WDVE, Jack Maloy enjoy fruits of a long-lasting relationship
Jack Maloy, WDVE (102.5 FM) 1 to 5 a.m. weekday air personality, knew early on what he wanted to do: As an 8-year-old, he made his own fun by doing play-by-play announcing for Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates games.
Young Maloy would turn down the sound of televised games so he could play-announce as though he were a sportscaster.
"I knew that was it. I wanted to talk," he says. That was it -- that is, until he started hearing something far off in the distance.
"I thought sports was it, until I started listening to radio, mostly at night," Maloy says.
Today's younger radio listeners do not understand what Top 40 radio usually sounded like from the late '50s through the mid '70s. A station's DJs could have very distinctive presentations -- some had white-hot energy, while others were very cool. Like some of the personalities at one of Maloy's favorites, WABC in New York City.
"Homogenized" was not a term that was used back then to describe most radio programming. Maloy listened to stations in Detroit and Boston, too. Those faraway nighttime radio signals carried into this region and into his imagination. He carries those memories with him to this day. He says about three WABC personalities, "I can hear them in my head when I am talking."
Ask him his age, marital status, where he lives -- or for permission to have his picture taken -- and he gets tight-lipped. Jack Maloy, regional man of mystery. Maloy will divulge that he was born in Latrobe and reared in Westmoreland County and that he cannot name a local radio air talent who has more than his 26 years of continuous work at one station.
Top 40 radio helped him realize that he could communicate by playing music, as well as by talking. Once he started listening to how well Top 40 radio was done by some of those major-market stations, playing music sounded better and better.
Terry Bradshaw sounded out Maloy about the QB's singing career in 1977. "WIXZ (1360 AM, now WPTT) let me be the sports director," Maloy says. That meant he could get in free to all the Steelers games. Getting interviews was more difficult, especially since the little country music station based in East McKeesport did not have much of a following.
So when Maloy requested an interview with the superstar, everyone was stunned when Bradshaw came down to speak with him.
"I had never met the man," Maloy says. However, Bradshaw had not come to talk about airing out the ball. He wanted to talk about airing some of the country songs he recorded, including the classic "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." No. 12 wanted to talk about a 45.
Maloy told Bradshaw that his songs would be more likely to air if they were about 90 seconds long. Back then, DJs had to end each hour of their shows at precisely the moment the network newscast would start at the top of the hour. DJs would try to fit in short songs, preferably with long instrumental endings that could segue into the news.
One of those extra songs could be one done by Bradshaw, Maloy suggested. Looking back on what he told the Football Hall-of-Famer, and noting that Bradshaw's singing career disappeared faster than the resolve of most Steeler opponents, Maloy's 20/20 hindsight is that, "apparently, it was not good advice."
In 1978, one year after Maloy started at WDVE, the station's program director had some good advice for the air staff: The station had to grow up with its listeners or risk losing them to other stations that sounded more contemporary. The boss advised the cool, mellow, laid-back FM announcers that they had to change with the times.
And Maloy was the role model suggested by 'DVE management when the air talent were told they should not talk on air as if they were ... like ... stoned ... dude.
"It sounded as if all the others were sitting around smoking a joint," Maloy says.
The station's typical listeners were starting to do their own segue: from main squeezes to wives, waterbeds to mattresses and box springs, and psychedelic love bugs to family-friendly sedans. The times, they were a-changing, indeed.
When the listeners first heard Maloy, his more up-tempo delivery, juxtaposed with everyone else's dreamy one, rubbed some listeners the wrong way. "Get him off the air" was what one late-night caller said, not realizing that Maloy had answered the studio phone.
Maloy also can still hear the program director at that seminal moment in local broadcasting say, "We need to have some energy, kind of like what Jack does." Yesterday's stoners were becoming today's rockers. "What?! I could not believe it," Maloy says. "Suddenly, my sound was OK." "Do it like Jack does" was ... like ... the new cool ... dude.
Actually, it was 'DVE that had come a long way in that year.
When Maloy is not in the production or air studios, he does cool things such as recording snippets of sounds from TV and film pop culture. And virtually every episode of "Seinfeld," including the one when another actor played Seinfeld's dad instead of the one who usually did.
"I have 130 CDs with nothing but sounds, voices, clips, Homer Simpson saying 'do'h' and a 'death' category for celebrities over ages 60 or 70. I have it ready to go." Like a Jed Clampett "well, doggie!" for when Buddy Ebsen passed away.
Stories about the Steelers might include the sound of a fan's trumpet at the games; stories about the Buccos could include the sound of a bat hitting a baseball. "It gives you an advantage. It is not a 'wow,' but it is taking advantage of sound," Maloy says.
By working nights, Maloy is doing what his radio heroes did when he was an impressionable DJ wannabe. Maybe his sound is being carried around in the young heads of tomorrow's late-night radio personalities.
