[Robin Pendergrast was another WMTH announcer, along with Steve Goodman. He recorded interviewed for the Steve Goodman biographic. The book “Steve Goodman: Facing the Music by Clay Eals” has a web site at http://stevegoodmanbiography.com/ It is available on Amazon.com]
Robin Pendergrast interview 9-4-2000
“Neal Pollack had an interesting sense of humor. I don’t know where he is now.
Steve and I were early-morning buddies. He was singing. He and I were the sportscasters together, and we really had a great time doing it. WMTH, the voice of Maine East High School. It was done at a time when radio stations were just beginning to make their mark on high schools. We were on the air four or five hours a day. We also would be on the air for broadcast.
Jack Coombe always wanted to be an actor. He attempted to oversee myself and Steve, and we ignored him. Steve and I used to show up at the most obscene hours, early in the morning and carry on. He would do his singing, and I was recording him, and we’d have our own little radio show. It never went anywhere. I’m sorry we didn’t tape it, to this day. But we’d have 15 minutes or half an hour, and we always told him, “We were just practicing the console, Mr. Coombe.” That was a bunch of baloney.
Stevie was a short, little squatty, and believe it or not, some people referred to him as the Little Jew because he was from Morton Grove. Anti-Semetic components were in place even then in 1960, 1961, 1962. I was class of 1963. We really hit it off well. I really took great issue with people who would call him that mostly behind his back. I remember numbers of confrontations I had with greasers who saw him. He’d always be carrying his guitar case around. Then he wasn’t taking lessons in the music department. He had become a talented guitar player long before he hit high school. He really knew his stuff. We spent hours doing our little mini-broadcasts and getting to know each other. I lost touch with him when I graduated and went to Bradley.
We saw him once at one of the reunions. At the fifth year, he was just beginning to embark on his career. But after that, you turned around and heard him all the time. Of course, Roy Leonard became one of his biggest fans. Steve showed up at our fifth reunion. He didn’t play his musical instrument. It was a snowy night.
We actually broadcast over a very limited distribution of Maine Township. I don’t know how many watts it was, five watts? We had these broadcasts where he’d be singing. We only had four hours of airtime. But when he and I did the sportscasts together, we had a field day.
Early morning before school started, we’d record it. He’d play a song. He was singing a lot of Peter, Paul and Mary, because they were just starting to move into the limelight. And then we would talk about it, like one of these Saturday night folk song fest things where people would talk about the music. And I would perpetually kid him for plagiarizing. It was done tongue-in-cheek. He would always refer to the fact, “Y’know, in two or three years I’ll be writing my own music.” I told him I would do the lyrics and he could do the music. This type of bantering.
Remember, we’re high-school kids. We had a lot of fun. We’d bring in food in the morning, and we would eat on the air, and he would play “Music to Eat By.” He would play four or five minutes guitar music while we’d sit there and eat and talk over music with open mikes that were live. It was either done for broadcast later in the day, or, once Mr. Coombe got ahold of it, he didn’t buy a lot of this stuff, because remember talk shows were only becoming, early components. He was very, very conservative, and he was always afraid of what we might do because he was responsible for the license. In 1961-62, high-school radio stations were brand new, and it was a new adventure to have these people on the air saying stuff at age 15 or 16 that potentially could influence a lot of people, which was scary to the School Board.
Stevie and I did basketball games together. We would start commenting, for example, on our morning show, that 15-minute slot, about how awful something was, and we need to get a player in here to explain why he did these things. That didn’t go over well because we were criticizing coach, team on the air. People heard this, particularly Bernie Brady, who was the basketball coach. He’s dead now. Initially, he took issue, but he realized that our intent was not to be malicious. It was to be honest. But a lot of people didn’t want that. So we had the music thing and the sports thing and eating on the air, playing “Music to Have Breakfast By.”
Frequency: 88.5
[When were recorded things played?] Noon to 3. [Other people had programs, too?] They had some canned programs that they bought. They were stupid, but they were filling airtime. Now, all sorts of high schools (have stations). I eventually got into broadcasting for awhile. I was down in Peoria, where all these sportscasters started. I did it for three years, got burned out. I do a lot of voiceover today. It all started with Steve’s and my sessions at some obscene hour of the morning. Sometime it was as early as 6 a.m. I can’t remember how we connived ourselves in there. It was sporadic.
