Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings (7 page)

Lucretia. My finest broadsword.

When I got to San Diego there was nothing. The station was a washed-up losing affiliate sharing space with a bakery. Rats walked across the floor in the middle of the day for no other reason than being bored. The station had no original programming to speak of and the news team consisted of an old lady who read the newswire and then made up stories. It was known all around San Diego that Channel 4 lied about the news every night. The lead story was often a story about the racetrack, because that’s where the news team spent most of their time. There was no sports desk and no field reporting. The anchor was a man by the name of Chalk Munson. He was
not a handsome man, nor was he well-spoken, nor could he hold his liquor. He barely made it through a broadcast without the aid of a four-letter word. He was beloved by no one in San Diego. When Ed Harken broke the news to him that he was getting fired he collapsed on the floor and started bawling—he had been praying for the day but thought it would never come. Every night, being forced to read the news was torture for him. He just assumed he would be doing it until he died. He frequently dreamed that he would be hit by a bus. It was his only escape he thought. I never met Chalk Munson but I do know that a large population of News Anchors feel trapped by their own chosen line of work. It’s a lot of pressure to deliver the news night after night and some guys can’t take it. Current newsman Wolf Blitzer hates his job and you can tell it every time he opens his mouth. Talking on camera for him is like one giant exhale, like he’s trying to empty all his oxygen out of his body so he can die and free himself of the terrible pressure. Chris Wallace would rather live in a hobo camp than deliver the news, but he’s up there, taking his lumps like a man. You can tell Brian Williams hates his job, but what’s he going to do? He’d make a great pharmacist in my opinion. He should go to pharmacy school and bone up on drugs and get a job at CVS or Duane Reade. Being a News Anchor is not a job for the faint of heart. I took the job at Channel 4 because I recognized a challenge. That’s me! I’m driven to be the very best.

The first order of business was the news team. Every one of the big stations was getting news teams in the sixties, and I knew we needed a great one. Ed Harken informed me that he
too had been thinking about a news team and he was already looking for the guys to help me. I stopped him right there and told him I didn’t want anyone but me putting together my team. We fought. No lie; we fought hard. Suits were ruined and coffeepots were broken, but in the end I won the fight. Little did he know I had already found one member of the team.

As it so happened I met Champ Kind my first week in San Diego. I came in from Denver on the bus and found a flophouse across from the station with rooms to let for one dollar a week. This was the early sixties, mind you, and San Diego has cleaned up its act since those rough-and-tumble days, but back then it was no place for honest Americans. I spent my first night out on the fire escape trying to stay cool in the midnight air, playing my flute as police sirens and gunshots went off all over town. It was a lonely time for me. After that first night I spent my evenings in some of the dirtiest low-down bars in town. Bars with names like the Filthy Slug, the Rusty Axe, the Toothless Sailor. Tough guys and loose ladies drank themselves to death in places like these, and I felt right at home.

One night I was stumbling back to my cold-water flat when four thugs jumped me in an alley. It was a real boisterous scuffle. I got hit everywhere, in the head and neck and ribs, but I gave back as good as I got. I put three of them on the ground pretty quick but the fourth guy was a real tangler. We beat on each other for a good half hour, circling and striking like two spotted hyenas. When it started to look like there wasn’t going to be a clear victor I yelled
uncle
. We both put our fists
down and had a good hearty laugh. He introduced himself as Champ Kind. I could tell we were going to be fast friends right then and there. In a loveless town full of empty souls and desperate men, I had found my first buddy. We tore it up. Some of our bar fights are now part of San Diego legend. They are the only bar fights I know of that have been given names: “the Punch-’Em-Up of ’66,” “the Black-Eye Derby,” “the San Diego Bone Bonanza” and many more. I will tell you this: Champ has no scruples whatsoever. He will kill a man, probably has, for no reason at all. Well, I asked Champ why he jumped me and he said he just likes to throw his fists around from time to time and get knocked about and punched, and then he yelled out, “Whammy!” and that was that. He said
whammy
way too much. Every time he finished a drink, “Whammy.” Ordering a sandwich, “Whammy.” He had sad whammies and happy whammies and sometimes he would throw a whammy into a sentence where it made absolutely no sense, like “This Texas barbecue whammy so delicious, whammy.” It might have been Tourette’s. A lot of doctors told me it was Tourette’s. Whatever it was, it was pure gold on air. I asked him if he knew anything about sports and he said he didn’t but that he knew how to read and get excited. Well, I brought him in to Ed Harken and we both agreed that the best sports announcers are the ones who know how to read and get excited. If you had a young Jewish kid or a Chinese kid or college kid good with statistics, they could write the copy, but you needed a big dumb American male to yell out the sports. Champ Kind was perfect. “Whammy” became a household word in San Diego. Several
restaurants offered “the Whammy,” which was nothing more than ham on white bread, but it sounded fun. The Padres had “Whammy Day” at the park, where the first five thousand got Champ Kind bobbleheads. Every year some poor soul was trampled but they still do it to this day. It’s worth the trade-off. If you ever get a chance make sure to pick up a copy of Champ’s self-penned autobiography,
Whammy!
It’s not always the most fun read. There’s more darkness than light for sure, but still, it lets you in on a fascinating life of ups and downs. I wouldn’t read more than twenty pages at a clip. It can really darken your mood for the day. It’s definitely too revealing but that’s Champ.

