Radio Striptease on “The Magic of Radio”

Text: Marc Fisher ’80 | Photo: Rob Schuman ’74

The Magic of Radio was a late-night, sometimes all-night, program that aired once a week from about 1977 to 1980. It was a mix of music, juvenile nonsense, brilliant satire and pathetically bad taste.

We tried to stay as close to the legal and moral edge as possible. We had a weatherman with a speech impediment that rendered him entirely incomprehensible. We had a substitute weatherman who was sentenced to stand at an (imaginary) outdoor phone booth in Kingston whenever there was significant snow or, his personal favorite, freezing rain. We had a sports reporter who never once made it on the air; he always seemed to be delayed at a bar across the street. The news was read by Gus Gil, whose booming voice made the acts of a New Jersey state magistrate seem like the coming of the Lord.

The Magic of Radio was a group effort and it was enraptured by the idea of format changes. Nearly every week, a dour-sounding program manager would take the microphone to announce that WPRB had no choice but to succumb to the entreaties of consultants and accept a format switch. One week it was Classical Top 40, a brisk, maniacal program scheme in which a group of PRB staffers stood in the studio chanting jingles (“Blast from the Past!” “Num-ber l!”) while 60-second bits of Mahler and Mozart sputtered out over the station. Another week it would be All-Cooking Radio, in which delicious-sounding dishes were prepared right in studio. When the chefs ran out of ingredients, they ordered pizza, then interviewed the delivery man on the air.

One week, we called a Trenton strip joint and invited a stripper to join the program. To our great surprise, she did, arriving in the studio at 2 a.m. and playing along as we presented Radio Striptease. It was, to the great dismay of listeners who got out of bed to hustle down to the basement of the Holder Broadcasting Complex, only a fully-clad woman describing her act.

Listeners visited the studios one other late night, as the Magic of Radio presented a dramatic performance in which an obviously (we thought) fictitious campus extremist political group staged a coup after losing university elections by a landslide margin. The coup took place in our studios and involved the guerillas taking over the airwaves and locking the DJ in a hot and airless studio. Someone took this a bit too seriously and half an hour or so into the DJ’s plaintive pleas for help, some actually arrived—the proctors and the town police. It took some explaining, but the station license was never in jeopardy.

[In October of 1990, I was in Berlin] covering the German Unification Day ceremonies for the Washington Post when someone asked me if I was the guy from The Magic of Radio. I’ve been recognized by old acquaintances before, but I must admit this was the first time someone had remembered my voice. It was a nice moment.

(Credit is due to my Magic of Radio cohorts — Jason Meyer ‘80, Alex Wolff ‘79, David Remnick ‘80, and a cast of dozens)