Season 3 Episode 9: This episode of “Get a Life” is from the very last Chris and Dave show – The Final Chapter. By this time we finally had the delivery and timing down for this feature.

Included here are actually two callers. The first one is by far the liveliest contestant we ever had who is awarded Window Washer for the Sears Tower. The second caller is WDGC-FM station manager Fred Moore, who wins the Grand Prize for the season – The Rights to the Chris and Dave Smorgasbord Radio Show!

Fred was such a good sport that evening and never said anything about us talking for six straight hours on that final episode. Years later we came to realize that Fred was in our camp all along, he just never could admit it at the time.

Season 3 Episode 8 – Baba Gonesh and his presentation of Comedy Camel. The question still stands – Do camels have tails, and if so are they hairy?

Season 3 Episode 8 – Another episode of the game show “Get a Life” where the lucky contest winner becomes a ‘Night Shift Nuclear Power Station Operator’.

Season 3 Episode 7: Baba Gonesh stops by the studio to share a little “Comedy Camel” with the gang. Hey – these are just recycled elephant jokes!!!

Season 3 Episode 7: Another episode of Get A Life. The first life given away is a bit of an inside joke. Peet lost his job as buyer of Home Hardware earlier that day, so the life being given away ties in with that real life event.

Double Life Giveaway: Buyer for Home Hardware and Ownership of the Checkerboard Lounge at 423 E 43rd Street in Chicago.

Season 3 Episode 7: Canadian astrologer Mystical Melinda guest stars on the Chris and Dave show and takes calls from the listeners.

Season 3 Episode 5: Another episode of “Get a Life” where a lucky caller is awarded a life as an ‘Underwater Marine Biologist’.

This caller was a real downer. In hindsight, she may have called into the show to get a new life but all she got instead was this lousy bit.

Season 3 Episode 5: Chris and Dave try to get the skinny on the opening night performance of Roger Waters’ Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking Tour.

We manage to get patched into the sound booth and speak to the events manager at the New Jersey Meadowlands Arena and got a verbal description of the performance.

Season 3 Episode 5: Jerry Malauskas spends his 19th birthday with Chris and Dave. Jerry opens up his birthday cards and Chris and Dave open up some of Jerry’s very steamy fan mail.

Season 3 Episode 4: After getting the F-bomb delivered on a recent show, Chris and Dave take things into their own hands by creating their own delay system out of two reel-to-reel tape decks. It actually worked!

So maybe it was a little late after 2 years of random incidents, but it was a feel-good to have finally accomplished this after so many prior failed attempts.

Season 3 Episode 4: Without a working delay system, Chris and Dave were often working without a safety net by taking live on-air phone calls.

Here’s a caller who, besides being an absolute moron, calls up to request a song during a talk show. When we give him the business, he drops the F-bomb on us. This was one of a handful of times we were glad station General Manager Fred Moore was not listening.

Season 3 Episode 4: Another installment of Get a Life where a caller is awarded with a life as ‘Michael Jackson’s Double‘.

This is an abbreviated episode where Peet delivers the prize for the caller. He is going off complete memory here because he lost the script. He almost slips with a word here…but then recovers before it goes out over the air. “We don’t have to cut off your…” what?

Season 3 Episode 3: We could never guarantee that any of our mail sent to us by our listeners would ever get to us. Often times we would find that other staff members would open our mail and post in on the station’s bulletin board before we would even get it.

So we decided to establish a P.O. Box. But since we were cheap, we decided to ask Peet’s mom for permission to use her P.O. Box. This is us calling her to get her permission before giving the address out on the air.

Season 3 Episode 3: Chris gets fired from his part-time job as a telemarketer for Time Magazine.

The first half of this bit is Chris describing the job and what pressures the salespeople are under to meet a minimum quota.

The second half is spent going through some actual scripts with Dave as the customer. After this job I returned to my safe and cozy job at Disc Jockey Records.

Season 3 Episode 3: This the debut of the game show “Get a Life”, which was one of more popular features in season 3.

Peet wrote all the “life” prizes that we gave away. Often times we didn’t even read the script until we got on the air so that it would be spontaneous. The life we gave away on this first installment – Gynecologist of the Stars – was quite the risque topic for a high school radio program, but somehow we got away with it. Station manager Fred Moore must have been out of town or asleep for the night. With this first attempt at this new feature, we had not yet worked out the kinks or the details with how this game show would work, but the concept is still there in its early form.

Season 3 Episode 2: Chris and Dave’s live “broadcast” from the Carlisle Banquet Hall in Lombard. 

This was actually a fake remote broadcast with actual party sound effects to create the illusion of a real party taking place. Dave and I put together the background party atmosphere soundtrack at the College of DuPage radio station sound effects library that morning.

The show was apparently so realistic that listeners actually started to show up in droves to the Carlisle looking for Chris and Dave and the free food.  The Carlisle called the radio station to complain about sending people their way as we were packing up for the evening. 

This was our version of “War of the Worlds”.  Too bad we didn’t get this good of a turnout for our real remote show from the Barn three months earlier! We actually got this idea while listening to all the other Chicago radio stations broadcasting from the Taste of Chicago. We decided to sponsor our own have our own “Taste of the Smorg”.

This is the entire broadcast from that evening.

Following a 6-week hiatus after getting suspended for parking my car on the radio station’s lawn, I wrote this script for General Manager Fred Moore to read.  This opened up every Chris and Dave show in Season 3 (Summer of 1984). 

This opener served as a constant reminder that “Fred Moore doesn’t go to sleep at 8 o’clock.”  The fact that Mr. Moore did this for us showed us he really wasn’t out to get us.

