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by George Csolak
Like a generation of music buffs, memories of my youth came rushing back after I finished reading Don Corey’s book, Are You Talking to Me? For a guy who, as a grade school kid, listened to Johnny Rabbit on KXOK on a small transistor radio, hearing disc jockey Don Corey play album rock on KSHE 95 after midnight was like an awakening.
Corey and his fellow KSHE jocks helped fuel an insatiable hunger within me to listen to real rock radio for nearly four decades, while elevating the level “cool” of their profession. I felt like I was listening to family. I wished I was there behind the microphone spinning records.
So when the news hit last October that Corey had passed away suddenly of a heart attack, I was stunned and saddened. When the book came out, I read it in one day and was thoroughly entertained.
Corey was passionate about radio — from the days of his youth, when the Webster Groves native fried a small transmitter in an effort to build a radio station in his basement, through the days at KSHE, where he achieved his dream at a young age.
His tenure was short — only six years – but he spent the rest of his life in search of something more meaningful.
“Don was always searching for something,” said his widow, Kathy Corey. “I think when he finished the book, he’d finally found what he was searching for and he put it in the book. And it’s a shame that we couldn’t have shared it together, because he’d finally come to the point where he had peace and happiness in his life.
“He was always on a quest…buying self-help books, trying a new diet or gym equipment. He was always trying something new, always searching for that one thing. I think he finally realized he had it all along.”
Kathy Corey is all smiles as she reminisces from the dining room of her home in Shrewsbury. She leafs through binders of photos and clips, points out framed photos and other memorabilia. On one table sit photos of their wedding six years ago. On another table rests a small book she made documenting their vacation cruise to Alaska. She played a video of young Don in the KSHE studio, which he made, while sitting at the board spinning records. Framed photos and stories and binders surround her as she looks back.
Kathy was a Notre Dame girl who came from a big family in Arnold, while Don was an only child who grew up in Webster. She never listened to KSHE in her life, nor did she know anything about radio. But when they met 10 years ago, his pursuit of her began.
“He was a very good salesman,” she said with a laugh. “I’d been married before and he kept pursuing me and I told him I didn’t want to get married again. We just weren’t alike at all. He was an only child and I have all these kids (two kids and three grandkids). But he just kept proving himself — and the kids just loved him. He’d get out his guitar, tell his silly jokes and they just loved him to death. He finally won me over and we got married.”
She laughed out loud while recounting their first date and how Don was so gullible. His friends had recommended he take Kathy to a movie and told him it was a great first date movie. Don took their advice. “The movie was Boogie Nights,” Kathy related with a hearty laugh. “So if ever, I should have dumped him then. He was embarrassed and said, ‘I’m going to kill those guys.’ That’s how he was.
“That’s how we started out. I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen next.’ We had such a great time together. It wasn’t long enough.”
They started a video production business in the basement of their home. She was the creative one with the marketing background, while he was the computer whiz and techno-geek who had a great talent for editing. Together, they made videos on topics ranging from the Children’s Aquarium for Channel 9’s fundraising drive to birthday, wedding and anniversary videos for friends.
“He introduced me to so many things that I would have never dreamed of trying,” she said. “We turned out to be a really good team.”
In starting the video production business, Don’s name resurfaced again with the public and he began hearing from faithful and loyal fans from three decades ago.
“All these people … I call them the Underground … started calling and emailing him and I said, ‘Don, who are these people?’ He’d go, ‘These are my fans!’ I’d say, ‘from 30 years ago you still have fans?’ And he’d say, ‘You just don’t understand. Once you are a KSHE fan, you’re always a fan.’”
The culture of the KSHE faithful fascinates Kathy. Once, a man from Colorado who swapped disc jockey air check recordings with Don, invited the Coreys out to stay with them. Don knew Kathy had wanted someday to vacation in Colorado and suggested that they go.
“I said, ‘I’m not going to stay with strangers in their home.’ But that’s how Don was. Everybody was his friend,” she said. “We went out there and it turned out to be our best vacation. Now we’re best friends. I would never have done that, but because of Don, and his belief that people are just nice and wonderful…that’s how he was.”
Don Corey never wavered in this belief — even through the turbulent times like in 1973 when he was fired from KSHE for speaking his mind. He would later take a disc jockey job at rival KADI, but that stint was short-lived when one day he came in to work his shift and found his replacement sitting next to Rich Dalton, who broke the news.
“This was not an unusual event in the crazy world of KADI and I am not surprised that I don’t specifically recall it,” said Dalton, a legendary fixture in St. Louis who hosts a weekday show on KHITS-FM. “I liked Don and he was an easy-going, likable guy. His love for radio was undeniable and that endeared him to me.”
They would see each other periodically through the years, at parties or at reunions of former KSHE jocks. One of the best stories Corey tells in the book is how he coordinated with DJs from other radio stations to play the same song at the same time. When Corey was at KSHE, he called the DJs at KADI and KDNA. Listeners would light up the phone lines telling them how the same song was playing on three stations.
“Don forgot to mention that I was the DJ at KADI at the time and what he also didn’t mention was that we did it two or three more times after that,” said Dalton. “We learned to do it with a really bad record. This way, people were more likely to switch stations!”
Mark Klose was working at General Grant Car Wash in Webster Groves when he met Corey, a story featured in the book.
“I remember when Don came through in his Pontiac,” recalled Klose, a longtime DJ at KSHE and current host of a daily show at KHITS-FM. “His car had KSHE stickers all over it and I said, ‘You work for KSHE?’ and he told me he did. I told him I was going to work there one day and I started in 1972. Don was working overnights. He was always a really good guy.”
