‘Good Morgan,’ Goodbye

Robert W. Morgan won’t quite reach his goal for radio longevity.

“My contract is over in 2000 and I’d planned to retire then,” he says, sitting in the still-Christmasy living room of his Tarzana home, his familiar voice weakened by the lung cancer that has forced him to retire two years short of that mark. “I figured one millennium on the air is enough.”

As it is, he’s been on the air for 40 years--the last 33, broken only by one year in Chicago, constituting an unrivaled run as a fixture in the Los Angeles morning drive-time, where his “good Morgan” signature has been as much a staple as the term “SigAlert.” In radio time, that’s about as close to millennial as it gets.

Morgan, 60, didn’t give in easily. Since announcing his illness last May, he’s remained on the air at oldies station KRTH-FM (101.1), his on-air home for the past six years, by broadcasting several times a week from a small studio set up in his house. But after a few months, and additionally hobbled by hip surgery, he decided it was time to pack it in.

“Because of my disease, I’m not able to go in every day and perform,” he says, sitting with Shelley, his wife of 27 years. “It was unfair for them to be in limbo for the morning show.”

A ceremony marking his retirement--”my bar mitzvah,” he jokingly calls the event--will be held Friday at the Museum of Radio & Television in Beverly Hills, broadcast live from 6 to 9 a.m. on KRTH.

But even if his voice isn’t on the air in 2000, his impact will still be felt then, and far beyond. It’s virtually impossible to listen to contemporary morning radio without hearing the influence of his pioneering ‘60s work on the teen-appeal “Boss Radio” of KHJ-AM (930) and later in two stints between 1975 and 1992 on the more adult-oriented KMPC-AM (710).

“I would hope so,” he says, a bit immodestly, when asked if his impact remains identifiable. “I wouldn’t want to speculate exactly what it would be--but a certain brand of humor and approach to topical events.”

Don Barrett, author of “Los Angeles Radio People,” whose readers recently voted Morgan as the No. 3 all-time L.A. radio personality, says that it’s hard to overstate Morgan’s place in radio history.

“At one stage he was probably the most copied disc jockey in the U.S.,” he says. “There were Robert W’s all over the place.”

But while it’s possible to see Morgan as opening the door for such current L.A.-based morning stars as Rick Dees at KIIS-FM (102.7), Mark and Brian at KLOS-FM (95.5) and Kevin and Bean at KROQ-FM (106.7), any direct comparison would be unfair to Morgan.

“There will never be anyone like him again in Southern California morning radio,” Barrett says. “Someone who has gone from rock ‘n’ roll to middle-of-the-road to even all-sports and still be dominant in morning radio. And Robert kept evolving his dry wit and sense of humor. He doesn’t play off bits like Rick Dees or setups like Mark and Brian. And I would never put Robert in the category of using toilet humor like those guys do. He would take a theme and roll with it, and you’d be mesmerized for hours, right up through his time on KRTH.”

The truth is, Morgan is not much of a fan of those who have followed.

“Mark and Brian were on the air for a year before I ever heard them, and I still haven’t heard Kevin and Bean,” he says.

In any case, it’s quite the legacy for someone who got into radio purely by accident. A pre-law student at Wooster College in Ohio in the mid-’50s, the Gallion, Ohio, native found himself thrust on the air one Thanksgiving weekend when no other member of the campus jazz club was available to host the organization’s weekly show on the college FM station.

“The first night on, that was it for me,” he recalls. “No more pre-law school for me. I’d probably still be in pre-law school if not for that.”

His professional career began when he moved to California in 1958 and got a gig hosting “Kegler’s Spare Time with Bob Morgan,” an all-night, six-nights-a-week show broadcast from the Wagon Wheel Junction bowling alley in Oxnard on KACY-AM (1520). Even after being drafted, he continued with both the morning and afternoon drive-time shows on a station in Monterey while serving at Ft. Ord.

Following his discharge, he bounced from Fresno to Sacramento to San Francisco, and then finally, in 1965, to Los Angeles, where he was one of the original jocks on KHJ’s revolutionary “Boss Radio,” which toppled Top 40 champ KRLA by adding the more mature folk-rock of the Byrds, Bob Dylan, the Mamas & the Papas and so forth to the teeny-bopper pop mix.

Soon Morgan, placed in the morning slot, was drawing about one-fourth of the L.A. radio audience--fantasy numbers today, when top-rated deejays pull in just 5% or 6% of listeners. With both the audience and music growing beyond the teen range, it was the perfect platform for Morgan to introduce entirely new ideas to radio that didn’t just cater to the lowest common denominator.

Eventually it evolved into a major enterprise.

“We had quite a staff then,” he says. “They came in at 3 a.m. to get started--I’d come in at 4--and we’d go through the news wires. In later years we taped every television newscast every night. Everyone was assigned a channel to watch that night, and if we saw a great sound bite, we’d jot down the time and channel.

“It sounded effortless, I guess, but it was a lot of work by a lot of people, and the longer I did it, it became harder and harder because I had to keep topping myself.”

Unlike Gary Owens, Bob Eubanks and Wink Martindale, among other contemporary L.A. radio personalities, Morgan learned quickly that one place he could not top himself was television, thereby costing him perhaps wider recognition. Though he tried his hand at it, with a brief stint on a “Boss City” afternoon show on KHJ-TV Channel 9 (now KCAL-TV) and in the ‘70s hosting such fare as “The Helen Reddy Show” and “In Concert,” he decided it wasn’t for him.

“I was not as good on TV as on radio,” he says.

Arguably, the end of Morgan’s L.A. run also marks the end of an era, coming on the heels of the lung cancer death in August of the Real Don Steele, who was a teammate of Morgan at both KHJ and KRTH. What Morgan did, Barrett says, was certainly a product of the time in which it was created, though it ultimately transcended all the cultural changes since.

“I don’t think anybody pines for the old days, but there seemed to be more freedom then, a sense of fun that doesn’t exist today,” Barrett says. “But he was his irreverent self right up through KRTH.”

Morgan says that if nothing else, the fragmentation of the radio audience limits what any single morning jock can do both in terms of creativity and reach into the community. But he notes that there’s no question today about the importance of a strong morning show.

“The morning show is usually the last to catch on when a station changes format,” he says, then adding in a nod to his own career, “but it’s the longest to stay.”