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Yosts Murphy in the Morning Memories
August 02, 2012
Since the sudden firing last month of radio host Jack Murphy from 107.5 WKZL, and the abrupt end of The Murphy in the Morning Show, about 200,000 people have asked me why apparently one day out of the blue one of the most popular radio show hosts this area has ever known was fired.
The show had great ratings; everyone listened to it. People loved or hated Jack Murphy but, either way, they listened to him.
Then, one day, after 20 years of doing the show from Studio 2-B at Dick Broadcasting in downtown Greensboro, Jack Murphy walked in to work and was told he was fired.
So, naturally, people, especially the ones who woke up to the show every morning, want to know why.
The reason people ask me about it is because I worked for the show for years. I started in the fall of 1998 as a writer for Murphy in the Morning, and I eventually began doing on-air bits and, then, for a while, I was on the air regularly.
In addition to the work, Jack and I became good friends.
I worked for The Murphy in the Morning Show for about seven years, and, even after I stopped working for the show, I continued to do things like judge contests or cook for a table at the Murphy in the Morning Samurai Celebrity Cook-off, or just help out with a bit every now and then.
It's been a month now since Jack was fired, and I didn't write about his firing or about the end of the show at that time, for the same reason that, right after someone dies suddenly, you might not want to talk about them for a while. You know, it's a little painful.
But, now, some time has passed.
Since everyone has asked me, here's exactly what led to Jack's firing and exactly what happened: The truth is I have absolutely no idea what happened.
The other day, I asked Jack again to tell me the real story, and he told me that right now the lawyers were fighting it all out and he couldn't talk about it.
However, he said, he would give me the details later. Jack told me that, even then, I wouldn't be able to write about it because part of the agreement with Dick Broadcasting would no doubt include a gag order forbidding him from making any public statements.
The day I heard the news that Jack had been fired, I just laughed to myself I thought it was funny.
Because, when I heard it, I thought it was a publicity stunt no, I knew it was a publicity stunt. It was funny to me how everyone was getting so worked up about it that meant the stunt was working brilliantly.
But then, after the news kept coming that day, I started to wonder if it might actually be true. So I called Jack.
"It's not a stunt," he told me.
And, finally, I was as shocked as everyone else.
Over the last few weeks, I've thought a lot about the show's death. There have been several mornings where I've turned on my coffee maker and then instinctively reached to turn on the radio only to remember that The Murphy in the Morning Show is off the air.
The shock and disappointment has begun to go away, and again, just like when someone dies I've started to focus on the good things.
I think about how much fun I had working for the show, and those memories are truly overwhelming.
It wasn't just a good radio show it was a great radio show, one of the best this area has ever seen. The whole reason I wanted to work for Murphy in the Morning was because I enjoyed listening to the show so much.
I used to listen to The Murphy in the Morning Show every day, and I somehow got the idea in my head that I wanted to work for it. To this day, I have no idea how I ever got that job in 1998.
Here's what I wrote about it in December 2006
I used to listen to The Murphy in the Morning Show every morning and I just loved it. I would lie in bed and laugh out loud morning after morning. And, after a while, it hit me that listening wasn't enough for me I had this overwhelming desire to work for the show and be part of it.
There were a few things stopping me. For instance, I had absolutely no experience in radio and not one second's worth of education in broadcasting and not one qualification for working for the show. I didn't know anyone at Dick Broadcasting or even in radio and I knew nothing about running any of the equipment or even what the machines were called. Oh, and the show didn't have any job openings and it was the number one show in one of the most attractive radio markets in the country and, if it had had any openings, which it didn't and hadn't had for years, they had boxes full of audition tapes and a file
cabinet full of resumes from radio professionals with degrees in broadcasting and years of experience from all over the nation, all eager to come work there.
So I asked myself, OK, me getting a job there is clearly impossible, but if it weren't, then how would I go about doing it?
So that was my inauspicious start down the road to radio.
The first radio bit I ever wrote that Jack used on the show was one where I suggested Jack call area Everything's a Dollar stores, and ask them if they had various items. Then, the idea was, when the person at the store said that they did, continuously ask them the price of each item.
"Do you have any plastic party cups? Oh you do? OK, how much is a package of those?"
"A dollar," the store employee would say.
