I first listened to the radio to see what was happening with my beloved New York Mets. Unfortunately, I was stuck in Los Angeles at the time, so the Met news wasn't so frequent. But Vin Scully called a most engaging ballgame. The radio didn't have a "sleep" setting, so, often, I'd doze off and wake after the game.
Which on KFI, meant Dave Hull, a humorous man who invited the Dodger first-baseman, Wes Parker to do the show with him. Eventually, I got a clock-radio which you could set to turn on in the morning. Since the dial was on KFI (and I never saw any need to move it), I was soon waking to Al Lohman and Roger Barkley.
Now, what Lohman and Barkley did was not extraordinary or unusual by today's standards, but I wonder how common all this was 30-35 years ago: They used funny voices to create characters, and you were listening to an entire fictional town with loads and loads of humorous personages. My young mind found this most amusing.
Late at night, on Sundays, there was, lo and behold, a radio drama produced by the Salvation Army. No, it wasn't called "lo and behold" but it could have been. These were always inspirational dramas, and amazingly melodramatic. I realized that these were the last vestige of the sort of drama known to my parents in their youth. I got my friend Adam to listen to them, and he was similarly enthralled.
So, eventually, we dug out my dad's old reel-to-reel and recorded our own audio plays. We spoofed the then-current craze for disaster films, using many a fun sound effect. (If I recall, Hollywood fought an outbreak of lockjaw - probably inspired by Charlton Heston's performances.) Adam went on to write many a movie and to create many a comedy show on television (currently Mad-TV, the Jamie Kennedy Experiment and Blue Collar), and he'd be quick to tell you "It all started when Noel dug out his father's reel-to-reel."
