Dick Bertel

Richard Bertelmann, professionally known as Dick Bertel, is a retired American radio and television personality and broadcasting executive who is best known for his work locally in Hartford, Connecticut, nationally on the NBC and Mutual Broadcasting System radio networks, and internationally for the Voice of America. He remains engaged with the profession to the present day.

Early life

Bertel was born on January 6, 1931, at Bronx Maternity Hospital on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx borough of New York, New York to Meta Katherina "Martha / Mattie" (née Delvanthal) Bertelmann, the daughter of German immigrants living in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, and Heinrich "Henry" Bertelmann, who emigrated to the United States from Hemmoor, Germany, in 1909, disembarking from the steamship President Lincoln at Ellis Island. (He was naturalized in 1933.) Richard's only sibling was their son Henry John "Harry" Bertelmann, a U.S. Army veteran of World War II.

Mattie claimed that as Richard first learned to talk, he would frequently babble a version of " W-E-A-F New York," the hourly legal identification of one of the most prominent stations in New York City at that time. During his early childhood, family and friends called him "Richie." While growing up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, he attended Public School 87 and P.S. 68.

Henry and Mattie legally separated in 1936 and were officially divorced in 1939. In 1940, Mattie married James Morton "Jim" Latz, a draftsman and veteran of World War I, who by this time had already become Richie's primary father figure. The family moved to nearby Darien, Connecticut in 1944 when Jim was hired to manage the Marchand medicine cabinet factory in Stamford, Connecticut, which had been converted into a war plant.

Before meeting his new classmates at Hollow Tree Ridge Junior High School (Middlesex Middle School today), he decided to introduce himself as "Dick" rather than "Richie." From this point forward, he was always known socially as "Dick."

After one year at Hollow Tree Ridge, he attended Darien High School as a member of the Class of 1948. In 1947, he was elected Homecoming King.

Early career

During the years 1948 - 1955, Bertel's career began at Fairfield County radio stations in the New York suburbs surrounding Darien and strung along the Boston Post Road corridor. Three forces shaped the American broadcasting industry as Bertel gathered his early experience with it.

* The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lifted its wartime ban on issuing licenses, causing new stations to proliferate across the United States, especially in small cities and towns.
* The explosive growth of commercial television was causing the radio networks to reduce their programming. This in turn increased the need for local stations to produce their own shows. In addition, TV was creating new job opportunities for broadcasters.
* Despite their superior audio fidelity, FM stations were struggling to find audiences. In 1945, existing FM stations had been rendered obsolete when the FCC reassigned their portion of the spectrum (then between 42 and 50 MHz) to VHF television stations. Meanwhile, postwar consumers were more interested in purchasing television sets than radios with receivers that could be tuned to the new FM band (the current 88 to 108 MHz). This limited the interest of most operators in seeking FM licenses and increased the risk of investing in innovative FM programming, thus compounding the problem of low consumer interest in buying radios with FM receivers. As a result of this cycle, AM stations would continue to dominate radio listening for the next three decades.

WNLK in Norwalk

In April 1948, shortly before graduating from high school, Bertel requested a tour of WNLK, a new daytime-only radio station being built in neighboring Norwalk, Conn., and was offered an unpaid position. Initially writing and announcing news from his school, within a few months he was hosting ''The Hi Teen Show,'' a weekly Saturday morning program featuring local amateur singers, a band, and sketches performed by teenagers.

To accommodate his work at WGCH (described below), in 1949 WNLK moved his shift to Sunday. When the station was granted a full-time license in the summer of that year, he was placed on the WNLK payroll.

Bertel also performed with and announced for the Community Radio Workshop, a group of local hobbyist actors who produced a program on WNLK called ''The Mystery Theater of the Air'' and who also appeared in community stage productions. In 1950, WNLK broadcast a supernatural drama called "The House of Retribution" which Bertel wrote for the show.

He remained at WNLK until 1951 when he accepted a Sunday shift at WNAB in Bridgeport (described below).

