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Man From Mars Productions

Reeth & King
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WDRC went to Allentown, PA to find Kenny Reeth and Eddie King. The pair had been friends since high school and were popular on the nightclub circuit. The exact date they took over is unclear but newspapers first listed the pair as WDRC's wakeup team on Friday, January 8, 1960.

In February, 2002 Reeth agreed to an interview which sheds a great deal of light on the important transitional months prior to WDRC's full-tilt switch to Top 40 programming (on August 18, 1960).

It is ironic to note that Reeth & King's run was even shorter than Bacon & Fay's. By late April, 1960 they had been replaced by Ron Landry who settled in for a six-year run on WDRC's morning show.

Q: First, some factual stuff. Where were you from and where had your radio travels brought you before (and after) WDRC?

WDRC's (l-r:) Kenny Reeth and Eddie King
(l-r:) Kenny Reeth & Eddie King

 
  newspaper ad - January 24, 1960

A: I was born in the Bronx, where I lived until the age of 14, when my family moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania. My future partner, Eddie King (real name, Charles Potts) was in my 9th grade class and we became close friends.

As members of the school drama club, we appeared in several plays, then auditioned for and became the youngest members of an acting ensemble called the WSAN Drama Workshop Group, appearing in live weekly radio plays every Monday night on the NBC affiliate, preceding the Carnation Hour. No salary, but it was great fun, playing different characters each week, with live organ music and live sound effects. We stayed with the show until it's demise after three years.

In high school, we formed a knockabout tumbling act called, The Martini Brothers", in which we pretended to be two drunks, staggering around and falling on our faces, while trying to do a serious tumbling act.

At that time, before Rock and Roll groups took over in the small clubs, entertainers could make a decent living in Pennsylvania and we actually picked up some agents and paid bookings. Since a lot of traveling was involved, I was soon skipping high school to do shows. The Martini Brothers act ended when Eddie dropped me on my head and we became a less dangerous Martin and Lewis/Abbott and Costello type comedy team. We talked, sang, danced and did many impressions. Soon, we quit school to work night clubs and supper clubs all over the country.

 
 

The Korean War interupted our show-bizz careers but, in 1954, we re-formed the act and continued where we left off, traveling the country, doing shows. When we wanted a break, we returned to Allentown where we made pretty good money writing and producing comedy commercials on spec, for a friend of ours who programmed WHOL. As a result, we were offered and accepted the morning show. The only thing was, we really missed the night clubs and left WHOL, with a standing offer to return to the morning show whenever we wanted to. Over the next few years, we did this four or five times. A truly unique situation indeed, rare in it's time and one which would be unheard of in modern radio.

By 1959, Rock and Roll groups appeared in many of the night clubs and, while we still had plenty of work, we saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to see if we could land a good, steady radio job. We made an audition tape and answered several ads in Broadcasting Magazine. One turned out to be a blind ad for WDRC. John Jaeger and Dick Buckley had recently sold WNEW in New York and were buying radio properties.

Reeth and King ad  
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