Seven Dirty Words by James Sullivan Read Free Book Online

could cover the next one. “They thought that was a poor attitude for a professional,” he recalled. Sure enough, when he returned with the truck, he was unceremoniously relieved of his job.
    The one bright spot of Carlin’s short stay in Boston was his instantaneous rapport with a WEZE newsman and Boston native named Jack Burns. Born in November 1933, Burns was almost four years older than Carlin. The two men shared an attitude toward the military: Burns, who spent his teen years living the peripatetic life of his father, an officer in the Air Force, realized he was no serviceman as soon as he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1952. After serving as a sergeant in Korea, he gladly took his discharge and headed back to Boston, where he studied acting and broadcasting at the old Leland Powers School of Radio and Theater in Brookline.
    Jeremy Johnson, an aspiring actor who’d done a hometown Bob and Ray-style radio show with a partner before enrolling at the Powers School, met Burns there and quickly became a friend and drinking buddy. They first became acquainted on the set of a student-run radio comedy—“variety stuff,” recalls Johnson, like Fred Allen’s Allen’s Alley , primarily consisting of mock interviews with outlandish characters. “We used to go to parties together and drink—quite a bit, actually,” says Johnson. One time, after passing out on the floor and staying overnight, Johnson woke up and saw his friend still snoozing. He staggered to his feet, stood over Burns, and woke him up by putting the fear of God into the hung-over acting student: “I am omnipotent!” he boomed. “I am omnipresent!”
    After graduating from Powers, Burns spent some time in New York, studying acting at Herbert Berghof’s studio and performing in an off-Broadway production of Tea and Sympathy , the controversial Robert Anderson play about an effeminate young man, originally directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan. Soon, however, he was back in Boston, where he took a job as a radio newsman. By the time Carlin arrived at WEZE, Burns was the station’s news director. Carlin, the newcomer, moved into an apartment with Burns and another roommate. While the New Yorker was jeopardizing his own livelihood in radio, Burns was establishing himself as a bona fide newsman, interviewing Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and traveling to Havana to interview Fidel Castro. “I was staying at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana and it was . . . well, I really believe life is like a B-movie without the music,” Burns once recalled. “The blonde told me she was working with anti-Castro forces and she needed to use my telephone because hers was bugged. Fantastic! People with beards running around, carrying guns. The last I saw of the blonde was when they dragged her and the phone from my room. Somebody suggested it might be time for me to return to the States.”
    After Boston, Carlin quickly landed on his feet. He heard from a Shreveport acquaintance who’d become a sales manager at KXOL, a competitor of McLendon’s KLIF in the Dallas-Fort Worth market. “Anybody who came to Dallas-Fort Worth knew that was the place to be in radio,” says “Dandy” Don Logan, a fellow Shreveport radio personality who spent some time in Texas himself. “It was a real hotbed for DJs. They had a lot of what they call ‘six-month wonders.’” Media figures who would become nationally recognized, such as CBS newsman Bob Schieffer, game show host Jim McKrell, and The Price Is Right announcer Rod Roddy, were all products of the Dallas-Fort Worth radio scene around Carlin’s time. Starting in July in the seven-to-midnight slot, Carlin took to calling it the “homework” shift, taking dedication requests from young lovebirds and peppering his banter every Friday night with the all-important high school football scores. “Developed great rapport with teenage listeners by not putting them on,” he wrote a decade later for an early press