The next step was finding a field reporter. I’ve known a few in my time. Geraldo Rivera comes to mind. He’s probably the best there is behind Brian Fantana. Of course no one is smoother and more professional than Brian Fantana. In my opinion he is the very best. It takes a special man to hit the streets and investigate stories, interviewing people while also being on camera. It’s no easy job and it demands a certain kind of sex appeal. Geraldo had it. Brian Fantana had it in spades! He hooked up with women every time he took a camera crew out of the building. His secret: Only go after the best! That’s what his secret was. I sometimes questioned what he meant by “the best.” I mean, he basically went after anything with tits. I think maybe he thought women, just women in general, all women, were “the best,” but that translates on camera. You can see it in Geraldo too. You just know he’s rolled around with some homely fatties for sure and I’ll bet you he didn’t
love them any less for the fun. That was Fantana’s approach as well. Women just liked him because he never judged.

Anyway, before we found Fantana, Champ Kind and I were inseparable. After work we hit the bars and then went home. We roomed up together in those early days to save on bills. A lot of nights we would invite some of the guys from around the station or over at the bus depot to watch some nudie flicks. Champ had boxes and boxes of eight-millimeter film strips with all kinds of romantic action going on. Well on one such occasion the whole lot of us were struck dumb by an actor in one of the films. It was a short ten-minute thing called
A Lonely Girl Calls Up for Room Service
. If you’re over fifty you know how these films go. So when the room service guy comes into the room—even before the pants came off—we were all just staring at the most handsome man with the greatest face for film ever. We never even got to the sex part. There were about ten guys and one lesbian and a he-she in the room and we just kept going back to the point in the film strip where this handsome devil entered. We did it over and over again until it hit me: “This guy needs to be our new field reporter.” Ed Harken was in the room and he says, “What if he’s an idiot or can’t read?” Champ wasn’t convinced either: “Hold your horses, Ron, most of these films are made in Sweden. We can’t hire a Swede!” Well, I was hooked. I didn’t care what these guys said; I had to find this guy and make an offer even if it meant going to Sweden.