Klose remembered going into the tiny studio late one evening and found Corey banging away on a set of drums to the beat of the songs he had on the turntables. “The KSHE studio was like a glorified closet, a little cinder block building and he dragged this drum set in and was just banging away. It was really funny seeing that, said Klose.”
Another time Klose said Corey decided to manipulate two-pronged patch cords, which pulled tracks out and pulled stereo into the left and right speakers. “Somehow he found a way to eliminate the vocals on a song and he’d go, ‘Listen to this’ and play the song on the air without the vocal track. He was always doing something bizarre, but it was easy to understand…you start going buggy doing midnights.”
Klose appreciated Corey’s demeanor and the way he treated people. “He was just as friendly to the new grunts as he was to the guys who’d been there for awhile,” recalled Klose.
That friendly nature came through clearly when Corey was on the air, which made listeners feel comfortable. Over time, you felt like you knew him personally. “Don was in that perfect moment where you didn’t have to have a super voice or talent, but had to be a real person,” said local longtime radio personality and historian Frank Absher. “That’s what his audience wanted and appreciated.”
Absher related how listeners would come up and talk to the KSHE jocks through a small window in the KSHE studio. “People were able to associate a real live person with what they were hearing on the radio,” said Absher. “Don was in exactly the right place at the right time. What happened to him, the kid playing radio station in his basement was not unique. It was just one of those things where you get to where you want to go through strange twists of fate. He had a chance to live his dream and a lot of people don’t get that chance.”
Mike Anderson is a veteran broadcaster and the editor and publisher of the popular web site Stlmedia.net. Anderson never heard Corey on the air because he didn’t move to St. Louis until 1985. But he did hear Corey through recorded air checks. Later, he would create the web site for Don Corey Productions.
Anderson talked about how Corey’s style was “…just so far beyond, well, that’s personality radio. Don expressed things. He didn’t just say things to be cool,” noted Anderson. “I was a mechanic in terms of being on the air. Don had a soul, a heart and it was all about his connection with the tunes.”
In the late 60s and early 70s, the days of so-called renegade formats, radio was loaded with characters, said Anderson. “Way beyond the Richard Millers of the world. The jocks that came in…some were downright weird. Not that Don was weird. But somehow he fit in. He was appropriate for the format,” explained Anderson.
“The fact that he got drummed out of radio, the way he left the business, was kind of unwarranted,” he continued. “It’s the nature of a business that relies on the creative integrity of its employees who are underpaid and underappreciated and are considered to be imminently replaceable. It was radio’s loss when they lost a spirit like Don’s.”
Corey went on to work in sales, but that wasn’t rewarding. So, Kathy said, he started the production business on the side. “Don had to do other things on the side to pick up the slack,” she continued. “He loved to try new things.”
She persuaded him to try snorkeling, which he did for the first time on their honeymoon to Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean, despite a tremendous fear of the ocean. Everyone but Don returned to the ship and the captain was ready to go back to port when Kathy reminded him that her husband had not returned.
“He said, ‘We’ll have to send another ship back to get him.’” “I said, ‘No, you don’t understand. This is his first time snorkeling and he’s scared to death of the ocean and we’re on our honeymoon.’”
Finally, Don surfaced and made his way back to the ship. Kathy asked him “…what the heck were you doing out there?” to which he replied, “I saw this cute little school of fish and I was following them.”
“I said, ‘Do you realize you were almost left in the ocean?”
Don’s love for writing was great and he kept a journal every day of his life from age 25. The basement is stacked with journals, and they led to his desire to write a book about his life. He had a passion for it and he did it every night, explained Kathy, who tried to get him to take a course in writing. But he opted instead to read books on how to write a book.
“I knew it was something he had to do,” she said of the book. He started writing it in December of 2006 and finished it the following September.
Two days before he passed away, Don spoke words to Kathy that turned out to be prophetic. He told her to promise him that if anything happened to him, she would make sure to finish proofing the book and make sure it was published. She laughed and asked where he thought he was going. He made her promise to see it through. “It was so surreal,” she said. “It’s almost like he could see a plan.”
Kathy went through the tedious process of editing and working with the publisher, Denver-based Outskirts Press, Inc. Good friends Mars Eghigian and Janice Denham helped her bring the book to its final form. “It’s been a labor of love,” she said.
In the final chapter, Don talked of how Kathy inspired him to write the book and how much he loved her. In a brief but touching ‘Afterword’, Kathy wrote of how Don made every day of her life special.
“Every day he would not just say I love you, but he would show it in so many ways,” she said. “On the day he died, he made blueberry pancakes and he did that every Sunday morning because he knew how much I loved them.
“This dog [Peanut] we have – I happened to mention once that after I retire, I’d like to get a dog. So the next day this dog shows up and I say, ‘What, am I retired?’ I had to start watching what I would say because he’d go out and make it happen. He just always wanted to make me happy.”
Don Corey’s book, Are You Talking To Me, is available at www.amazon.com.
“When I was young, people would ask, ‘What would you like to be when you grow up?’ To my mind, ‘like’ had nothing to do with it. I had already decided I was going to be a DJ, and nothing was going to stop me from reaching my goal. I had no idea that I was destined to run headlong into cold reality. Fortunately, this dilemma was resolved when I found something far greater than my original quest. This is a true story … ask your doctor if this story is right for you.”
“I turned in my tape and resumé to the receptionist. ‘Some resumé,’ I thought to myself. All that was on it was my one announcing job as the E. J. Korvette store announcer. I didn’t bother to mention that I was in charge of the lost and found. I left and went home…to wait for the phone call I feared would never come …”
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