Joe Franklin: A Personal Remembrance

Joe Franklin was born 95 years ago today. When Franklin ruled the airwaves, it seemed that everyone was a guest on his show at one time or another. Even me.

It was the early 1990s when I arrived at the WOR studio in New York City. I was hawking “Theatre of the Imagination: Radio Stories by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre,” a project I had produced with Welles’s personal collection of radio shows. Joe Franklin had called and wanted to interview me on his show.

Franklin was a radio and television legend and had such a distinguished lineup of guests on his show throughout the years that I felt honored to be there. He met me at the door, ushered me into the large radio studio and motioned for me sit in front of a microphone on the opposite end of a very long table.

The set-up itself was very intimidating. We did not sit close together, like one normally does on a radio talk show. I felt like I was having dinner in a giant, formal mansion — one where the people sit far, far away from each other at opposite ends of a long table.

Within seconds, Franklin introduced me on the air and then asked me a very general question. When I began to answer, he abruptly got up and left the room. Boom! That was it. I was on my own. 

He was gone a good ten minutes, leaving me alone to talk continuously without any more questions or conversation. Finally, when he eventually returned, he thanked me and the interview was over.

Because I had virtually grown up in radio, I knew how to kill dead air time, so I didn’t miss a beat. But for an amateur, it could have been a killer. It is always disconcerting to be thrown on the air and left there without knowing what’s going on around you.

Joe Franklin was one strange man and I had a very unusual experience on his show. Whenever, I hear Franklin’s name, I think of that bizarre night at WOR.