Casey Kasem, My Father & His Friend Marty Cherrin on the Radio, April 9, 1957

My music collection includes about 400 hours of live tape that I’ve traded for or recorded myself, maybe 550 LPs, and it’s now approaching 700 CDs. Consequently, when I was cleaning in the basement of what had been my parents’ house and I came across their small record collection, of course I leafed through them. Along with a number of soundtracks and comedy records, including Allen Sherman song parodies and some Belle Barth LPs of “blue” material we weren’t allowed to listen to that they played when friends were over for bridge, and other artifacts of my childhood and its home, I found a couple of LPs in paper slip liners with the label of Detroit radio station WJBK and “Dr. Schreiber 4-9-57”.

Apparently, my dad and a veterinary colleague and close friend of his, Dr. Marty Cherrin, appeared on a radio show called “Sound Off”, to discuss, of all things, veterinary dentistry, and then take calls about pets from listeners.

Fortunately, not only have I kept my LPs, but my Systemdek turntable with a Profile tonearm and Grado cartridge works just fine. To get the recording into a digital format, though, I did have to buy a little Behringer USB audio gizmo because the cheap Asus laptop I had gotten to run my laser doesn’t have a line level input like computers used to have, and using the mic input badly distorted the signal.

At first my father’s voice was hard to recognize. The recording was made when I was just 3 years old, before most of my memories were formed, he was then closer to his Brooklyn roots, and his voice was pitched higher than decades of smoking would make it. Then, though, he laughed and I immediately recognized his laughter.

Ironically, the radio announcer’s voice seemed familiar itself, and when my dad called him Casey, a light bulb went on. I knew that long before Casey Kasem starred on the America’s Top 40 radio and tv series, he got his start as a disc jockey in Detroit. His parents were Lebanese immigrants (I just found out, by the way, that Kasem, often identified as of Arab descent, was actually from a Druze family), and a quick search showed that after getting into radio announcing in the Army his first radio job was indeed at WJBK, where he worked from 1954 to 1957.

Because I watch videos related to music and because YouTube spies on me, the video website suggested a short on some musical topic. One of the comments to the video said it was by actor and radio announcer Mike Kasem, Casey’s son. I tracked down an email address and asked him if he’d like to hear his dad from 68 years ago. He replied, saying it was, “Incredible.”

To be honest, the first half of the radio show was about as boring as you would think the topic of pet tooth care might be but in addition to being of personal interest to the Schreiber, Cherrin, and Kasem families the transcription is also an artifact of radio history. Besides being a recording of some of Casey Kasem’s earliest radio work, it long predated the rise of talk radio with hosts taking calls from listeners. In this case, it also predated the technology to allow on-air calls from listeners, so, in a gross violation of the first rule of radio, No Dead Air, Kasem would take the call, listen to the caller, and relay the question to my father and Dr. Cherrin.

You can listen to it here: