One of the best things about going out on a book tour, especially when you are promoting a memoir, is that you hear stories about yourself that are only vague memories in your brain. (Shore Magazine's Pat Colander refers to memoirs as "All-I-can-rememboirs" which I think is brilliant). This phenomenon has certainly been happening to John Records Landecker on his "Records Truly Is My Middle Name" publicity tour.
Last week, on the day of her passing, we published an excerpt from the book about how much Annette Funicello meant to John. One of his childhood friends contacted him to remind him the depth of that devotion. Landecker reports...
"Carol Smith got in touch with me through Facebook to remind me that when we were in elementary school, I had arranged pictures of Annette on my wall, charting her "development" Carol tells me I charged admission, so the local boys could take a look."
Love that story. But not as much as this one. This was reported on the Records Truly Is My Middle Name facebook page by Cool Bobby B...
"You were the evening jock on WIBG so I’m guessing sometime in 1969. I was like 19 years old and you didn’t look much older. I was the evening jock at WWDB a Jazz/MOR station in Philly at 96.5FM. For some reason you were working that night and I had the evening off. I really admired what you were doing on the air and I thought, gee, I’d love to see how you do that fast paced ad libbing, and the whole tight Top 40 format. Being a native Philadelphian I had never really heard that before...So, I called you on the request line and introduced myself and told you I wanted to see how you did it and you said come on up...You buzzed me in. As I remember it, your studio was on the second floor. You worked a wide counter, with an old engineer across the glass running the levels...
You continued with your show, making jokes and taking listener requests off a speaker phone on your right. The calls were not live on the air unless you put one on. All of a sudden, a woman called up on the speaker phone and told you she loved you and your show and she wanted you to know that she was very upset and she was going to kill herself. You told her to please hold on, you had to go back on the air, but you’d be right back. You talked to the engineer or somebody at the station and told them to try to get the police to trace the call and get to her place asap. Meanwhile, every time a record played, you went back to the speaker and spoke very softly and kindly to her, trying to to find out her location and information. She wouldn’t tell you anything! It was nerve racking for me and I don’t know how you were doing the show and keeping her on the line at the same time.
After like a half hour, you finally got her to tell you her first name. I think it was Mary. By then, she was crying and mumbling and sounding very drunk and drugged up. But you were very patient with her. Every single time you went back on the air, you had to plead with her to stay on the line, and she did. But after all this time, she started to say that you were just trying to keep her on the phone and no one really cared about her, even you. You were begging and pleading with her and at the same time, cracking jokes, and playing the hits on the radio like nothing was going on. Your face was white as ghost. This went on for about 45 minutes. All of a sudden, she said: “that’s it. I’m done. I can’t talk to you anymore. I’m gonna take the rest of these pills and kill myself.”
At that very moment, a loud boom or crashing sound came over the speaker phone. A man's voice came through the speaker and said: “Mr. Landecker, this is Sgt...., we have her. She’s gonna be ok."
I never saw a happier expression than that look on your face at that moment. And, boom, you went back on the air like nothing ever happened.
