I want to tell you a story about my friend Spalding Gray.
When I was in college and grad school at Cal, and also in between, I worked for the radio station there, KALX. Whenever we got a celebrity near a microphone, we'd ask them to do a "legal I.D." That's an
FCC requirement for terrestrial radio stations. They have to say their call letters and city as close to the top of the hour as feasibly possible.
The celeb could say whatever they wanted, as long as they said "KALX Berkeley" somewhere in there.
My
favorite station I.D. I ever got was baseball player and manager Joe Torre, who had been fired from a couple managing jobs
and was a broadcaster for the Angels at the time. We were on the field at the Oakland Coliseum during batting practice and I buttonholed him for a quick interview and when I asked him to do an I.D. he said "Hi, this is Joe Torre, National League MVP, 1971, and when I’m in Berkeley, I listen to ..."
This was in the late 80s, and 25-ish-year-old me walked away thinking what a
cheeseball, a failed manager who's still talking about his 1971 MVP. And then he won four World Series as manager of the Yankees.
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But we were talking about my friend
Spalding Gray*.
He came in for an interview once, and when he did a station I.D., he said something like "This is Spalding Gray, sitting in a studio at KALX Berkeley — a beautiful city. A loving city. The only city in the world where people put up flyers that say, 'Kitten found.'"
Here's a photo of a flyer on a pole.
