A broadcaster who was well-loved by KCOW listeners for years has died.
From Dateline Hollywood:
Don Kennedy, star of the long-running WSB-TV children’s show “Officer Don and The Popeye Club,” has died at 93.
Kennedy died from complications of dementia following a stroke in 2015, his daughter, Rebecca Maple, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Officer Don and The Popeye Club” aired live weekly for an hour starting in 1956. Kennedy served as the host of the hit show for 13 years.
After serving in the military, Kennedy was a staff announcer and news anchor at WSB-TV before taking on the role of “Officer Don.”
“The Popeye Club” show featured Popeye cartoons interspersed with live bits. It became one of the most popular local kids’ shows in the nation, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Live audience appearances for children in the taping of the shows were so popular, they had to be reserved a year in advance.
He was inducted into the Georgia Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame, Silver Circle Award and Georgia Radio Hall of Fame.
No memorial service is planned.
In 2015 I went to Atlanta, one of my all-time favorite solo vacations. My old college chum David Cohen took me on an extended tour of the WSB radio and TV studios including a fantastic museum of the stations’ history. This photo collage is all about Don Kennedy and his years as the host of the Popeye show.
I best knew Don Kennedy as the host of a syndicated radio series called, appropriately enough, “The Don Kennedy Show.” It arrived at our studios on cassette tapes, and we aired it weekday mornings at 5:00am. The show was a cavalcade of big bands and vocalists…classic adult standards from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, along with some current performers who favored the great American songbook.
Did I mention the show was on at 5am? Yeah. I was the one who was would turn on the transmitter (yes, we actually signed off overnight back in those days), played the cartridge tape with Mike Garwood announcing, “Good morning. This begins another broadcast day for AM 1400 KCOW.” Then the 5am network news, then the Don Kennedy Show.
That was how it was supposed to work.
The way it usually worked is I fumbled into the building at 5:12am, 5:09am, 5:23am….yeah, I just really sucked at mornings. It took me a lo-o-o-o-o-ong time to get better at that. It is a miracle that Kevin Horn did not ever drop kick me out of the studio.
Anyway, folks heard at least 2/3rds of the Don Kennedy Show.
One year I decided to do a KCOW Christmas special. And I thought it would be nice to have Don Kennedy record a special Christmas message for our listeners. I talked to him on the phone…it’s always very weird to talk to a voice you’ve heard on the radio a jillion times. His honey-dipped, warm friendly tone was the same on the phone as on the air. And not only did he record a Christmas message for my special, he recorded four different ones. And ended each one with a perfectly selected Christmas song. They were, if I’m being honest, the best thing in the show. And he did another batch for us the year after. This is the thing about radio people…they love what they do so much that they can’t contain themselves.
Eventually, the weekday “Don Kennedy Show” came to an end. It was likely the last syndicated program spotlighting “adult standards” and it hung in there for a long time. For a brief period, we aired another of Don’s series, a weekly show called “Big Band Jump.” But what worked at 5am weekdays didn’t seem to be a right fit on Sunday morning. So I had to make another call to Don, which as you might imagine was not nearly as fun as the first one.
Besides his work on Atlanta radio and television, and his music series, there is one more pretty terrific way Don Kennedy shared his gifts. Kennedy can be heard voicing a variety of characters on early Adult Swim series including “Space Ghost Coast To Coast” and “The Brak Show.”
I always enjoyed hearing him on these shows, because it was such a complete 180 from the kind of stuff he was doing on the music series. He was one of the last great broadcasters, and I feel fortunate to have worked with him, even in a very small way.