[Who was the audience?] Broadcast locally, not just in the school but into the community. [FM wasn’t that big at that time.] No, it wasn’t. You had line-of-sight transmission, too, which means a five-mile radius, which covered most of Park Ridge, Des Plaines. This was a broadcast station for two high schools that had about 8,000 students. It was really quite a big campus. Maine East and Maine West. Because we got carried away with Maine East all the time because we were there, but Maine West had their portion, but the studios were all at Maine East. There was nothing at Maine West.
[How could students hear this if FM wasn’t big?] It was broadcast in the school itself. But I know that in our home, we had FM. One of the driving forces behind it were football and basketball games were broadcast. That was probably the biggest thing that brought people there, particularly because we did some away games. It was unheard of at the time, totally unheard of.
[Knowledgeable about play-by-play?] Oh yeah. Here we were in high school, but then I had a propensity for it, and Steve was the color man. He was knowledgeable of sports, even then. It surprised me because he didn’t play sports. Little tiny guy, good-looking kid. He really knew a lot about sports. One day, my classic saying was, “Where did you learn that from? How did you get that information?” I was forever pimping him on the air. It wasn’t done purposely, but we had that kind of relationship.
[Senior/sophomore] I didn’t have those kinds of structures. I wasn’t much into cliques. Part of it was, even then, though it wasn’t as defined as it is now, Steve and I really played to our own drummer. That always wasn’t the case. I was really a non-conformist. In Bradley as undergraduate, I joined a fraternity. Was a waste.
[Songs he would play?] I remember Peter, Paul and Mary, and he was always singing “If I Had a Hammer.” Everything else that came out he picked up immediately by ear.
He had these fingers that were incredibly strong from playing for years and years. Callused. You shook his hand, you really knew you were shaking hands with a musician. Incredibly strong.
There was a sportscaster, Paul Christman, an All-American football player, for St. Louis Cardinals, then Chicago Cardinals. Played college ball, all-something, Heisman. Played maybe Illinois. He came in one day for an interview. At the time, this guy was a big-time broadcaster on Channel 7. He did pro or college games. But he lived in Park Ridge. He was a wonderful guy because his daughter Tori and his son Paul Jr. both went to Maine East High School. They were neat people and had lots of money and lived in Lake Forest, ended up dying at an early age of a heart attack. I invited him to come in for an interview. It takes a lot for somebody like that who is as busy as he is, but he came over one day at some obscene hour, and myself and Stevie were there. He comes in, he recognized me, he looked at Stevie, guy sitting in the corner strumming his guitar waiting for him. You could tell the look on his face was, “Who’s that?” Well, I knew who it was, and I refer to him as my sports counterpart, and I got this look. But then Stevie went into this discussion that was mostly geared toward football. We went into this collective discussion, and obviously Mr. Christman was very impressed with his knowledge even at age 14. So that was neat. Here was somebody who recognized his value.
Little squatty guy, and you know how high-school guys can be. They can be little brats.
[Personality] Gregarious, always smiling, at a time when a lot of people didn’t smile. He always smiled. But he always played music. He always had his guitar. He would leave it at school all the time. In the radio station. That was the sanctum, the hangout, the chess room, the locker room, if you will. Everybody had their own hangout, and that was really neat.
[Had no contact with him in junior and senior years.] Right. But he continued to have contact with the radio station. I went into college, played ball, went into broadcasting. Lost track of him. The depth of our relationship was based on our relationship at Maine.
Saw him perform at the Earl. I went up and said hello afterwards, and of course, he had people doing that all the time. People came out of nowhere. I told him how proud I was of what he had accomplished, and obviously he had pursued his dream. A lot of people didn’t understand why he was doing what he was doing. Obviously, he wasn’t going to be marred by any accusations or anti-Semetic statements. Very talented musician. [Was not an observant Jew.] I know that. But with the name Goodman, that’s all some people had to hear.
I wasn’t intelligent enough about the religion to know, other than to know that Maine East High School was predominantly white Anglo-Saxon protestant. [Dominated by Park Ridge.] Park Ridge used to be the elite. Not anymore. Today, 61 cultures represented at Maine East High School. Then, there were no blacks, a few Jews from Morton Grove, and predominantly WASPs. Boy, have times changed.
The Chicago media was very good to him. When I saw him, he was singing “City of New Orleans.” You could tell how he had developed his talent. Here’s a guy, he established his dream to be a talented musician, and he had obstacles thrown at him, and he fought it (leukemia) for awhile.
[Death] I heard it on the Roy Leonard Show. He was very upset. He was playing non-stop Stevie Goodman.
Big eight and a half inch reels. Where they would be, I have no idea. In the archives? Who knows.
