Memories of Beatle Trivia (AM Radio Show)
When I was a kid … ten or eleven years old … I happened upon a local AM radio talk show called Beatle Trivia. It aired Sunday nights at 10:30 p.m. I was a burgeoning Beatles fan, having “discovered” them in the mid-70’s.
The show began as a 5-minute segment during the 7:00 p.m. to midnight “Hall of Fame Show” on Omaha’s WOW AM radio (590 on the AM dial.) By the time I happened upon it, the show ran for about an hour. The host was WOW DJ Mike Rivers. The co-host was local Beatles expert Dave Helling. Well … he was going to college here in Omaha, but I believe that he called Kansas City his home.
Each week, people would write in asking questions for Dave to answer on the show while they played all Beatles tunes between the questions. I had gotten a couple of questions read on the air, but I just can’t recall what they were.
In late Spring of 1977, the weekly radio show ended after two years on the air. Dave had graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism or something like that and was ready to move on. He had been doing the show unpaid as something he could cite as experience on his resume. I was really sad that the show was ending. I remember staying up extra late for the final episode as it ran long. I was up well past midnight.
I got older. I got more albums. I thought about the show from time to time. During the Internet era, I tried to track down information about it, but I couldn’t remember enough information to zero in on anything of substance. I remembered the show’s name and that the expert’s name was Dave. That was it.
Last Thursday night, I took a trip down nostalgia lane, first reading a bit about WOW radio from a site that chronicled the station’s history. I was hoping to trip across something that would give me more info about the show, but it mainly stirred up other memories of listening to the station.
I did find a couple of other references on the internet from a couple of folks who had cited hearing the show some 40+ years ago. I’m not entirely sure how I did it … but then, I found it:
I saw the name “Dave Helling” in the title which clicked with me. I was sure that was his name. The screen that appeared for first few moments of the YouTube video filled in the rest of the info:
Dave’s daughter posted the video. With a little bit of Googling, I found that Dave Helling had gone on to be a TV personality in Kansas City. Later, he became a writer for KC newspapers. He still managed to weave in his love for the Beatles as I found a segment of the KC news program where he interviewed people about the Beatles’ visit to that town. Also, Dave wrote a bit about the Beatles on his blog for one of the papers he worked for. You can read it, here:
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/dave-helling/article153656219.html
But, I digress…
The YouTube video is really primarily audio. It’s the final episode that I had mentioned listening to. They cut the music out of the show, so it’s mostly the discussion about various Beatles topics triggered by listener mail. They also played a couple of recordings of the early episodes. If you give this a listen, you’ll note that it was recorded from the radio. At times, you can hear another station’s audio bleeding in to the main audio of the broadcast.
I listened. And, I remembered. I remembered some very distinct quotes from the show. I remember Dave talking about his parents living in a distant city driving around at night trying to pick up the show on their car’s radio. I remembered hearing the early recordings and finally the origins of the show and more personal info about Dave. It brought me back to that time when 11-year-old me ( with my one-speaker radio nearby ) was listening to those final words as my gateway to local Beatles fandom had closed.
If you give the audio a listen, you might find it campy, but it was something I waited for each week, back in the day. Good times.