(photo Allan Sniffen)
By Scott Benjamin
WABC Rewound 2005
(photo Allan Sniffen)
Steve Gilinsky recalls while riding with friends in the late-1970s, he would
turn the volume of the car radio up not for the music but for when the air
personalities spoke on 77 WABC.
His favorite was Harry Harrison, whose booming voice woke up
his “radio friends” on morning drive from September 1968 to November 1979.
Luring Harry from rival WMCA, where he had been doing the
mid-day shift since 1959, was probably one of the best decisions that longtime
WABC program director Rick Sklar made during his 14 years at the helm.
Former WABC Assistant Program Director Jeff Berman said in a
2005 interview that the late Herb Oscar Anderson, who had been the morning drive
air personality since the station went to Top 40 in December 1960, wasn’t
comfortable in that format and would have been better playing Count Bassie
standards at a Middle of the Road station.
“Harry came in and flawlessly made the transition and boosted
the ratings,” Gilinsky said in a June 26, 2017 phone interview with
Musicradio77.com.
Over four hours, Harry would remind moms to put on the coffee
and help the ladies with their zippers along with accompanying sound effects.
“I used to get annoyed because he would on vacation for two
weeks after Labor Day each year I couldn’t listen to him as we were starting the
school year,” said Gilinsky, now 56, who since 1989 has owned WLTB, a Top 40
station in Binghamton, N.Y. He was so devoted that he even listened to Harry on
his transistor radio while his family was vacationing in Miami.
Gilinsky and Harry became friends in 2004 and a year later he
accompanied him to the taping of the WABC Rewound talk show and even made a
brief appearance to discuss his devotion to Harry. WABC air personality, Cousin
Bruce Morrow, who, like Harry, was then on the air at WCBS-FM, concisely
commented on the negative impact of the I pod-inspired JACK radio format during
the other one-hour segment of the talk show.
The talk show aired the following Monday, during WABC Rewound
on Memorial Day, and four days later WCBS-FM switched to the JACK format, ending
Harry and Bruce’s careers at the station, where they had been since the 1980s.
Gilinsky said he has received phone calls from Sirius/XM
satellite radio about Harry working for them, but he has always declined.
“It isn’t his kind of radio, since he wouldn’t be doing the
weather or speaking to a specific audience in one geographical area,” said
Gilinsky.
Harry had been at WABC during its peak in the late 1960s and
early 1970s when reportedly up to eight million listeners a week tuned in and
kids with transistor radios anxiously awaited number-one survey song to come on
the air.
Afternoon air personality Dan Ingram was at WABC longer than
anyone during it’s nearly 22 years as a music station and has made a bundle of
money from commercial voice overs.
Bruce is still on Sirius/XM and has made countless television
appearances on PBS.
But, Harry did morning drive or middays on New York City
radio almost continuously for nearly 45 years – from WMCA to WABC to WCBS-FM. He
also was the first of the marquee former WABC air personalities to make the
transition to oldies on WCBS-FM – in March 1980.
“He got the adults and got the kids to listen to him at WABC,
which isn’t easy,” said Bruce Slutsky of Flushing, Queens, a college librarian
and avid radio listener who helped launch a Facebook appreciation page for Harry
in 2010, which currently has 1,527 members. Slutsky also helped establish a
Facebook page for Bruce.
Gilinsky said that he estimated that about 50 million people
have heard Harry since he arrived at WMCA in 1959 as its mid-day personality.
“He is the nicest and the happiest person that I have ever
met,” he said. “We can be walking through a shopping mall and he’s saying hello
to people.”
Former WABC and WCBS-FM air personality Marc Sommers said in
a 2017 phone interview that when he arrived at WABC in August 1979, Harry was on
vacation, but he had left a note in his locker at WABC welcoming him to
Musicradio77.
Gilinsky recalled that when “I
was going through my divorce, Harry would call every
day.” He said a generation earlier, Harry tried to help the late Bob Cruz, the
young WABC overnight air personality of the late 1970s, with personal problems.
When asked in a 2014 phone
interview about why there was scant material about Harry in his historical novel
on WABC – “Kemosabe: The Days (and nights) of a Radio Idyll” -
Chris Ingram, Dan Ingram’s son, said,
“I didn’t hear much about Harry from my dad through the years. My dad likes him
and respected his work. But I think, among other things, Harry was the morning
guy who was home when his children got back from school in the afternoon and
wasn’t staying out at clubs and restaurants at night and therefore there weren’t
a lot of anecdotes.”
“I don’t know of anybody who is closer to his children,”
Gilinsky said of Harry’s relationship with his two sons, Michael and Patrick,
and his daughter, Patti, who is an administrator and contributor at the Facebook
appreciation page.
Harry has always referred to his late wife as “Pretty Patti.”
Their marriage was an extended date.
“They had a phenomenal relationship,” said Steve. “He will
still talk about her all the time. His whole life was Patti.”
Gilinsky, who has lunch with Harry “two to three times a
year,” still listens to air checks of his WABC shows.
He said, “It’s amazing the memories that they bring back,
because I listened to some of those air checks when they were live.”
WABC Musicradio 77 Home Page