Death of a Good Guy

If you’re not from New York and of a certain age you’ve probably never heard of Joe O’Brien, who died in a car accident this past Sunday at the age of 90. I, and many, many others I’m sure, do remember Joe O’ Brien and remember him well. And why shouldn’t we, since as kids we had breakfast with him almost every morning?

Joe O’Brien was a radio personality in the 1960’s. Actually, upon reading his biography I discovered that he began his radio career as a teenager in 1934 and continued to work in the field for 66 years, right up until his retirement only five years ago. But it was during the 1960’s that O’Brien is best remembered, at least by me.

O’ Brien did the morning show on WMCA in New York, and was one of the original WMCA Good Guys. The Good Guys were a group of six on-air personalities, and I’m telling you these dudes were popular. I remember having a photograph of the group and trying to memorize the name of each one as if they were some kind of rock group or sports team. The Good Guys made tons of personal appearances together, recorded jingles and even came out with an album. I feel like testing myself tonight, so I’m going to try to remember as many of the six as I can. Let’s see there was Joe O Brien, Harry Harrison, Jack Spector, Dan Daniel, and two others. Dan Ingram? And some Latino news guy, I think. I’ll check my list on the web and get back to you.

Anyway it was Joe O’ Brien who my family listened to while eating breakfast and getting ready for school. WMCA was a Top-40 music station, and it seems almost incongruous to me now that we’d be listening to the latest music from The Beatles, Stones, Animals, Kinks, etc. all introduced by a DJ who at the time was around 50 years old! I remember the family laughing once when an odd little song came on with some whiney-voiced guy singing, “Everybody must get stoned.” Sure we all giggled. To us getting stoned still meant getting drunk. We kids were all twelve years and younger and it was 1966—what the hell did we know?

O’Brien himself said that this era was the most fun he’d ever had on radio. "When a new Beatles song came out, the competition to get it first was amazing. I think we got all but one," he once said in an interview. O’ Brien also did his share to make the mornings fun and even ease the pain of facing yet another interminable day of school.

I remember he had an imaginary sidekick named Benny. I also remember arguing with a friend about exactly what sort of creature Benny was. For some reason I insisted that he was a chipmunk or squirrel, probably because he sounded so cartoony-cute. My friend Arthur said he was just a person. And now forty years on I’m almost willing to concede that Arthur might have been right. Around Christmastime each year (and you were permitted to call it Christmas back then—even on the radio) O’ Brien’s gimmick was to allow Benny to recite The Night Before Christmas. That is, only if Benny had been good. It was a funny gag that began weeks before Christmas. I can still remember Benny’s high-pitched voice as he begged, “Please Joe, let me recite!”

Another thing about my friend Arthur is that he had won one of the most coveted radio prizes of the time: A WMCA Good Guys sweatshirt. The shirt was orange with a smiling face (not a “smiley face”!) over the words WMCA Good Guy. Oh how I wanted to win that sweatshirt! Now that I think about it not only did Arthur win a Good Guy sweatshirt but so had his sister. I once asked him how they both could have been so lucky, and he said the trick was to mail in a picture postcard, like you’d send from vacation, rather than a regular plain one. Sad to say I never did send in a picture postcard, I think because it felt a little like cheating. And ever sadder to say, I never did get that sweatshirt. (I recently discovered that you can now buy replicas of the original WMCA Good Guy sweatshirts through the world of instant gratification that is the Internet. But where, I ask you, is the fun in that?)

Ok, I just checked on the original WMCA Good Guys. I had some names right, but the actual original Good Guys were brought together a little before my time. They did include most of the names I’d listed, but certainly not Dan Ingram, who worked over at WMCA’s arch-rival, WABC. And the “Latino” guy was Dean Anthony, who I now think might have been Italian. Hey, how about giving me a friggin’ break? It was forty years go.

This week even my fellow New Yorker Howard Stern, who almost always refuses to acknowledge any of his childhood radio influences, said he respected Joe O’Brien as a radio pioneer and a true “good guy.” To me Joe O’Brien will always be the voice on the radio who made my family laugh every morning while at the same time introducing me to the incredible rock music that was to become the soundtrack of my youth.