Most of on here probably remember WFBG's former morning man
and Altoona's original "shock jock". Everyday while getting ready for school, Sean McKay and Patty Gross (sp?) Dave (Charltor) and I uesd frequently bring up the subject, and we'd talk about the on air pranks he used to pull.
Like the time he told every one that Ma Bell was going to clean out the phone lines by running compressed air through them. And the dust would be comming out of the the receiver of your phone. So if you didn't want dust all though your house, you need wrap a baggie around your receiver with a rubber band. I can remember him having on air conversations with people explaining what to do in detail.
Then there was the time he didn't want to read school lunches, so he said all of the lunch ladies were on strike, and there would be no school lunches. So 'you'd better get your mom out of bed and tell her to give you some money, so you buy something at Sheetz before school. I can still remember sitting in class and our principal making the announcement "In spite of what was said on WFBG this morning the WILL be lunch available to all students."
I think JP should remember some of this. Didn't you get your start at WFBG Professor?
Some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug.
Yes, I worked alongside Sean McKay for several years at WFBG in the '80's and early '90s.
He now resides in his home state of Montana, and works for an oldies station there, "entertaining the ranchers and the cowboys." Sean was back for a few special guest appearances recently at my former broadcast employer, appearing on (the late) Q94 and WRTA.
I remember both of those on-air stunts you referenced. I have a few other favorites as well:
Back in the '80s, the Altoona Mirror didn't hit the streets until the afternoon. One morning, the story broke that the Swedish Health Spa in Greenwood was busted for alleged prostitution. Sean McKay went on the air that morning and announced that the Mirror was going to publish a client list from the Swedish Health Spa in their afternoon edition. The Mirror reportedly got flooded with phone calls by concerned "clients," including a few community VIP's!
Sean also loved to bust on "mountain women." During his Saturday show, he'd often lament that Saturday was the day that the "mountain women" came down the hill to Altoona to do their shopping; he'd describe them as being fat, dirty and only having two teeth in their mouths. This would prompt numerous women from the mountain communities to call and argue with Sean on the air, making for great entertainment!
In 1983, Michael Jackson's Thriller album was the craze, and WFBG used to get deluged with phone calls by kids wanting to request the hits from that album. Sean would announce on the air that he was vehemently refusing to play Jackson's hits. He then announced that he would play the hits, but proceeded to play them all AT THE SAME TIME! So you heard this cacophony of "Beat It," "Billie Jean" and "Thriller" battling with one another on the air, with Sean's legendary laugh track playing over it...classic!
I have many, many McKay stories...And Dangerous Denny has a few as well, from McKay's stint on WNCC in Barnesboro as "Barney Hoople." (My favorite episode from that stint was when "Barney" introduced WFBG newsman Jeff Speck as a radon expert from Washington, DC. After Jeff started explaining that radon was good for your health, several suspicious listeners called "Barney" and alleged that the radon expert was a phony. "Barney" then became incensed on the air because listeners were insulting his guest, and punished them by silently reading the local newspaper to himself on the air for the rest of the show!
In his latter days on WFBG, Sean also used to do afternoon newscasts during my show. We called it "Sound Effect News;" Sean would read the stories, and I would provide sound effects in the background (tires screeching and a crash sound behind an auto accident story, fight sound effects during a story about a domestic fight, etc.). One day, one of Sean's stories was about police being called to the Altoona Campus because two women reported that a man exposed himself to them. I caught Sean by surprise by playing the sound effects of a zipper opening and closing, followed by a woman's terrified screams. He busted up laughing in the middle of his newscast - touche Sean!
I have a ton of stories...I may post a few more later.
Some of Sean's best gags happened when he exploited the gullibility of some of his listeners...In the late '80s, WFBG announced that they were jumping on the bandwagon of an emerging broadcast technology at that time, AM stereo. (This technology flopped, as you needed to buy a special radio to get AM stereo, and most folks didn't go for it.) Anyway, after WFBG announced the switch to AM stereo, Sean started getting calls from people asking how they could hear WFBG in AM stereo without buying the new radio. Sean had them position two or three standard radios in different parts of the same room, explaining that this would produce the stereo effect. Many of these folks believed him hook, line and sinker!
In his latter days at WFBG, Sean hosted his own midday talk show. He would get a wide variety of guests, from hucksters selling new products to authors of new books, to psychics. The psychics were among the most popular, and people would call in to ask the psychics questions about their futures. Some of the psychics were "legit" (as legitimate as psychics can be, given whether you believe in them or not), but a few times Sean got fellow radio staffers to pose as psychics, and the listeners fell for it each time!
Also in the late '80s, WFBG signed on to broadcast Paul Harvey news and commentary. Sean loathed Paul Harvey, and used every opportunity to poke fun at him on the air. Sean would take portions of Harvey's broadcasts and play them back out of context, to make him sound senile. Sean edited a story Paul told on one of his newscasts to make it sound like Paul was attempting to tell a joke, but got lost midway through! He'd also drop in Paul's laugh in the middle of songs; and he also took a clip of Paul attempting to enunciate a Japanese word or name ("Foo-mee-yaah-kee-ahh!") and randomly drop it in during songs, commercial breaks, and even during Harvey newscasts themselves! Eventually, some of Paul Harvey's relatives in this area caught wind of what was going on and complained to station management about it, and soon Harvey's broadcasts were discontinued on WFBG and went back to WRTA.
And then there was "Bald Bob's Burger Barn." Sean used to run this spoof commercial for a fast food eatery, Bald Bob's Burger Barn. The commercial was a comedy gag supplied by a morning show prep service, but it sounded real, so Sean would drop the Bald Bob ads in the middle of actual commercial stop sets. Of course, listeners would hear these commercials and then try to find the place. Sean would put them on the air, and try to tell them how to get there, even though the place didn't exist! I could picture these yay-hoo's driving around the countryside trying to find Bald Bob's!
