Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone with part two of the radio documentary series we're airing courtesy of Radio Diaries, about three radio personalities who had huge audiences in their time, but today are largely forgotten. These days, we're used to media that amplifies the most outrageous voices in the room. It's something we often trace back to shock jocks like Howard Stern or in-your-face talk shows like Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh. Long before those guys, all of them, there was Joe Pyne. At the height of his career in the 1950s, The New York Times called him the ranking nuisance of broadcasting.

Joe Pyne: Our guest is one of the most controversial men in recent American history. This is Joe Pyne, and the action starts in just a moment.

Ed Pyne: My name is Ed Pyne, and Joe Pyne was my dad.

Joe Pyne: I mean, if you were a Broadway play, you'd be a flop.

News clip: I'm not a Broadway play.

Joe Pyne: You're a flop. Your whole premise is a flop.

Ed Pyne: He just was a very opinionated guy on air. It wasn't like, "What's your thought on that, sir?" It was just, "Now, why the hell do you think that?"

News clip: Why do you want to be a corrupter of other human beings?

Joe Pyne: Well, I certainly wouldn't want one of you people marrying my daughter, I'll tell you that.

Ed Pyne: He got such a following from it. I just couldn't believe that people could be so enamored.

News clip: In fact, this is such an absurd show. I'm leaving the studio.

Joe Pyne: You're leaving the studio? [laughs] Yes, he's really leaving. This is Joe Pyne. I'll be back with another guest as soon as we comb the streets.

[music]

Announcer: Now, let's get on with that number one record.

Michael Harrison: When Joe Pyne came into radio, he was a disc jockey back in the late '40s, early '50s. My name is Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers Magazine, and I've been writing about talk radio for the past 35 years. Radio DJs back in those days were very mild-mannered, very genteel, "Hello. How are you? It's a beautiful day, and here's the latest song from Perry Como.

[MUSIC - Perry Como: Some Enchanted Evening]

Michael Harrison: Joe Pyne would sometimes make commentary during the course of his show. The story goes that one day, the station manager, the station owner at one of the stations that he worked, said, "Stop playing records. Just talk," and people responded. I guess from that moment on, he was a talk show host.

Joe Pyne: A phenomenon has swept the country in the radio telephone call-in type show. My program, which is all talk, almost invariably will beat out rock and roll.

Tim Harrell: My name is Tim Harrell. I produced the Joe Pyne local radio show on KLAC radio in Los Angeles. This was the '60s. This was the era of the hippies and free love and all that, which Joe was absolutely opposed to.

Joe Pyne: I think that we put up with enough. We've allowed our cities to be disgraced. We've allowed certain areas of cities like San Francisco, for example, the Haight-Ashbury district, to become literally cancer cells.

Tim Harrell: He was a staunch patriot. Of course, the Vietnam War was going on, and he really hated the anti-war protesters.

Joe Pyne: You called my country the aggressor, and yet my country is the aggressor.

News clip: Hey, this is not your country. This is my country.

Joe Pyne: You're a traitor. You've already exposed yourself.

News clip: I am not a traitor to the American people.

Joe Pyne: You're a communist, and you have to be a traitor.

News clip: The facts are that my country is at fault in this situation, that my country should withdraw its troops immediately.

Joe Pyne: By what right do you call this your country?

[music]

Tim Harrell: We would go on the air, and he would go on a monologue. That's generally what he did for, I don't know, 20 minutes or half hour. We get the audience riled up, and we'd start taking calls. I would say 90% of our callers were supporters of Joe and agreed with his political viewpoint. He was a darling of the right-wing conservatives. Sometimes we get some people on there who disagreed with him and would fight with him. Actually, he liked that. He'd make fun of them. He'd berate them. He would just say, "Oh, go gargle with razor blades." The interesting thing is, off the air, he was a totally different person. When the microphone went out, when it was just you and him, he was nice.

Nicole Hemmer: My name is Nicole Hemmer, and I am a historian of conservative media. As Joe Pyne got bigger and bigger over the course of a few years, he's suddenly on 100 and then 200, and then more than 200 radio stations across the country, and then he becomes a television star.

[applause]

Joe Pyne: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Good evening, everybody.

Michael Harrison: That's when I first became aware of him as a kid, watching this mean guy sitting there smoking cigarettes behind the desk and seeing the characters that he interviewed, Bohemians and beatniks that he would lambaste and attack and insult and just totally chew him up and spit him out. I found it to be just outrageously entertaining.

Joe Pyne: I'd like you to meet our first guest of the evening, who won't be a stranger to you. Seated here with me now is one of the most controversial figures in America.

Nicole Hemmer: In the mid-1960s, Joe Pyne had on his show James Meredith, who was the Black student who integrated the University of Mississippi.

Michael Harrison: You can hear just how aggressive Joe Pyne was. It was quite hostile.

Joe Pyne: Mr. Meredith, have you said this, "Just as the law always works against the Negro, it always works in favor of the white man"?

James Meredith: That is absolutely the case.

Joe Pyne: Now, don't you think that you're being a little bit ungrateful when you consider what this country did and what we all went through to send you into college?

James Meredith: [laughs]

Joe Pyne: You think that went over? I remember the troops down there. I remember hearing what it was costing. Do you remember the figures? They were published. You must have memorized them.

James Meredith: Yes, but I remember other figures. I remember 400 years of Negroes being denied. I remember--

[crowd murmuring]

Joe Pyne: Well, James Meredith, I'm not going to dispute that. If you want to, I'll give you a thousand years of denial by your own tribes throughout Africa if you want that. We don't want to get--

James Meredith: Well, I tell you what, if you think I'm going to pat you on your back, you and all the rest of them, I'm not going to do it.

[music]

Michael Harrison: People who were conservative, they felt extremely marginalized by the mainstream media. When someone like Joe Pyne came around, they felt a certain kinship to him. There were a lot of people that didn't like Pyne, but they watched him anyway because they thought it was amusing, entertaining, sensational, different, not boring.

Nicole Hemmer: Pyne really demonstrated that not only could outrage get people to tune in, but it could get them to care about issues. It could get them to listen to political content. I don't know how you get to somebody like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and those big names without going through Joe Pyne.

Michael Harrison: I'm often asked whether or not I think talk show hosts who are controversial actually believe what it is they say. I always answer, "I don't know." I don't know whether Joe Pyne really was that way, or he was a showman who had a thick skin and didn't care what people thought of him, because it worked.

Ed Pyne: I remember, I think I was just under 17, and we got on the Santa Monica Freeway. I see a billboard that has my father's face on it, and it says, "Opinionated but lovable."

[MUSIC - The Shadows: Sleepwalk]

Ed Pyne: He told me many a time, "It's just a shtick. It's a thing. We're making a show here." He would say, "Don't ever worry if people are taking shots at you. If you want to worry, it's when people stop talking about you."

[MUSIC - The Shadows: Sleepwalk]

Brooke Gladstone: In 1970, a few years after his show went national, Joe Pyne died of cancer. He was 45 years old.

[MUSIC - The Shadows: Sleepwalk]

Brooke Gladstone: This story was produced by Alissa Escarce and the team Radio Diaries. Go to RadioDiaries.org and check out their incredible archive of 30 years of radio documentaries. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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