Who's That Charlie King?

Hi, Bud!

I see we have a mystery on our hands concerning a Charlie King (January 3, 1969) who was NOT Charlie Scarbrough! I am stumped as well concerning this voice--woulda sworn there was only one Charlie King.

I do not believe it was Matt White (Sonny Martin III), as you can hear him and George Jennings on the Walloch's Home Furnishings commercial near the beginning of the audio.

I'm not absolutely sure, but it sounds like Ron Owens (the late Walt Sadler) doing the voiceover on the Commercial National Bank spot at about 17:45 into the audio.

This brings up what registers on me as an anomaly which I have noticed in almost every piece of audio that's been posted here on the Blog since day one. The voices are all pitched slightly higher than I remember them, which makes positive ID a little difficult for me. Maybe the pitch glitch is a product of the sampling rate during the conversion from analog to digital format. Perhaps the tape machines at 1425 West 7th were running a bit slower than standard speeds, owing to slightly low line voltage in the building. This would account for the slight speed-up when the tapes were played back on modern reproducers fed by "proper" voltage. (This would be something that Dave Montgomery would know WAY more about!)

As to the Mystery Charlie, the only guess I have is Al Eisenmann (hope that spelling is correct), who had the Doc Holiday name immediately before me in 1970. Al was an All-Purpose Radio Dude who could fill any on-air position at any time. His jingle in 1970 referred to him as "Doc Holiday, Super Sub '70." He left me with some serious shoes to fill!

Al may well have been at KAAY in 1969. And it might have been that with the arrival of Jonnie King in April of that year, Al was repositioned as Doc Holiday (we all know that there can only be one King at a time). This is a wild guess, but it makes as much sense to me as KAAY's policy of changing voices while they kept the same names. At any rate, I completely missed this Charlie King, which makes me think his tenure under that name was short-lived.

Maybe somebody has the real story on this and I will wind up looking foolish. Well, fine, It certainly won't be the first time! Meanwhile, happy sleuthing!

All The Best,
David B. Treadway
Doc Holiday VII
The Last PD