In the late '80s, Donna Dunkel returned to WFBG but went on the air under the name "Billie Starr." Donna is normal-sized in real life, but Sean played up her "Billie Starr" character to be this huge, obese, several-hundred-pound woman. Sean went as far as to enlist a huge, rotund woman to ride on a hay wagon in a Hollidaysburg parade, posing as "Billie Starr!"
Sean occasionally played local music on his show. Some of it was legit, as he played Cut The Mustard on his show a lot in the early '80s, and also played Jack Servello's tunes from time to time. But other times, he had some fun. Once, he announced that he was kicking off his Saturday radio show with some "local talent," and proceeded to play an excerpt from a local church radio broadcast, of a minister singing a hymn out of key! Sean announced that it was "local talent," and mixed it in with the regular hit playlist! He also played this awful-sounding big band-styled vocal tune, claiming it was a new recording from WFBG-FM announcer Ted Johnson (the voice did sound like Ted, but the song was terrible)...He even got a groundswell of listener votes behind it to get "Ted's" song voted onto Jay Randyll's "Top Nine at Nine!"
A lot of Sean's gags and jokes were against his radio co-workers, myself included. Anything, everything, anybody and everybody was fair game. He even busted on station management and owners from time to time!
One time, he and chief engineer Terry McAlarney (or as Sean called him, "Terry Malarkey") played a classic on-air gag on a young news announcer on WFBG, Andy Flick. They set it up that as Andy did his newscast on WFBG, Terry's voice would come across Andy's headphones, announcing that this was a test of the state's emergency broadcast network, and that Andy was being ordered to stop talking in the middle of his newscast! Andy froze up on the air when Terry spoke through the headphones, and the rest of us all played along like we didn't know what was going on, and asked him why he stopped talking. (At last word, Andy was now working for one of the radio news networks in another part of the country; he left all of us pranksters in Altoona behind.)
Last edited by Jim Price on Wednesday Jun 03, 2009, edited 1 time in total.
Most of Sean's gags against me were small and too insignificant to remember...most of them happened during "Sound Effect News," especially if I botched a sound effect or played the wrong one.
I've likely mentioned this before, but Sean is the person who gave me the "Professor" nickname; because when I first started working at WFBG in 1984, I was the only person on the air staff with a college degree.
I heard some of his appearances on Dave Barger's show on WRTA. He shared words with John McGinnis, whose rhetoric has ratcheted up several notches since then! Ya gotta hand it to a guy who can drop in, throw stones at the bees nest, leave, and months later the bees are still angry. He's liberal, and refused to be the target they wanted him to be. They just couldn't corner him, he was very deft.--->JMS
I have fond memories of Sean and Tommy Riley doing a morning show (around 1977 as I remember). Tommy doing the Garibaldi character. They worked well together.\
I also remember Sean and Tommy doing a bit Tommy called "under the covers". They would read song titles followed by the words "under the covers". It led to some subtle, risque laughs.
Oh, I remember "Barney Hoople" the laid off coal miner up here on WNCC. You knew in a second when you heard the voice that it was Sean. He violated his WFBG contract when he did that one.
Dial and Deal is another McKay memory, with some of his epic battles with "the nice Eye-talian lady." And if somebody got on the air trying to sell a car super cheap, Sean would cut to the chase and ask what was wrong with the piece of junk!
This was right after the Lakemont Park/Boyertown fiasco...WALY 104 (before Forever bought them) moved their studios and offices into the town square portion of the park area near the Casino, and the park was briefly called Walyworld at Lakemont Park. WALY ran a break page ad in the Altoona Mirror looking for sales staff. Sean McKay decided to have some fun with this; he called the Mirror claiming to be from WALY, and told them to add a line to the ad: "Experience running amusement park rides preferred." I was working at WFBG the day the revised ad ran, and remember WALY's general manager showing up at the WFBG front offices, his face beet red from the caper...classic!
This was right after the Lakemont Park/Boyertown fiasco...WALY 104 (before Forever bought them) moved their studios and offices into the town square portion of the park area near the Casino, and the park was briefly called Walyworld at Lakemont Park. WALY ran a break page ad in the Altoona Mirror looking for sales staff. Sean McKay decided to have some fun with this; he called the Mirror claiming to be from WALY, and told them to add a line to the ad: "Experience running amusement park rides preferred." I was working at WFBG the day the revised ad ran, and remember WALY's general manager showing up at the WFBG front offices, his face beet red from the caper...classic!
Thats the best one yet. I remember when it was called WALYworld.
Sean was the man. He even had billboards around town with his caricature on them.
Some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug.
This is from one of WFBG's hit survey playlists from 1979 (you could pick these up in local record stores). My scanner cut off the top and bottom of the image, but the caricature air staff from left to right: Donna Dunkel, Steve Kelsey, Steve Austin, Ed Tate, Sean McKay, Patty Gross, Rick McGee and Tony Booth.
I used to collect beer cans in the 70's, it was a popular hobby then... I had well over 600 different cans from all over the world. The only ones I kept were a full Billy Beer, a full JR Ewing Beer, and a mint WFBG Keystone Country Beer. I want to say that Pittsburgh Brewing (Iron City) made it, they used to do a pretty good business in small house labels like Oyster House, Olde Frothingslosh, and such. They made more different names than any other brewer as far as I'm aware, they used to Steelers, Pirates and Pens series, as well as cans featuring Burgh landmarks. If collected them you'd have a sizeable collection, and they'd be worth a nice price now.
I also had Horseshoe Curve Beer. I think Altoona Brewing made that.
Back to your regularly scheduled thread. --->JMS
--->JMS