The enclosed article did not show up in the Duluth paper this morning, but is big news here in the Bay Area! Many of you should remember Dr. Don Rose from his work on WEBC in the mid 60's:
Bay Area radio legend Don Rose dies
By Brad Kava
Mercury News
``Dr.'' Don Rose, one of the top-rated morning radio disk jockeys in the Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s at KFRC-AM, died in his sleep at his Concord home Wednesday, after months of fighting pneumonia. He was 70.
``If you didn't listen to Dr. Don, you were out of it,'' said Dave Sholin, who was his last program director at KFRC, before Rose left in 1988. ``You'd go to school and you wouldn't know what was going on. It was a must-listen.''
A master of one-liners and wild sound effects, Rose was a pioneer in radio on both coasts, after starting his career broadcasting in the fly-over zone in between.
He broadcast in the golden age of Top 40 radio.
``He was a guy who played songs like `Rock Around the Clock' when they were new,'' said Sholin. ``And he loved them all.''
He won Disk Jockey of the Year at Philadelphia's WFIL-AM and again at KFRC-AM.
``I would guess an entire generation of people who grew up wanting to be disc jockeys wanted to be Don Rose,'' said Mike Amatori, a producer and sound effects master at KGO-AM in San Francisco. ``He's been ripped off by everyone, and he was probably as big a talent in the '70s and '80s as Don Sherwood was in the '50s and '60s.''
According to the Web site, www.BroadcastLegends.com, Rose majored in accounting at the University of Nebraska, before landing radio jobs in Omaha, San Antonio, and Kearney, Nebraska -- getting fired from all of them.
At KMT-AM in Fort Dodge, Iowa, his luck changed. He met his wife of 45 years, Kae, and landed a morning show, where his one-liners drew a following (``Did you wake up grouchy, or is she still in bed?'').
That led him to bigger and bigger markets: Duluth, Minn., Atlanta, Ga. and then, six years in Philadelphia (``I spent some of my finest days in Philly,'' quotes Broadcast Legends. ``Vacations . . . weekends . . . sick leave.'')
His next stop was his biggest: the country's fourth largest radio market in San Francisco, where he surprised some skeptics.
``A lot of naysayers thought the Bay Area was too hip and the corny stuff would never work,'' said Sholin. ``Guess again. It's called human nature. People love to laugh. But when there was something serious, he stopped and poured his heart out.''
He had the top-rated music morning show in the market for 10 years.
After retiring from KFRC, Rose joined his son, Jay, who was chief engineer at KKIS-FM, and then moved over to KIOI-FM, where just two months into a new morning show, he had a heart attack on air and stopped working.
``He was a genius,'' said KABL-FM deejay Jim Lange. ``One of his things was the utilization of what we call drops, voices he could talk to when there was no one else in the studio. He did it all himself. He had a huge collection of sound bites and cabinets of old jokes. He was terribly entertaining and sweet.''
Wrote former Sharks' color man, Chris Collins: ``The guy exuded greatness, style and grace. I cannot think of where I would be today without that guy in my life in my developing professional radio years.''
Rose helped raise more than $10 million for the March of Dimes Superwalks and was master of ceremonies at a host of golf tournaments, including his own, for Special Olympics.
``In a business with so many big egos, you couldn't have found anyone as nice,'' says Sholin, a friend as well as a co-worker.
Sholin said he spoke with Rose last week, and the retired deejay was complaining about his long bout of pneumonia.
He is survived by his wife, five children and 13 grandchildren.
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