"And what about spray bottles of glass cleaner? Do you have that? You do? OK, how much is a bottle?"
And after a while, the flustered clerks would be almost screaming, "It's a dollar! A dollar, you idiot! Everything's a dollar!"
Also for the show, I wrote 60 or 70 episodes of "As Irving Park Turns," which was a four-minute weekly radio sitcom about "the adventures of a rich white family in Irving Park."
In "As Irving Park Turns," I played the voice of Ridge Granite the tennis pro who was sleeping with every woman in Irving Park.
Jack and I played other parts as well, along with the phenomenal cast of Neil Matson (Bentley Swarthwood), Jeff Corbett (Chipper) and Ronnie Alexander (Victoria), who were so funny bringing the scripts to life each week that, on many days, we couldn't get through a scene without falling down laughing.
I remember some days the five of us were in the recording studio laughing so hard that we couldn't make it through a scene. We would have to do take after take trying to get hold of ourselves because we were cracking each other up so much.
"As Irving Park Turns" would air at 8:20 a.m. every Thursday morning, but sometimes the radio show would be running late so we wouldn't play "As Irving Park Turns" until 8:40 or 8:45. I never thought it mattered much but then fans of the show started telling me that we had to play it before 8:30 because, they told me, they would be sitting in the parking lot at work, and they wouldn't go in until they heard it.
They were getting in trouble for being late to work which was why, they insisted, we had to be sure to get it on the air by 8:20.
When you talk about Jack Murphy and The Murphy in the Morning Radio Show, and the past 20 years, there are so many great moments that I remember.
A lot of them came at my expense.
When The Rhinoceros Times sent me to Hawaii in 2005 to follow the Guilford County commissioners, who were supposedly "attending a convention" there, Jack called me on the air and caught me when I had just gotten in to the hotel room on my first night. When he called, it was 6 a.m. in Greensboro and midnight in Hawaii. And I'd just arrived and had a boatload of mai tais to celebrate living through an 11-hour flight. I'm not going to lie to you: I was very, very drunk.
Here was Jack's genius: It would have been funny enough just to play the tape of me really drunk in Hawaii on the air but Jack didn't just do that. Instead, he taped our conversation, and later that morning, when everyone was on their way to work. He called my boss, John Hammer, who was paying for my "business trip" to Hawaii.
On the phone, Jack said to John, "I just thought you might want to know what Scott Yost was up to in Hawaii," and then he played the tape of me drunk in Hawaii.
That's where Jack was brilliant: Taking something one step further than anyone would think to go. Twisting that comedic knife just a little more. Making everything just a little more uncomfortable.
It was all an amazing amount of fun. Somebody once asked me what it was like working for the radio show, and I thought about it a minute, and then I said, "Well, you laugh a lot and then they pay you."
The cook-off, Dog-o-ween, Breaking and Entering Christmas and on and on it's hard to list all of the great things that that show brought to the community.
But all good things must end.
For what it's worth, these days Jack sounds happier that ever, and I think one huge reason is that now he can sleep in beyond 3:30 a.m.
One time he told me: "You know I love everything about this job except one thing the fact that, every morning, I have to get up at 3:30."
And I said, "Well, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
As someone who's had more than my fair share of days getting up at 3:30 a.m. to do a radio show, I would add to that, that the impressive thing is that Jack could get up at that hour and then, even before the sun came up, he could be cheerful and funny for thousands and thousands of people on the radio day after day after day.
So, in case you were wondering, Jack is doing fine. If you want to thank Jack for the last 20 years, you can find him on Facebook where you can also see what he's up to. Ever since he got fired he's been extremely active on his Facebook page; I think that's because of his deep and undying need to express himself no matter what the medium.
He's been working on a show that will be broadcast live over the internet and through podcasts, and he's continuing the Murphy's Kids charity. In fact, he's got a charity golf tournament coming up at Sedgefield on Monday, Sept. 24. (If you want to play in it or be a sponsor, you can email him at Jackmurphy@triad.rr.com.)
Anyway, long live Jack Murphy.
I'm very proud to have been a part of something as wonderful as that show. And I'll miss it because, from the first time I heard Jack Murphy on the radio, to the present moment I've been his biggest fan. Jack is still alive and kicking, but, man, I will miss that show.
Rest in peace, Murphy in the Morning. Rest in peace.