In 2006, Kalin Krohe was working days at KCOW. We decided we should come up with some kind of character for him to play on my morning show. We came upon the notion of a strange recluse who lives in the radio station basement, venturing upstairs once a day to ask me to play a request. The thing people get wrong most frequently is his name. He’s not “Bob Asbestos”–that would be a bit too on-the-nose. He’s Bob S. Bestos, of the Bestos clan with such luminaries as Rufus Bestos, Wallace Bestos, etc.
Bob made an appearance every morning for about two or three months, and we discovered that was too much. Bob is better served by less frequent appearances; during the years when Kalin was living in South Dakota Bob popped in once or twice a year. And since Kalin returned full-time Bob is now on my show once a week, usually Fridays, accompanied by his pet pig Hot Dog. Bob also puts on a slam-bang Halloween show each year, and has done a Christmas special. We sent Bob and Hot Dog to the Peyong Chang olympics in 2018. He’s served as an official celebrity spokesweirdo, first for Martin’s Restaurant and these days for Bloedorn Lumber. Bob is not the kind of polished salesperson that typically does this kind of thing.
(You may notice I have a hard time keeping my composure working with Bob. This is because he throws in ad libs and bonkers line readings.)
Shortly after Bob returned to KCOW we decided he should have a theme song, in the Sherwood Schwartzian tradition of making sure the audience gets the plot before the story begins. And eventually I made a visual representation of said theme:
