Customer Reviews

Don Sherwood: The Life and Times of The World's Greatest Disc Jockey

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San Francisco in the '50's was a Sherwood-kind-of-place to be, as Herb Caen might have noted in his Bagdad-by-the-Bay San Francisco Chronicle daily column. KSFO was the City's most popular radio station, and Don Sherwood (nee Danny Cohalen) was the station's #1 gift to the entire San Francisco Bay Area. In the vernacular of today, "Sherwood Ruled!". He was radio's ORIGINAL "Shock Jock", the 50's version of Howard Stern, and more than any station manager could ever deal with or contain. What he did with/to/for the medium of radio could only be experienced if you ever heard the man at play. In commuter-bumper-to-bumper traffic, he'd tell you to roll down your windows and turn up your car radio, then he'd play a siren at full-volumn and scare the oil out of the car in front of you! Here was a Man for All Seasons! Sherwood lived as he died, comedically, on a houseboat, away from the airwaves, alternating puffs off a cigarette with breaths from an oxygen tank, a sad & sorry victim of Emphysema. But lived he did, and when at last his epitaph was etched so valiantly as in these pages, authoress Harper paid High Tribute to He who indeed earned and evoked and bore so deservedly, the Mantle of "The World's Greatest Disc Jockey", Bagdad-by-the-Bay's very own, First in the Field of One, "Out of the Mud grows the Lotus", DON SHERWOOD! Find a copy and read it again and again; Sherwood will come to life for YOU, and YOU will love Don as the rest of us did back in those Halcyon Days of RADIO!

Laurie Harper had her hands full with this one. How do you describe Don Sherwood's "naughty" laugh, or the leer in his voice, or the effect that Sherwood had on his listeners in San Francisco? It wasn't easy, but Harper did an admirable job, rounding up Don's friends, colleagues and admirers -- including Herb Caen, Russ Couglin, and her husband, the pioneer of airborne traffic reporters, Hap Harper -- and crafted a book that captures much of the flavor and feel of an era that has sadly passed: San Francisco in the late 'Fifties and early 'Sixties, an era to which Sherwood and his KSFO colleagues (Jack Carney, Del Courtney, Al Collins, Buddy Hatton, Gene Nelson, Terry McGovern, Carter B. Smith, Aaron Edwards) provided the soundtrack.

San Francisco in the '50's was a Sherwood-kind-of-place to be, as Herb Caen might have noted in his Bagdad-by-the-Bay San Francisco Chronicle daily column. KSFO was the City's most popular radio station, and Don Sherwood (nee Danny Cohalen) was the station's #1 gift to the entire San Francisco Bay Area. In the vernacular of today, "Sherwood Ruled!". He was radio's ORIGINAL "Shock Jock", the 50's version of Howard Stern, and more than any station manager could ever deal with or contain. What he did with/to/for the medium of radio could only be experienced if you ever heard the man at play. In commuter-bumper-to-bumper traffic, he'd tell you to roll down your windows and turn up your car radio, then he'd play a siren at full-volumn and scare the oil out of the car in front of you! Here was a Man for All Seasons! Sherwood lived as he died, comedically, on a houseboat, away from the airwaves, alternating puffs off a cigarette with breaths from an oxygen tank, a sad & sorry victim of Emphysema. But lived he did, and when at last his epitaph was etched so valiantly as in these pages, authoress Harper paid High Tribute to He who indeed earned and evoked and bore so deservedly, the Mantle of "The World's Greatest Disc Jockey", Bagdad-by-the-Bay's very own, First in the Field of One, "Out of the Mud grows the Lotus", DON SHERWOOD! Find a copy and read it again and again; Sherwood will come to life for YOU, and YOU will love Don as the rest of us did back in those Halcyon Days of RADIO!