World’--in Living Color

Remember your first big box of Crayolas--a flip-top box of what seemed to be an infinity of hues, each with an exotic name like ocher, burnt sienna, Cincinnati red, Georgia brown? Maybe you, too, just looked at them, loathe to blunt all those fine points. . . .

Lately, the Crayola people have been providing an incentive to plunge two-fisted into the box: a series of contests culminating in some impressive prizes (two $25,000 scholarships for openers). This year’s coloring theme is “Share Your World”; last year’s--winners just announced--was “My Favorite Wish,” with the wishes just as colorful as the artwork.

Among top Southland contestants, Joellen Moe, 6, of Los Angeles writes, “I wish unicorns were real.” Fletcher Cork, 6, of Concord wishes “we could have rainbows when it isn’t raining.” Jackie Gordon, 6, of Long Beach longs to lead a parade; Kevin Whitesides, 11, of Fountain Valley yearns to be a paleontologist, while Jennifer Earl, 11, of El Cajon goes for all the marbles: “My favorite wish,” she wrote, “is to be queen of my own island.”

All of which, company spokeswoman Mary Mullane opines, “are very California, don’t you think?” Possibly, when compared to an Iowa boy’s wish “never to be a fly in a Venus Flytrap,” or another Midwestern lad who wishes only that “my dad would get out of jail.”

For at least one nascent artist, meanwhile, reality has outdistanced desire. Summer Thompson, 10, of San Diego wishes there were no fences or freeways. The accompanying drawing is a striking pastel dreamscape with uncanny overtones of Chagall. The Hallmark people thought so, too, and signed her to a greeting-card contract.

Getting the Lie of the Land in Book Form

--A man who sucked 326 flies out of the air with the business end of an ordinary household vacuum cleaner.

--A woman who ran her 1989 Honda over 641 beer bottles before getting a flat tire.

--A sportsman who “bowled a 600 game and has the credentials to prove it.”

World records? Absolutely, Dennis Beattie says. Is he kidding? “Of course,” says Beattie, who runs Fancy Fonts, a copy center cum publisher in Garberville, Calif. Fancy Fonts hopes to print the initial “Liars’ Book of World Records and Astonishing Feats” in 1990, depending on how many submissions Beattie is able to corral.

There’s not much to do in Garberville (“population 3,000 on a good summer day, counting all the tourists”), and “we were sitting around one day spinning yarns of our own,” Beattie says. Like most stories, they’d gotten better and better with time--not necessarily more truthful; just better. “We figured if we collected some of the taller tales it’d be a neat little thing to read. Readers complain, ‘This book is full of lies.’ Here’s one that really is.”

The plan is to solicit whoppers, 100 words or less, with $15 “recording fees” that entitles the liars to a book discount. “One thing I do know,” Beattie says, “is that people like to see their names in print. Like the guy who says he was the first to surf Hawaii’s ‘Pipeline’--while wearing roller skates; the woman who claimed to have triple-looped on a windsurfer at the Columbia (River) gorge; another man who stands 6 (foot) 4 and insists he’s the world’s tallest midget. . . .”

Why a fee? “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that if you tell a fib you’ve got to pay for it?” And what if there aren’t enough submissions to permit a viable book? Will Beattie refund the $15 fees?

“Definitely,” the publisher says. “Would I lie to you?”