The box the film came in said
JACK PEPPER PRODUCTIONS
on it and with a little quick calling around I discovered a business by that name up in the San Fernando Valley area of Los
Angeles. Champ and I took the bus up there and several buses to North Hollywood out in the Valley. It was hotter than shit, that I do remember. Jack Pepper Productions was a house out on Saticoy Street. Nothing fancy, just a little stucco prefab deal. The kind you see all over Southern California if you’re not careful. Jack himself was in the back, by his pool, shooting a movie. He didn’t exactly welcome our intrusion but Champ and I can be pretty persuasive with our fists. Pretty quickly everyone making the movie took a ten-minute break while we talked to Mr. Pepper. We showed him the film. He confessed it was one of his but he had no idea where the actor was. His name at the time of shooting the movie was Cyrus Court. Pepper was quick to tell us that these guys changed their names faster than Esther Williams changed costumes in
Million Dollar Mermaid
. Well, that’s what he said. It’s not like I’m making any of this up. He went on to say, “Cyrus Court could be any number of guys out there, Tony Oakland, Wayne Duke, Kevin Dangle and a lot more. The plain truth is most of these guys end up on Hollywood Boulevard hustling for tricks.” Well, it was a pretty sad picture really. Here we thought this guy, Cyrus Court, had it made being in the movie business and having sex and all but Jack Pepper painted a different picture. Pepper’s world was one of broken homes, drug use and loose morals. We went back outside by the pool to watch some filming but sitting there in the 110-degree heat, watching two people have sex like that, took all the spirituality out of it for me. It was as close as I’ve ever come to understanding what existentialism means. I lost sight of whatever theological center there is that holds us together, however loosely, while watching
two very beautiful people with perfect anatomies go at it like dogs. In his defense Champ Kind turned to me and said quite simply, “Let’s go, Ron. This ain’t love.”

We gave up on finding the actor in the film. If Pepper was right the kid was probably one pill short of an overdose, if not already dead. Before heading back to San Diego we decided to take in some music along the Sunset Strip. It was the midsixties and the Strip was where it was happening. We must have looked like a couple of old fuddy-duddies at the Whisky a Go Go but we paid our five bucks to see Johnny Rivers and forget our troubles. I don’t have much use for long-haired people and man, there were a lot of them in the Whisky that night. The band that opened for Johnny Rivers was called the Practical Figs. They came out dressed in eighteenth-century garb with some guitars and started making noise—a lot of noise, really too much noise. Champ got disoriented and started swinging his arms around hoping to hit someone. I started yelling and then singing and then yelling. It was a crazy mess! If that’s rock and roll then no thanks! They were barely into their first “number” when I grabbed Champ and said, “There he is!” It was Cyrus Court or Tony Oakland or whoever he was—the guy from the film up onstage as the lead “singer” of this “band.” Champ rushed the stage and tackled him right away. It was the wrong thing to do and we acknowledged that. We did a bad thing. The crowd of hippies and drug addicts pounced on us and called us “the fuzz” and “narcs” and “Dad”—hurtful stuff, really, since we were none of those things. I might have been a dad but I certainly didn’t know it. Anyway when the melee was over and the cops had gone I got
a chance to talk to Tony Oakland. Right out of the gate he told me his name was Lance Poole. It wasn’t his real name but the name he’d had for the last two months fronting the Practical Figs. He did the porn thing and scraped up enough dough to get through UCLA as a journalism major. The whole rock thing was a goof—just good college-guy fun and a great way to score chicks. I had him! I told him about the gig down in San Diego, where he could not only use his journalism degree but he could score all the chicks he wanted. He was looking to get out of that scene anyway and he agreed to give it a try for a few weeks. A few weeks became thirty years in the news game—eight Peabody Awards, a Mr. San Diego Award, six daytime Emmys, and a
Playgirl
spread. His real name was Brian Fantanofskavitch, which sounded too commie for comfort, so we changed it to Fantana and the rest is history. Ratings at the station went up the very moment he came on camera. Women wrote in to the station to complain they were having spontaneous and uncontrolled orgasms when he spoke. It was a real problem. For about a three-year period from ’72 to ’75 the news van was nothing more than a traveling bedroom for Fantana. We did way too many breaking stories from the suburbs. Real news might have been happening downtown or over at the harbor but Fantana liked trolling the suburbs for bored housewives. I would lead in with a line like “And Brian Fantana with a special report on crime in the suburbs” or maybe “Backyard barbecues, are they safe? Brian Fantana weighs in!” I mean, there were nights when I would throw to him with nothing and he’d make up a story standing outside a house he’d just come from. “Ron, I’m standing here on the
corner of Mountain View and Grove, the virtual epicenter of a frightening new trend in exercising called ‘jogging.’ ” Back at the station we had a hard time keeping a straight face. We knew what Fantana was up to. We supported it. It was good for ratings and frankly speaking it was good news. Veronica Corningstone, my wife and massage partner, ruined all that fun male stuff for us—in a good way of course.