By Hans Hogendoorn
DUTCH radio in the 1940s and ’50s could be exciting when a radio play was broadcast. Otherwise it was rather boring, scripted, read from paper. With pauses … and so on. Then in southern Holland there was Radio Luxemburg, with slightly more enthusiastic hosts touting new 45-rpm records.
Around 1960, sea stations came on the air, including Radio Veronica, supported by commercials, with programming recorded in Hilversum. The tapes were taken from Scheveningen to a ship at sea, and broadcast from there to Holland. The basis for that method had been laid years earlier by a radio ship off the coast of Denmark, imitated in England by various entrepreneurs who saw money in this form of broadcasting. The British “Radio pirates” became competitors to the stilted, official BBC programs.
It was suddenly exciting to scour the radio band in search of sounds other than just Hilversum. There were Screaming Lord Sutch, Tony Blackburn, Kenny Everett, Tony Windsor, and many others. And suddenly out of your speaker would come a loud talking American, Jack Spector, breaking all radio speed records.
For him it was an extra job, he was in New York Top DJ, “Good Guy,” on WMCA. That all became clear later when, little by little, I got to know the American stations better than what came to us in Europe.
MY MILITARY service was largely spent in front of large radio receivers, looking for “foreign” broadcasts, as part of the nation’s defense. But the short wave also made it possible to hear American stations, with very different music choices; it was very educational. The American radio world began to attract me.
Once I was discharged, within a few months I ended up at start-up Radio Noordzee, initially as news editor/announcer, but soon also as a DJ. It didn’t turn into a Jack Spector-like soundburst, but it tasted just as good. Living and working on a bobbing ship 150 feet long, and with an equally tall radio mast, was fascinating at times, to say the least. And not just because of that bombing and subsequent fire on the stern – several storms also hit hard.
I gained more experience at the ANP telephone news service, moved on after two years to NOS Radio (Met het Oog op Morgen), and went on vacation trips. For starters, two weeks staying with relatives in Curacao, where an uncle and aunt had been living since 1946. And the return trip via that promised radio land: America. First Florida (overnight stay, radio listening and recording), then to New York. The first cab I got into that afternoon had the radio on. WABC, Dan Ingram – it only dawned on me later that this was the top station, with the top-afternoon host. What a voice, what a presentation. And in the evening, TV in the hotel room until after midnight, David Letterman.
ON SUNDAY morning walking around, Avenue of The Americas. The ABC building, two women in uniform guarding the front door. “Are you Dutch, we speak that too, we are from Curacao.” Of course they also allowed me to look ‘upstairs’, no problem (lax security, 9/11 was only years later), there was not much exciting to see though, some equipment and a lot of paper. I kept in touch with those two guards for a few years.
Later, in Amsterdam, I met a delegation from New York at an Audio-Video trade show, with high-ranking bosses from that same ABC network. It was the time of making contacts. During one of the following visits to the US and New York, I spoke to the ABC boss in his office, we looked at how their broadcast editors worked, and he asked if I felt like becoming a “stringer” in the Netherlands for ABC.
In that capacity I was later able to report, e.g., on the kidnapping of Freddy Heineken, on cold winters, when people were skating in Dutch streets, on matters concerning the royal family, and also with the first reports on the 1992 El Al plane crash into an Amsterdam apartment high-rise. The stringership was later taken over by Wereldomroep colleagues. On one of my subsequent trips to the U.S., I had the pleasure of being at a Dan Ingram broadcast. Those are “the” moments.
DURING several trips, I was able to stay with colleagues in New York (with the Van Meerendonk family), and, a little farther north, with the Hammelburg family. From there, a drive to Niagara Falls was unforgettable.
In preparation of the musical “design” in the Dutch sports shows, I worked intensively with composers and studios in Dallas, Texas, among other places. Tom Merriman was one of the great composers who even came to Holland to conduct music in Hilversum, performed by the Metropole Orchestra. Not only his own music, but also a version of, for example, the time-honored Langs-de-Lijn tune. Much of that work can be heard on the site of www.jingleweb.nl (click for link). Also with Bart van Gogh and Ren Groot we prepared and recorded a number of station tunes in the US.
I enjoyed traveling through America. A long distance across the continent by rental car, always a hotel to spend the night – I don’t know how I did it, but it came naturally. And my oldest child is doing the same now – in Europe, and also in the U.S., all along the west coast. What a wonderful country.
* Hans Hogendoorn (Amsterdam, 1947) recently retired as Holland’s most famous radio voice (“Buiten is het 7 graden, binnen zit…”). He worked i.a. for Radio Noordzee, ANP, ABC, NOS, NPO, Wereldomroep, KX Radio. Virtually all Dutch adults know his work as a designer of shows such as Met het oog op morgen, RadiOlympia and Radio Tour de France.
