I don’t like this at all.
I don’t like friends and/or people I admire dying.
I would much rather be a 21-year old radio disc jockey again, when all of my friends were immortal and the only looming question was, “Which of us will make it to the big time?”
Fast forward a decade or so.
Every now and then, the phone would ring.
“Hello, Dan. This is Gary Owens.”
“Y’know, Gary,” I’d think, “you really don’t need to identify yourself. No one else in the world has that voice.”
Before I first came to Los Angeles, I hadn’t even known Gary Owens was a radio personality. I knew him only as the announcer on the TV show, Laugh-In.
Then I heard his daily radio show on KMPC.
Whoa! You can have a voice like that and possess a lightning fast wit?
He was great.
Gary never used his wit as a weapon. The “funny” parts of our conversations usually came in 3 acts.
Act One: Gary would say something funny.
Act Two: Immediately I would respond with something at least as funny.
Act Three: Without missing a beat, Gary would matter-of-factly add a third comment that was funnier than mine.
But it never was competitive. It was like a tennis match… between two people who were playing on the same side. Which was fortunate for the player who wasn’t Gary Owens.
My first personal contact with Gary occurred when I was a (very) small market DJ who asked him for feedback on his aircheck. I wrote about that in some detail here.
Before the end of that decade, I was publishing two radio comedy services. Gary was one of my first subscribers. Not that he needed my stuff. Probably he was just being supportive.
I was living in Fresno. During one of my mini-trips to L.A., Gary invited me to drop by KMPC.
It was while we were in his office, talking about comedy and writing and the pressures of continually producing new material on a daily basis, that I saw first-hand how brilliantly funny Gary Owens really was.
This won’t make you laugh. It’s one of those “you had to be there” things.
At one point, Gary said, “You know, I find a lot of good ideas for funny bits just by reading the ‘Letters to the Editor’ page of the Los Angeles Times.”
I replied, deadpan, “I used to read the Letters to the Editor page, but then I realized I just don’t have the time to go out and kill all those people.”
To which Gary leaned forward and in a fatherly fashion advised me, “Well, Dan, you just have to make the time.”
If you ask The Internet, you’ll learn that Radio & Records “deemed Gary Owens ‘The Babe Ruth of Radio.’ ”
The Internet is, for understandable reasons, mistaken.
Shortly after I began writing a column about radio personalities for R&R, I did a lengthy interview piece about Gary Owens.
I titled it “The Babe Ruth of Radio.”
If The Internet is going to immortalize that accolade, I proudly lay claim to it.
I’ve never met anyone who experienced Gary Owens as anything other than generous, gracious and kind.
I’ve never heard of anyone who ever heard of Gary complaining about anything or anyone.
So I was shocked to discover that he always felt lousy, physically:
“My childhood was not a happy one. I was never well. Being a diabetic, I always said, ‘Why do I have to not ever feel well?’ Juvenile diabetes…takes its toll in many ways. And perhaps that’s why many great comedy minds react in that situation by coming up with a fantasy world. There is a fantasy that we need to create, little islands in our minds. Diabetes is one of those illnesses where you can look at a person and say, ‘Hey, they look okay to me.’ But it leaves so many psychological scars….”
According to press reports, it was “complications related to diabetes” that took Gary from us. Gary fought that enemy all his life, kept it at bay (if not defeating it) for so long.
I guess friends, role models and living inspirations come with a price: Eventually you’re forced to go on without them.
Maybe it’s worth it. But when the time comes, that doesn’t make paying the price any less painful.
On the other hand, as I reread that last paragraph I found myself smiling, knowing that I’d continue to tell “Gary Owens stories” for the rest of my life.
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I never met Gary Owens, but I spoke to him by phone several times when he was a client of mine. (Why he needed my stuff I’ll never know. Gary could read the phone book and make it funny) After every conversation with Gary I hung up feeling somehow rejuvenated and uplifted. If he could do that simply by talking, imagine what a great person he must have been to actually be with. In a business with so many insecure pretenders, Dan is right: Gary Owens was a towering radio giant. A unique natural talent, yes. But also a performer who knew the value of preparation. Radio was so lucky to have him.