Word: mcneill
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus, every day of the working week, begins Don McNeill's radio Breakfast Club, the longest running series in the history of broadcasting. This summer it begins its 30th straight year...
...Corn. Mixing orchestra music, songs, plain talk, sentiment, shenanigans, commercials, and poems that would have embarrassed Edgar Guest. Breakfast Club is the salt of the air. The visiting audience is full of people who listen to McNeill every day without fail, and they feel no restraint about participating. One woman walked up to him during a show recently and hefted a likker pot toward him, drawling: "Ah brought you a small jug of corn from Alabama." "We got our own corn on this show," said...
That's a real fact. "Courtship makes a man spoon," Don will inform his listeners, "but marriage is what makes him fork over." McNeill himself has no monopoly on the maize. Comedian Sam Cowling (a 23-year man on the show) is the author of a regular feature called "Fact and Fiction From Sam's Almanac." Says wise old Sam: "The distance from the head of a fox to its tail is a fur piece...
Embryonic Celebrities. The show is perhaps of limited appeal to the average Vassar graduate who worked at The New Yorker for three years before marrying an advertising account-executive and settling in Greenwich, Conn. But there are other kinds of people in the U.S., and they have made Don McNeill the most enduringly successful broadcasting talent in the country. "Our theme is to make a neighborhood of a nation," he says. He is the archenemy of smut. His show is clean, decent, plain, straightforward, decorous, honest, and full of gimmicks like the daily snake march around the breakfast table...
...McNeill was born in Galena,Ill, and raised in Sheboygan, Wis., where his father ran a small chair factory. He went to Marquette University and helped pay his expenses by working at a Milwaukee radio station. Four years of miscellaneous radio jobs after graduation finally led to Chicago and the first Breakfast Club show on the old Blue Network (now ABC) in the summer...