Word: mcneill
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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...
Over the years, the program has had dozens of embryonic celebrities in its cast: young Fibber McGee and Molly, Patti Page, Johnny Desmond, Fran Allison, etc. And people have kept up with McNeill's own family as if he were everybody's first cousin. He has three sons, and each birth was big spot-news on the show...
When he started the Breakfast Club, he recalls, "I took over the deadest radio time just to fill it." Now the early morning hours have become the prime time of radio, and Don McNeill is cruising along on some $100,000 a year...