windfall: a sudden, unexpected piece of good fortune

Thursday, August 18, 2011

KDKA and Rege Cordick

If you grew up in the 1950s in Pittsburgh, you probably listened to KDKA. And every weekday, from 6 - 10 AM, you listened to Cordick and Company, hosted by Rege Cordick.

While my sister Judie and I drippingly ate our cornflakes or rice krispies, the radio would be tuned to Rege and his screamingly funny cast of characters. We rarely understood what was funny about him and his friends, but our mother laughed a lot so we thought it had to be funny and all we had to do was grow up and wait.

There was Rege's ne'er do well buddy, Carmen Monoxide, who was always coming up with crazy ideas and ridiculous schemes. Rege tolerated him but did get impatient. There was Louey the garbage man who always said just one sentence: "Doggone right!!" I think he was supposed to be of Hungarian origin. And of course Brunhilda who waddled into the middle of Rege's show; Rege would always call out "Throw a couple of chairs together, Brunie's coming."
Rege had a little friend from Venus I think it was called Omicron who was so tiny that she sat on the edge of Rege's coffee cup.

There was also Cordick and Company; Better Things for Better Living through Chicanery. A take-off of DuPont (I think)--Better Things for Better Living through Chemistry. This was where Rege got to advertise all his new insane inventions. Old Frothingslosh, the Tall Pale Ale with the Head on the Bottom; new car smell that you could buy in cans; a musical snow shovel that played your favorite kind of music while you shoveled. Also a little syringe that you could use to inject new flavor into your chewing gum after the gum began tasting rubbery.

There is a web site where a lot of Rege's monologues have been saved. In one of them, Cordick and Company bewailed the traffic in downtown Pittsburgh and the amount of exhaust let loose into the air. (And this was when the steel mills were working 24/7!!) Anyway, Rege devised this kind of plug that you could insert into the exhaust pipe of the guy in front of you. So at least you wouldn't have to smell so much exhaust. When the movie West Side Story came out, Rege responded with "North Side Story" which was so funny when I recently listened to it that I laughed until my ribs and stomach hurt.

Finally, at 6 AM and again at 10 AM, Rege's theme song would be played. "Up the lazy river..."
Which I did not understand until decades later--the city of the three rivers...


2 comments:

  1. I still tell my friends about Old Frothingslosh: the beer in the bottles with the bubbles on the bottom!

    ReplyDelete
  2. "The pale stale ale with the foam on the bottom..."

    ReplyDelete