I started The Hound Dog Kingdom in 1956 at WTMA in Charleston, S.C.
I remembered the success Alan Freed had in Cleveland
with his Moon Dog Show. The Hound Dog was patterned after the Freed
show, but it was not a copy. Nobody was playing what was called “race” music
except Freed. I collected all the R&B records by Fats Domino,
Laverne Baker, etc.  and that’s what I played, keeping the
backbeat by slapping a ruler against the console and yelling along with
the singers throughout the records. I played a rhythm beat on a tape loop
between records, so there was no dead air. The key was the delivery.
I used a gruff, yet frantic gravel voice, and rhymed almost everything
I said. The Hound Dog was a howling wolf sound effect.
I opened “The Hound Dog Record Shop” and bought several thousand used
records from juke box operators, all Hound Dog music, and put them on
sale “5 for a dollar”. We sold out in a matter of days.
The show was such a success in Charleston that when I got to WITH
in Baltimore in 1957, I talked Sales Manager Jake Embry into
letting me put it on the air on Saturday nights. It caught on immediately
and became a regular feature. At drive-ins around Baltimore, every car
radio would be blaring with the squealing sounds of the dog. Leon
Golnick of the Golnick agency sold it to the Madera Bonded Wine
and Liquor Company, and they came up with special product exclusively
Mayor D’Alesandro (L) presents Jack Gale (R) with the keys to the city of Baltimore, 1957
for the show called White Tango Wine. 49 cents for half-a-fifth,
and 89 for the full fifth. After the first three months, we had over
4,000 card-carrying members. Golnick made arrangements for the tapes
to run on WLEE in Richmond and WUST in Washington. I would
tape every day after the morning show at WITH until we had about forty
hours of tape that we just kept rotating. After each taping, I would
come out of the studio exhausted, with about twelve broken rulers,
but it was a ball. I loved that show and savored every minute of it.
At the reunion in Baltimore in 1996, people approached me with their
original Hound Dog cards from the ’50’s, and wanted an autograph.
They had cherished those cards for forty years.
– from Same Time, Same Station
