Ralph is an interesting guy. He has followed Jaz McKay on the Buckley owned KBZR-AM in Bakersfield California. At least on air, Ralph is moderately reasonable – for the most part, he doesn’t make a big deal of his skin color, which can be a trap in radio – getting pigeon holed as the “black host”. That being said, his callers often baited him on racial issues, which he mostly deflected – it’s kind of like the callers who call lesbian Tammy Bruce and make oblique negative remarks about lesbians…
Ralph is moving to KERN-AM, the local competitor in AM talk radio. If you’re looking for something different, Jaz McKay and Ralph Bailey are interesting for local hosts
Reminds me of the legendary Chuck Leonard of WABC music radio in the 1960s. I suspect many listeners didn’t know he was black. Listen to this high quality air check on April 4, 1968, the night it was announced that Dr. Martin Luther King had been killed. Must have been an especially hard broadcast for him
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZurSFWh1E
http://s87885916.onlinehome.us/wabcmarty/martycollection.html
How would things be different if Cumulus owned WABC in 1968?
Not sure about that. How would the night have been different if MSNBC had been on then?
An interesting aside, at the 4:57 mark of that recording, the news guy, Charles Garrett says “WABC’s Bob Hardt spoke to several Harlem residents on the death of Dr. King”.
Not sure what happened to Charles Garrett, but Bob Hardt had just joined done his first newscast for WABC in January 1968 after leaving WXYZ in Detroit in December 1967. He want on to do news nationally for ABC’s “The American Contemporary Network”.
Even in retirement, ABC reached out to Bob Hardt to interview him in December 2006 about President Ford after the exPresident passed away- Bob had covered Congressman Ford for Michigan radio.
For more, see http://www.musicradio77.com/bobhardtanniversary.html