Chris and Dave call various restaurants in the Downers Grove area in search of the best salad bar.

The selected restaurant would be the destination for Chris and Dave’s winning couple of “The Dating Game” which airs the following evening. Peet joins Chris and Dave for this broadcast. The bit ends with yet another f-bomb.

There once was a “shopping cart lady” who frequented many retail outlets in the area. I spotted her on several occasions in different stores in my area, just walking aimlessly around the store for hours and filling up her shopping cart with miscellaneous merchandise. When she was finished, she would just leave her shopping cart behind for the store personnel to unload and restock the merchandise.

One Saturday afternoon while working at my first job at Disc Jockey Records in Bolingbrook, the shopping cart lady came into our store and filled out a job application. This recording has me reading her application on the air. It’s not clear from this bit, but I can assure you that the shopping cart lady was not hired by our record store.

This is the bit that could have had me thrown off the radio for good (or my dad thrown in jail), if Mr. Moore our General Manager had only heard it while it was going on.

I decided to have my girlfriend and her best friend on the show one week to guest DJ for an hour. They ended up taking calls, and boy did they ever attract an audience! Somehow the show devolved into a date line where they took live calls from guys.

The caller in this bit is actually my dad who was 43 at the time, but that little detail was not revealed to anyone. During the call he is trying to pick up these girls who are both about 16 or 17. This is seriously risky stuff.

The second voice you hear on the phone at the end of the call is that of Peet, who was living with my dad and me at the time. The other voices you hear in the background in the studio toward the end of the bit are those of a few WDGC staff members who heard this going out over the air while driving in the area. They came in to yell at me for what I was doing. They couldn’t believe I was letting this dirty old man try to pick up these girls. I tried to explain it was my dad, but they wouldn’t hear it.

They ended up reporting me to Mr. Moore on Monday morning, but somehow I went unpunished. Go figure! This is from the Smorgasbord Saturday Night program where I teamed up with Geoff Beran for the season.

New Year’s Eve, 1983.

Admittedly, we stole this concept from Chicago Radio’s Steve Dahl where he tried to call the U.S. Embassy back during the hostage crisis in 1979.

I remember when Fred Moore got the bill for this phone call. International calls were pretty expensive back in 1983. Somehow he knew it was us and made us pay up. I remember having to save several weeks’ worth of allowance to pay for this.

Dave Jackson fills in for Geoff Beran on this episode from Season 2.

Dave and I ended up doing a Wednesday morning show during spring break 1983. Dave had a directory of all the high school and college radio stations in the country. We thought it would be cool to call a station in Wyoming and talk to one of the on-air talents there.

We ended up reaching a young gal by the name of Tracy Blake who worked at station KYDZ-FM. She was a pretty cool sport about it and that conversation is presented here. I wonder what she is up to today.

Chris and Dave speak with Bear Bryant from Lindenwood College Radio Station KCLC-FM in St. Louis Missouri. It was pretty cool being put on the air on their station as well.

This was from a special Wednesday edition broadcast of the Smorgasbord Radio show which we covered one of the daytime shifts during spring break.

Dave had a directory of other high school and college radio stations in the country and we spent the morning calling around and talking to other deejays.

Jerry Malauskas loses his radio show after being required to re-audition for a program and not making the cut.

This bit is Jerry calling Chris and Dave to explain what all went down. After all, who else would be sympathetic to the cause?

There is a story behind the infamous bell that you hear on the Chris and Dave show. It actually started in late 1982 shortly after the HPs came on the show and did their “Mr. Brown Can Moo” tune. Chris went over to a band member’s home to watch them rehearse. Chris saw a bell that someone had as a part of a board game. Chris mentioned that it would be nice to have a bell for the show whenever we did our game shows. The HPs then donated the bell to the show.

But after a few weeks, Chris and Dave wanted to move on and not have the HPs on the show anymore, but they kept calling us. When we were a bit more forceful about it, they demanded their bell back. I’m not exactly sure how it all escalated from there, but apparently somebody’s mom became involved. Due to the hassle of wrapping, getting to the post office and paying shipping costs to mail the bell back, there was a standoff in getting the bell returned. Eventually another devoted fan of the Smorgasbord Show donated her bell to Chris and Dave – and that one was for keeps and is an entirely separate story altogether.

This recording is a series of snippets highlighting the on-air banter about the bell.

Another classic excerpt from late 1982, the first season of the Chris and Dave Smorgasbord. I believe Dave was attending a Rush concert on this particular Saturday, so I asked Jerry Malauskas to fill in for Dave that evening.

Earlier that week, Jerry had found a memo in the radio station that someone on the WDGC staff had typed up as a joke to the rest of the staff warning everyone to be on alert for a “man in red hair seen spreading a disturbing odor across the area”. I realize about half way through the reading of this who they were referring to in the memo.

Dave learns to cook with Judy the Child.

This is the first show that used pre-recorded material after Fred Moore imposed new rules on our program. This was recorded in Chris’s home studio.

This bit is from Chris and Dave’s debut broadcast. “Homework Hotline” was designed to help our listeners with their homework assignments.

During our first broadcast, we received a call from a sophomore student at Glenbard South High School. She phoned in with some tough Algebra problems. Nothing was too tough for Dave Jackson who had already completed Advanced Algebra the year before.

Some Smorgabord history trivia: This caller ends up making a significant contribution to the Smorgasbord radio program on a number of levels: 1) She donated the game show bell that you hear repeatedly throughout all three Smorgasbord Radio Show seasons, 2) She was one of the two girls on the “Date Line” broadcast from 03-03-84 who chats with the 43-year old man and 3) Chris ends up dating her for the next three years.