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.
This was always a great way to run out the clock on a late-night show. One of the more popular features of Season 2 (Smorgasbord Saturday Night) was Talent Line. It wasn’t anything too original, but it allowed our listeners to call in and have 15 seconds of fame. Co-hosting this season with me was Geoff Beran.
Here is a really rare gem. Wayne Lela, Downers Grove local and resident of the Tivoli Hotel, made a run for President of the United States. He didn’t do so well in the New Hampshire primaries, but he began his campaign on the Chris and Dave show. This is an exclusive interview with Wayne during a summer broadcast of the Chris and Dave show. Wayne also had a classical music radio show on our radio station late night Sundays.
A 33-year old “moral conservative”, Mr. Lela would regularly tune in to high school station WDGC-FM to monitor rock and roll lyrics, language, and program content. He would then submit a list of complaints to Fred Moore (and quite possibly to the FCC). Surprisingly, Wayne never gave Chris and Dave a hard time – and there were certainly opportunities for him to do so! He even made an appearance at our Tivoli Bowling Alley remote broadcast and played the drums. It’s funny listening back to this broadcast now at age 41.
At the time of this broadcast I was 16 and I knew next to nothing about politics or what a “conservative” or “liberal” really meant in terms of policy. Wayne considered himself a conservative, yet now knowing a great deal more about politics, there is very little conservatism in Mr. Lela’s 1984 platform described during this broadcast. You can occasionally find some of Mr. Lela’s social commentary out there on the internet. Funny how it all started back on the Chris and Dave show. By the way, Ronald Reagan went on to win that election.
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.
This was one of the earliest recordings I have on record of Jerry Malauskas doing his own radio show. Jerry had accidentally left his hat behind in the studio one day and I learned that someone on the staff had gone “number one all over it”. I phoned Jerry to tell him about it.
The next weekend, I turned on his radio show and he was actually talking about this incident in great detail. Fortunately I had a tape recorder on hand and I captured the bit. I love how at the beginning of the story Jerry says he doesn’t want to “name any names”, but he pretty much reveals everyone’s identity as the story unfolds.
Absolute Nonsense
Baba Gonesh Double Feature: “Thought for the Day” and “Comedy Camel”.
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 is the bit that got us in big trouble toward the end of our 3rd show. Listening to it now, it is quite tame relative to the other things we did, but I don’t think Fred Moore had warmed up to us quite yet. Plus, this predates all our other questionable bits so maybe we were still operating at a low baseline.
I had finally managed to create a 7-second delay system to prevent any profanities from going out over the airwaves when we put callers on the air. I created the delay system using two reel-to-reel tape decks. The first tape deck recorded the on-air comments live. I then fed the tape from that machine over to the second tape deck that was used for playback on the air. It took about 7 seconds for the recorded tape from the first tape deck to reach the playback heads of the second tape deck.
This allowed us to take phone calls live on the air by recording it. If the caller swore or said something inappropriate, we would be able to stop the tape before it got on the air. Well, we abused the technology and this is what it sounded like. This is actually a re-broadcast of the original bit during our final show on the air. We followed it with a re-enactment of Mr. Moore calling us to deliver his 9 commandments.
This is a clip from one of our more favorite on-air moments from Season 1. This enthusiastic bunch of pre-teens called up on our second show. Their band was called the HPs (abbreviation for Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss). This gave us the idea that the phone should be used more during our shows making the program more interactive with the audience.
It was strange many years later when I had a child of my own, I would read this story to my daughter and I found myself delivering the lines in the same rhythm as this band’s delivery here. In fact, 28 years later we re-created the song in our own style.
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.
The SmorgShow Podcast originates from the Chris and Dave Smorgasbord radio show which aired on suburban Chicago high school radio station WDGC-FM between 1982-1984. The show was known at the time for its edginess for a high school radio program. Chris and Dave’s all-talk format broke the mold by deviating from the station’s rock genre and often pushed the boundaries of acceptable community standards.
In 2010, Chris resurrected the Smorgasbord brand name and paired up with his daughter, Ally to create a new podcast series staying true to the original spirit and variety format of the old radio show.
After serving as co-host and contributing to nearly 100 episodes, Ally is now grown up and has flown the coop, leaving Chris to fend for himself. As a result, the show has taken a bit of a different turn. Chris now pairs up regularly with original Smorgasbord Radio Show co-host Dave Jackson as well as Jerry Malauskas who serves as the show’s Chief Conspiracy Correspondent (CCC). And let’s not forget ‘Master of the Wide Open Spaces Between the Ears’, Baba Gonesh – who after 40 years of being featured on our show, serves as our International News Correspondent, sending his views and breaking news directly from his homeland of India.
While Seinfeld was said to be “a show about nothing”, the SmorgShow Podcast is a show about anything.
As we discussed in the last episode, we determined it would be extremely difficult to continue forward with the Smorgasbord Radio Show in its current form following the passing of co-founder Dave Jackson earlier this year. Have no dispair though, because Chris and Jerry will be launching a new podcast in early 2025.
In order to finish this podcast series properly, it only felt right to return to how it started in January 2010 – with Chris and his daughter Ally teaming up on the mic. In this final episode, Chris and Ally discuss all the life stages we have moved through and the milestones that we have achieved over these past 15 years. A lot of ground was covered during this time. After all, Ally was only 11 when we started the show and now she is only a couple weeks away from closing on her first home. We reflect upon how the podcast format began and all the challenges and learnings that we faced as we tried to get the show off the ground with the relatively primitive technology. From our first episode recorded in our kitchen, to seeing the show evolve over the next 15 years, we believe we hit all of the main highlights in our retrospective.
As mentioned in the show, we reserve the right to occasionally add an episode here and there to the catalog, but this episode essentially marks the end of our 42 year run (15 years in podcast form and the years 1982-1984 when the Chris and Dave Smorgasbord was heard on high school radio station WDGC-FM). We would like to thank everyone who has been on this journey with us at one point in our timeline or another. We certainly had fun bringing our creativity to you and we appreciate all your support and encouragement over the years.
It truly has been a great run!
Listen to the Wisdom of Baba Gonesh and understand why he is known worldwide as ‘The Master of the Wide Open Spaces Between the Ears’.
A Fashion-Conscious Monkey is cited on the streets of India and Baba Gonesh was there to capture it all.
SmorgShow Theater is a collection of classic, old-time radio dramas from the golden age of radio. Sit back and relax, turn off your lights and let us transport you to a world where your imagination takes over. If you have a favorite radio show that you would like to hear us present, email us at [email protected]. Check out Smorgasbord Radio (The SmorgShow Podcast) for more of our creative antics.
In our 11th installment of SmorgShow Theater, we re-enact ‘Knock at the Door’, which originally aired in 1942 on the ‘Lights Out’ radio drama series that centered around horror and the supernatural. This tale is narrated by Ella who describes her descent into madness – how she married a nice fellow and mama’s boy Jay who adores his mother to the point of Ella feeling pushed out of the way. Our narrator, after hearing some convincing voices in her head, pushes her poor mother-in-law down a well and seemingly doesn’t have to deal with her anymore. But how wrong she is when the couple hears a knock at the door while eating dinner one night…
The SmorgShow Players are: Ally Bockay (Ella), Chris Bockay (Jay), Kim Bockay (Mrs. Kruger)
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