Coombe was the guy who started it all. [Did he listen while you were doing it, or did he listen when it went on the air?] Sometimes he did neither. He trusted us for awhile. Sometimes, he would come in, and periodically we would broadcast live. That was an adventure. It was his responsibility to keep everyone in line. I don’t think we were the epitome of conforming high-school students. Typically, this eating thing we did. A couple times we did it live. We criticized the foot from the cafeteria, then we started presenting our own recipes, and we’d make them up as we went. I didn’t know what we were doing. He never knew what was going to come out of our mouths. Steve would sit there perpetually making up songs for these recipes. He’d sing them. We had a good time. I don’t think Jack liked the fact that we didn’t take our radio work very seriously. We were the original talk-show junkies.
[Tape changes to side 2]
We used to sit up on a table next to a window in the upper level of the cafeteria. The upperclassmen always sat in the upper level. It was an elitist thing. We took our silverware and plates and dump it out the window into the snow, and somebody, one person, was assigned the responsibility of taking the trays over, because if you had your silverware and other stuff on your tray, you had to take it to the other end of the cafeteria. We decided not to do this. So this goes on a couple months in the snow. I don’t know how we got onto the subject, but once the school found out what happened, the lunchroom monitor was the head football coach, and he would come up and jaw with us. Every day we’re in there eating. I made this issue about how on Friday we would have toasted cheese, mashed potatoes and apple sauce, and I would always get two plates of this thing. Steve made up some concocted song about this menu. Then I told him about the disappearing silverware and plates. That became a critical part of the story, about how the food was so good it would disappear. In the studio, I laughed so hard, I was absolutely sore. I thought I was going to get sick to my stomach. Obviously, he never recorded anything about it. He’s making up this song about toasted cheese sandwiches, mashed potatoes and gravy and how the food was so good the plates disappeared out the window. This is, of course, after this whole thing surfaced, and we were in big, big trouble. We had to scrub all this stuff. It was rusted. He took it with a grain of salt. He thought it was funny, as did I, even though I was one of the people who ended up cleaning silverware. He concocted this weird song that we ended up putting on the air. Mr. Coombe said, “It’s really not appropriate to make light of what happened.” Hell, I’m just trying to graduate and get out of there, and he thought it was funny. I guess that’s why he was so successful because he had this incredibly wonderful sense of humor that was reflected in “The Mashed Potatoes Song,” or whatever he called it. It was bizarre. Mashed potatoes with gravy, toasted cheese and apple sauce. Can you imagine this pile of silverware and plates, once the snow melted? From the senior football players. I was one. This went on for a month and a half, two months. Nobody saw us, and nobody picked it up outside because it was an obscure area, but obviously we had a lot of snow that winter. It was bizarre, and I think now about how stupid it is, but you don’t think of stuff like that when you’re 17 or 18. When Steve heard me telling the story, that’s the way he was. He’d start strumming something immediately. Immediately he would start strumming something. And you never knew what would come out of his mouth. That’s how creative, talented and impulsive he was. Maybe “The Mashed Potatoes Song” was the first one he did with any civility.
I heard Coombe got into trouble, not sure what kind of trouble. Ran into him on movie set. Was a wannabe broadcaster. Saw him doing commercials in Chicago.
[Guitar?] A big, light-brown one. It was enormous. To see this little kid carry this big instrument.
[Anything bug you?] He was too laid-back. He took a lot of this anti-Semetic stuff, even then, with a grain of salt. I know that it affected him. And there was a lot more. Even then, I’d say, “How can you put up with all this bullshit?” And he just smiled. He just wasn’t going to be affected by it. He really knew what his mission was. Obviously, he was blessed with a talent to carry on that mission. More than to entertain, to be a troubadour. To use his musical and writing talent to communicate his own personal message. He wasn’t out to retire, make money, although he made some money in the process. He never lost his zest for that message. Steve always had fun.
I’m thinking of his voice. Engaging. It brings you into the song immediately.
He makes a song out of it. You can imagine, I thought they were going to expel us from school. It was a big deal to the administrators. And all he could do was make light of it. Think about how far ahead of his time he was.
Something about mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes, something out the window, couldn’t be better. He picked up on the mashed potatoes rather than the toasted cheese and the apple sauce. Of course, they always served this on Friday, so Friday became part of it, too.
The anti-Semetic statements that were made. They were done at a time that I don’t think had the anti-hate mentality. It was outright racism. Whether it was blacks or Jews. We’ve come a long way, perhaps in part due to his efforts.
Even when he was a sophomore, dragging his oversize guitar case around on his 5’2” frame, he had a mission. And a kid of that age at that time, talk about being unique.”
[end of recording]