Jack Gale's Passing Summons Memories of Baltimore Radio's Golden Age

Reports this week of Jack Gale’s death at 92, after years as one of the funniest people ever heard on Baltimore radio, are another painful reminder of a time when the AM airwaves were filled with quirky personalities and belly laughs, and not just angry telephone callers venting their political differences.

Gale was here a long time ago, from 1957 to 1963, at a couple of AM radio stations whose call letters barely register in memory – WITH and WWIN. He returned in the 1990s, for a brief stint with WITH, 1230 on the dial.

But by then, the glory days of AM radio were gone. And soon enough, so was Gale, off to some other, distant radio markets where he surely brought his sense of silliness and glee to listeners.

You don’t hear his kind on the radio any more. Ask anybody still around from Gale’s glad era who still remembers the jokes, The Mighty Gale Players, the man-on-the-street interviews, the 29 different voices Gale employed such as the finicky Lady Hortense.

Raised on Lower Park Heights and graduated in 1943 from Forest Park High School, Gale scrounged around a few smaller broadcast markets before landing at WITH in his home town in 1957.

It was a great time to be in radio. Rock ‘n’ roll had just tumbled in, along with transistor radios that seemed permanently attached to teenagers’ ears, and Baltimore had some of the most creative jocks in the business, including Paul (Fat Daddy) Johnson, Hot Rod Hulbert, Buddy Deane, Johnny Dark, Les Alexander, Johnny (“Hello, you good-looking people”) Contino, long, lean, lanky Larry Dean – and Jack Gale.

WITH never had much of a signal, and so WCAO was the big rock ‘n’ roll ratings leader back then. But WITH scored big with Gale and some of its other jocks. The station gave them more room for patter between the songs, more chance to let loose their comic creativity – and Gale made the most of it.

He wisecracked. He made up songs. He sang along with commercials. He poked fun at local big shots. Once, the station staged a phony firing of Gale. Hundreds of listeners called to protest. The station then ran a full-page ad in the old News-Post announcing he was “back” on the air.

That kind of playfulness on the radio has long since disappeared – and so has the sheer comic joy of Jack Gale, and his generation of radio jocks.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.