Wednesday, January 26, 2011

...I hope you know who you are...

From the PG.

Police found veteran radio talk host Doug Hoerth dead in his Bellevue home Tuesday night.

Mr. Hoerth, 66, was a well known and popular talk host in the Pittsburgh market. He had shows on the former WTAE-AM and WPTT-AM.
There was a time once before blogger, twitter, and facebook when, if you wanted to get your crackpot ideas out to the public airways, you had to call in to a local radio talk show. Usually you called in to Doug Hoerth, noon to three on WTAE... that is before they switched to all sports all the time.

The weird thing about local talk radio back then was that it wasn't exclusive to right-wing, uninformed demagogues. For me, it was Lynn Cullen, Doug Hoerth, and Phil Musik from 9-6, which made for a fairly sane and sensible line up. Out of the three of them Doug seemed to get the crazies. I remember the guy who used to go on about how the Bildabergers were running the country and the woman who sang him "I want to die, so I can go to heaven."

Good times. Entertaining radio. Not like today.

I hadn't listened to Uncle Dougie in years since the change in formats (I had heard he was spinning oldies late at night on a station I couldn't receive), but I still to this day refer to my picture as "suitable for framing and/or wrapping fish."

So, in memorium, here's something only he would appreciate:

3 comments:

deegazette said...

"hello, I must be going, I cannot stay, I came to say, I must be going, I'm glad I came, but just the same..."

Finally in a market worthy of his remarkable talent.

spork_incident said...

Aw, heck. Sometimes his dogmatic contrarianism got on my nerves and I had to turn him off but he was almost always entertaining.

If the good lord willing and the creeks don't rise.


.

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah! That WTAE lineup was indeed the "murderer's row" of Pittsburgh talk radio.

Hoerth had a knack for mixing fun (like the trivia shows) with serious talk. We were lucky to have him for 27 years.