Legacy Inductees/3:

V.A.L. Jones
     V.A.L. Jones was literally the first lady of St. Louis radio. She was the first announcer, program director and scriptwriter at KSD, the market’s first commercial radio station.
     Miss Jones was the subject of several articles in national radio publications of the day for her work in getting the station on the air in 1922. “Radio in the Home” wrote in September 1922 of her distinctive voice, “You recognize it among the voices of other radio announcers for its clearness of enunciation, for the purity of diction it employs...”
     She was said to have received thousands of letters from listeners, and her on-air identifier was simply “Miss Jones announcing.” Virginia Adele Laurence Jones spent five years at KSD, having been hired by owner, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, because of her knowledge of the city, her musical knowledge and her writing ability, which she had demonstrated as a rewrite person at the paper.
     In the station’s first year, Miss Jones held weekly auditions for on-air performers, usually hearing 50 - 60 acts per week.
     She left KSD when she married an engineer from another local station and he was transferred to Kansas City.

France Laux
     France Laux has been called St. Louis’ “pioneer baseball voice,” a tribute that referred to his work with the St. Louis Browns and St. Louis Cardinals. He was the voice of baseball for 19 years on KMOX starting in 1929. The Sporting News presented him with its first award to the nation’s outstanding major league broadcaster in 1937.
     He did radio play-by-play in nine World Series and nine Major League All-Star Games, but his work wasn’t limited to baseball. Laux also broadcast boxing, football, wrestling, hockey and basketball.
     His voice was also heard on KXOK in St. Louis as part of his play-by-play baseball agreements, but his association with KMOX lasted 30 years.
     His list of broadcast booth sidekicks reads like a “Who’s Who” of sports: Gabby Street, Dizzy Dean, Pepper Martin, Joe Medwick, Leo Durocher and Frankie Frisch.
     He often bragged that he had worked for 20 years without missing a broadcast or arguing with a player or umpire.

Robert R. Lynn
     Robert R. Lynn began his broadcast career at KWOS in Jefferson City, MO., while he was in school at the University of Missouri - Columbia Journalism School. He came to St. Louis in 1959 after working at two stations in Houston, where he claims to have been fired by Dan Rather.
     In addition to his 20-year career as a newsman at KXOK followed by two years at KMOX and a brief stint at WIL, Lynn was well-known in the St. Louis market for his commercial voiceovers.
     He was president of the local AFTRA chapter for three terms and received the Nellie Booth Award for meritorious service from that organization in 1991.
     He even found time to do some acting at the St. Louis Municipal Opera during the 1969 season, and after his retirement from radio, he appeared in a national television movie and mini-series.
     Robert R. Lynn was part of the crack news team at KXOK during the station’s rock heyday in the late fifties through the sixties. The men were well-known for their deep-voiced, authoritative presentations and rapid delivery.

John McCormick
     John McCormick became known in St. Louis as “The Man Who Walks and Talks at Midnight.”
     His overnight program on KMOX was a throwback to radio’s earlier days, when deep-voiced announcers steeped in knowledge and personality held forth on the nation’s powerhouse stations.
     McCormick began his work at KMOX in 1958, having already established himself as a radio personality at Chicago’s WGN and WBBM and stations in New Orleans and Los Angeles.
     He held forth on the KMOX overnight shift for 31 years, with listeners awaiting his familiar clichés, like his sign-off at the end of each morning’s show: “And now, the night has separated from the day.”
     Like many KMOX personalities, McCormick stayed on the air past the usual retirement age of 65, finally hanging it up at 75.

Buddy Moreno
     Buddy Moreno’s name became synonymous with the Big Band era because the group he led appeared many times on CBS, NBC and Mutual network radio from 1947 - 1952. His CBS appearances included several stops on “Saturday At the Chase,” which originated live from St. Louis.
     His second career was as a disc jockey, first at WHHM in Memphis. After a year there, he returned to St. Louis, where he worked at KWK, WEW and WSIE. At the latter two stations, the formats allowed Moreno to share his big band expertise and experience with listeners, and he developed a regular following that would tune in just for his programs.
     He was an all-night disc jockey at KWK for ten years, moving to WEW to take the job of announcer/program director. In 1996, Moreno came out of retirement to host a weekly big band program on non-commercial WSIE.

