George Jennings remembered by David Treadway

Dad GUM! I have just now gotten the news that George
Jennings is dead. My idols are mortal after all and I
do NOT like that! How fitting that this mighty man was
taken, like Caesar, on the Ides of March, for he was
the only human I ever met who could explain (at GREAT
length) why the 15th of any month was not necessarily
the Ides. Just another reason to wish that I had paid
more attention to George Jennings!

There has only been one other man who came close to
scaring me on first sight as bad as Pat Walsh did, and
that was George Jennings.

I was 6’ 4” on March 8, 1971, when I got my audition
at KAAY. I met him in the newsroom and I remember
having to look UP to him--literally. Surely, he wasn’t
THAT tall, but that’s the way I still see him: a regal
and imposing presence.

George taught me more about a newscast in five minutes
than I had learned in the previous two years. “It
doesn’t matter if a story is local or national or
world or whatever,” he fairly barked at me. “You start
with the most important one first. Then, you move down
to the second most important and so on. Ya GOT that,
kid?” It was more of a command than a question and it
seemed to me at the moment that you did NOT admit to
George Jennings that you didn’t understand what he was
telling you. He was about to throw your uppity young
butt into the deep end of the pool and you would swim
if you knew what was good for you.

I would soon find, from reading his First Class
Radiotelephone Operator’s Certificate (back when you
actually had to KNOW something about Radio to be on
the air), that he was a fellow Aquarius, born on
February 1. We had a birthday in common, something
that SOMEHOW made me admire him all the more. Dang,
but I wanted to SOUND like George and THUNDER the News
into that big spongy-looking Electro-Voice 667 mike
that hung over the Gates Stereo Statesman console in
the newsroom at 1425 West 7th Street. I did my best to
copy him.

There’s no telling how high his IQ was. He could
probably do all the parts of Hamlet from memory,
although I never did press him about it. One thing for
sure: he was smart as a handful of whips about Radio.
He could start a feud with Sonny Martin using no more
than six words--and people would Tune 1090 by the
thousands just to hear what those two would get up to
next. (Sonny, do you KNOW what a Magnificent Bastard
you were working with?)

In early April of 1985, I had the idea of getting as
many of the original KAAY airstaff as possible back
together for the last broadcast day before the station
got sold to the Christians. I could get almost
everybody but George. When I called WOAI, they told me
he was out covering a story. How fitting that was.
Sonny laughed when I told him.

I utterly HATE it that it took George a long time to
die, but it’s SO fitting that the Grim Reaper had to
work to get him! We will not see the likes of him
again.

Rock ON, Jennings!!! Fly free forever and tell Johnny
Cash I said hey.

With great love and admiration from the snot-nosed
Arkie Pup that you helped to raise.