Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
We called her DiDi. She was my dad’s sister, Aunt Ivy. She was a character; I remember when she got promoted to Chief Cook and Salad Maker at the cafeteria in our local Weinstocks department store. She had fun calling herself that; it was so funny. She had a long-standing bet with a local radio DJ who was a big fan of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. DiDi was a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers. This was not long after the two teams moved to California from New York. If the Dodgers beat the Giants, she would cook him a Cornish Game Hen and he would have to eat it. She called it the closest thing to eating crow and it became a bit they would do on the air. Her son, my cousin Alan, was a master at calling in to the station when they would do radio contests on air. He was good at it and shared his secret of being the first caller. Before I share his clever tip, I must inform any reader that is unfamiliar with a rotary phone, just how long it took to dial a seven-digit number into a telephone. It was a slow process, especially when you had big numbers like 8, 9, or zero. You had to wait for the dial to rotate all the way back. It seemed like an eternity when you were trying to be fast. Alan told me to dial the first six numbers, so you only had to dial the last one. It worked like a charm, and I used it to win my first radio prize; a 45 RPM record of Midnight in Moscow by Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. I must have been about 8 or 9 years old and was smitten about being on the radio. This was in the late 50s.
Fast forward to the late 80s/early 90s when I was Superintendent of Postal Operations at the Atwater Post Office. I also moonlighted as a Karaoke DJ and worked the local music scene in the area. I had befriended a local radio DJ at Merced’s KABX Oldies Station at 97.5 on your radio dial. Dave Luna was a good friend who was working the scene for the radio station. I would call in to his contests and win a lot of prizes. Once he posed the question: “what was the first word in the song Johnny B Goode?” He said it was “way” and I challenged him to play the song as I knew the first word was actually “deep”. He played the song and called me back saying “I should have known better than to challenge you.” I remember another contest he had where you could trade your music for an Oldies CD. After answering the question correctly, he asked me what I had to trade. I told him I had a pirated cassette tape of Slim Whitman’s greatest hits. He laughed and told me I could keep it.
He would have games where he offered a choice of two different prizes. I offered to supply one of those prizes. I made a folder with the Rock and Roll legends stamps. I wanted to get some positive publicity for the Atwater Post Office. I got a lot of play on that prize as most people chose the other gift over the stamps and it remained in the prize packet for a long time. He invited me to talk about the stamps on air and I got to go to the station. That was fun. Years later when we moved to Dixon, we would drive through Merced on the way to Las Vegas. I called in to Dave’s show from the car and he put me on the air while I was driving through town.
After I retired from the Post Office and became the Studebaker Dude, I got another opportunity to go on air with friend John Sweeney, who had a weekly radio talk show about the Sacramento area car scene called “Cruisin Talk”. I got to co-host the whole show with him. Later he would put my car on the cover of his local magazine “The Northern & Central California Cruisin’ News”. Being on the radio was big fun for me. People who heard me told me I had a great radio voice. I was having fun. Just give me a microphone and I’m ready to talk. Fear of public speaking has never been a problem for me.
