590 MIGHTY MEMORY #458

PHOTO INDEX: THE LATE LEN WOLOSON.

LEGACY OF LENNY

How memorable were the guys at WARM? Well this week I received two e mail communications from people with fond memories of WARM, particularly Lenny Woloson. A woman e mailed me to see if I could provide her the sound from Woloson’s show where there was a gaggle of young girls cooing “Lenny, Lenny”. She wanted to put it in a type of time capsule/cassette for her husband's birthday. I sent her a soundbite from the You Tube video I did on WARM. , I hope it helped.
An e mail came from Maryland. Mike Lewis had this memory of WARM and Woloson.
I discovered WARM at the end of August, 1970, the week before I started eighth grade. It took only two songs to do it --War's "Spill the Wine" and Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime" -- and I was hooked. Every morning that year, my
radio alarm woke me to the sound of Len Woloson's voice. For some reason, all through that January he played Todd Rundgren's "We Gotta Get you a Woman" promptly at seven a.m. I still remember his quirky sense of humor, which was much more subtle than any DJ I've ever heard. One example sticks out. That fall there was a song by the Flaming Embers called "My Brother's Keeper," and Woloson told a joke about a zookeeper who came across a chimpanzee who had a copy of the Bible in one hand and Darwin's Origin of Species in the other. "What are you doing?" he asks. And the monkey says, "I'm trying to find out if
I'm my brother's keeper or my keeper's brother." Somehow I can't imagine a DJ saying that today. Even 41 years later I remember the kind of intelligent wit that made waking up a very pleasant chore that magical year.
Woloson was not your typical punchline joke teller. He was more of an observer of the current scene and did a tremendous amount of work with “drop in” voices. Lenny would cue up a voice and have it interspersed with his bits. Some of his humor was so simplistic that it was funny. Plus Woloson used area towns as references to his show. One of his favorite tag lines was “winner of the Honeypot beautiful child contest”. Woloson did seem to play the same songs in rotation almost to the minute but I think that was more of a happenstance due to a crowded morning commercial log than anything else.
Four decades later…….the memories of Len Woloson and WARM just keep on coming.