Chuck Norman
     Chuck Norman started his radio career in 1948 as a late-night disc jockey where he made money selling time on his own show. Three years later he moved to WIL.
     Five or so years into that gig, he left the market for a year but returned and put WGNU (Granite City) on the air in 1961. In 1965, he added WGNU-FM, claiming it was the first radio station to broadcast country music in stereo. He sold the FM in 1978.
     The AM format was switched to talk in 1977 and the station was later dubbed “Radio Free St. Louis” developing its audience by featuring non-mainstream hosts.
     Through his entire life, Norman maintained ownership of the station, which, in his later years, gave him the distinction of being the only original sole-owner left in the St. Louis market.
     In addition, he held an annual holiday party every year starting in 1976 to benefit the area’s needy families.

Gil Newsome
     Gil Newsome was the teenage heart throb of St. Louis during his stint at KWK in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
     He gained a national reputation as a disc jockey for the station, gaining his popularity with his teenage audience in numerous personal appearances at sock hops and teen dances, and he had a regular television show in St. Louis in 1953. Variety magazine named him the nation’s most popular disc jockey.
     He was elevated to KWK’s program director’s position in 1958 after deejaying there for 13 years. A year later he was appointed manager of the station. By 1961, he had moved to KSD as a disc jockey.
     Prior to coming to St. Louis, Gil Newsome was an announcer on big band shows on NBC and CBS. His stints included the “Chesterfield Supper Club” and “Coca Cola Spotlight Bands.”

Bob Osborne
     Bob Osborne worked in St. Louis radio as a pop music disc jockey at WIL and jack-of-all-trades at KMOX and KMOX-FM.
     Valued for his knowledge of the music business, Osborne, or “Ozzie” to his friends, was on WIL from 1960 to 1968, and as the station’s program director, he was responsible for switching the station’s format from rock to middle-of-the-road.
     KMOX General Manager Robert Hyland hired him away in 1968. Osborne worked at the local CBS outlets until his death in 1988. At various times, he served as program director at KMOX and KMOX-FM, general manager of KMOX-FM, disc jockey on KMOX-FM, music director at KMOX, and program host on KMOX.

Don Pietromonaco
     Don Pietromonaco, in the ears and eyes of thousands of St. Louis radio listeners was the definitive Johnny Rabbitt, holding forth at KXOK with that air name from 1964 to 1968. He commanded the nighttime radio scene, inviting his listeners to phone in and “blab it to the Rabbitt.”
     There were other characters on his show with whom he would converse, but none was as popular as Bruno J. Grunion, who was Rab’s alter-ego. Often, Pietromonaco would get to the studio early and record his Bruno drop-ins before the show, then converse with the pre-taped voice on the air. Other times he did both voices live.
     Don Pietromonaco motivated his listeners to donate millions of dollars for medical research during his stint here. He ran a couple teen-oriented nightclubs in St. Louis - Bruno’s Bat Cave and Cloud Nyne - and his audience came to believe that Johnny Rabbitt was an adult who understood them and would go to bat for them.
     Even today, several decades later, his baby boomer fans can recall intricate details from humorous bits he did on the air, even though they were only broadcast once.
     As an indication of his fame in St. Louis, Pietromonaco was recognized by Billboard magazine in the 1980s as the Johnny Rabbitt the listeners remembered and the one who was known nationally for his ratings successes.

Roy Queen
     Roy Queen’s career as a hillbilly singer and broadcaster began in 1929 when he was 16. He hitched a ride on a freight train from Pilot Knob, MO., to St. Louis and auditioned at the KMOX studios in the Mayfair Hotel. He got the job and was soon yodeling and playing his guitar on a daily basis on KMOX. He was an entertainer on KMOX and WIL and later worked as a disc jockey on KXLW and on KWRE in nearby Warrenton, MO.
     Early on at KMOX, he had a namesake program, “Roy Queen and His Ozark Mountaineers,” that was fed to some network affiliates. KMOX later moved him to the wildly popular “Uncle Dick Slack’s Barn Dance.”
     Like many of the young performers in those days, Queen did many personal appearances in addition to his musical performances at the station. It was during the return trip from one of those appearances that he was gravely injured in an auto accident.
     The recovery period for his two broken legs was lengthy, but that didn’t keep him from working. The station set up a remote microphone in Queen’s hospital room while engineers ran the records at the station.

John Roedel
     John Roedel was one of the KSD folks who worked at the radio station when television came to St. Louis, which meant he was required to wear several hats in the Pulitzer broadcast operation.
     Roedel came to St. Louis from WISH in Indianapolis in 1946. As he told it, his uncle in St. Louis had lunch at the Missouri Athletic Club and KSD’s general manager George Burbach mentioned he needed radio announcers. A call was made and John Roedel was on the next train to St. Louis. The relationship that ensued was a long one. John Roedel served as a staff announcer and newsman at KSD until 1975.
     In his initial position as staff announcer, Roedel “did just about everything,” from disc jockeying to news to commercials, not to mention the station IDs between network shows.
     When KSD-TV signed on in February 1947, staff announcers were also expected to perform similar chores in the television studio. Roedel was the voice of morning news on KSD for 25 years. In 1996 he was made a member of the NATAS Silver Circle.

Bob Shea
     Bob Shea (Schoeneberg) became a part of the St. Louis radio scene when he moved to the market in 1948, taking a job at WEW as a newsman. Two years later he moved across town to KXOK, where he stayed until his retirement in 1985.
For about a year at KXOK, Shea was called Victor Fontana in an unsuccessful effort to give all on-air staffers memorable multi-syllabic names.
     Much of his time at KXOK was as the station’s news director, although he was on the air through his entire career there.
     For a couple years in the 1960s, he hosted a Sunday night call-in show called “Hotline,” in which Mr. Shea took the devil’s advocate position and disagreed with callers’ opinions. According to his family, he received several death threats because of the show.
     He was active in the St. Louis chapter of AFTRA and served as its president. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award, which is known as the Nellie Booth Award, from the group.

Lou Thimes
     Lou Thimes’ strong college background in business and music has served him well during his nearly 50 years in St. Louis radio. Known to all his listeners as “Fatha,” Thimes’ deep voice graced the airwaves of many stations and was synonymous with rhythm & blues.
     His resume paints a picture of a man well-known for his musical knowledge and legion of loyal listeners: KATZ, KADI, KXLW, KKSS, KMJM, WESL and a specialty show on community radio KDHX. In the mid-1950s, Lou was the first African-American ring announcer at the local Kiel Auditorium boxing matches.
     It is a tribute to Lou Fatha Thimes that local blues musicians held him in such high esteem that they performed concerts in his honor over the years.

Jim White
     Jim White held forth at KMOX as a fixture in the nighttime hours for 20 of his 30 years at the station, retiring in 1999.
     Because KMOX enjoyed clear channel status with 50,000 watts of power, his show was often heard over much of North America.
     White came to St. Louis from KDKA in Pittsburgh in 1969, and like many people at KMOX, he worked many different jobs and shifts. At one time, he was program director, news director and program host.
     He made irascibility a mainstay of the overnight show, often cutting off callers in midstream if he considered them boring.
     White even gave himself an on-air nickname, “The Big Bumper,” which he said was due to his size and airshift - a not-so-vague reference to things that go bump in the night.

Ed Wilson
     Ed Wilson’s St. Louis radio career spanned 30 years, with a brief hiatus for a trip to California.
     In May of 1942 he moved to St. Louis from a radio job in Chicago and became a folksy-talking disc jockey at KWK, a job he held for 16 years. He had a huge fan base among teenagers and also hosted a local teen dance show on television, the weekly “St. Louis Hop.”
     A change in KWK’s ownership was the motivation for Wilson to move uptown to KSD in 1958, where his popularity continued. When he went to Hollywood to try his hand at movies, Wilson’s voice was still heard here. He appeared on KSD via recorded programs and still voiced many local commercials.
     Returning to St. Louis in 1962, Ed Wilson admitted movies were not for him, and he took a disc jockey job at WIL. After two years there, he took a job at WEW, only to return to WIL in 1970.