New York University

From September 1948 to June 1952 he concurrently commuted from Darien to Manhattan on the New Haven Railroad to earn a degree in broadcasting from New York University (NYU). One of his instructors there was Brad Phillips who had just started what would become a forty-four year career as a news anchor on WINS Radio in New York. (On Election Night in 1948 Phillips would stay on the air for twenty-three straight hours covering the surprising results of the presidential race between President Harry S. Truman and Governor Thomas E. Dewey.)

WGCH (FM) in Greenwich

In the Fall of 1948, testing began on a new New York television station, WOR-TV (WWOR today). While attempting to tune in a test pattern, Bertel instead found an unrelated audio broadcast. It was a test of an experimental FM station in Greenwich, Conn., WGCH (WFOX today), which due to a harmonic could be heard on the audio carrier of channel 9. Bertel responded to an announcer's invitation to listeners to call the station to report reception. Within a couple of weeks he decided to use that telephone conversation as a reason to visit the station and introduce himself. During that visit, he offered to volunteer as an announcer.

By January 1949, he was hosting ''The Teen Turntable'' on WGCH on Saturday afternoons, working for free to gain experience just as he was presently doing at WNLK. After hosting ''The Hi Teen Show'' on WNLK in the morning, he would take a bus to Greenwich carrying a case of his personal collection of 78 RPM records for use on his WGCH show. Within weeks, WGCH offered him an announcing shift on Thursday and Friday afternoons and all day Saturday as well as $18 per week, making this his first paid position. On Saturday nights he hosted a listener call-in show called ''Request Party'' and co-hosted ''Jazz Cavalcade'' with a local record collector, Bill Gray. On Sundays he hosted a music show called ''Rhythm and Song.''

In the Summer of 1949, Bertel was made the acting program director at WGCH, covering for program director Jack Hines during his hospitalization for pneumonia and the recovery that followed.

In 1950, Bertel hosted a Christmas broadcast featuring music conducted by Erich Kunzel, then a student at Greenwich High School, who would become known as the "Prince of Pops" during an illustrious career leading the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.

Bertel continued to work at WGCH until he graduated from NYU in 1952. By that time, however, struggling to find an audience and advertisers on the FM band, WGCH was only broadcasting for 3 1/2 hours per day. At the end of that year, it ceased operations altogether.

WNAB in Bridgeport

While continuing his work at WGCH, in 1951 Bertel left WNLK to begin working Sundays at WNAB (WCUM today), the ABC affiliate in Bridgeport, Conn., where a friend he had made at WNLK, Bill Edwardsen, was now the chief announcer. (Edwardsen would become a fixture in the Albany - Schenectady - Troy, N.Y. market, primarily on WGY Radio and WRGB Television.)

When he graduated from NYU in 1952, he was hired for the daily night shift, his first full-time position. Although he would continue to host ''The Saturday Night Dance Party,'' soon he was moved to the midday shift and was appointed to be the continuity director, writing all of the commercial copy for the station. He left WNAB in 1954 to work for WSTC (described below).

On Sunday nights, WNAB broadcast live performances of big bands appearing at the Ritz Ballroom in Bridgeport. Bertel participated as an announcer, receiving his first professional experience working with celebrities. In this capacity, he interviewed famous musicians including Billy May, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Spivak, Lou Monte, Don Cornell, Ralph Flanagan, and Steve Lawrence.

WSTC in Stamford

When Bertel and his family first moved to Darien in 1944, he began listening to WSRR in Stamford, an affiliate of NBC's Blue Network American Broadcasting Company (ABC) in 1945]. Intrigued that this radio station was broadcasting within a few miles of his new home, Bertel and one of his Hollow Tree Ridge Junior High School classmates visited the station and asked for a tour. The announcer on duty graciously showed them the operation and allowed them to stand silently in the studio while he conducted a record show. Bertel resolved then that he would one day come to work for that station which would change its call letters to WSTC in 1946.

In 1954, WSTC hired him for the night shift, delivering the eleven o'clock newscast and conducting station breaks around network shows such as ''The Lone Ranger''. Other members of the staff included Scott Vincent (who would become a staff announcer for ABC), Jerry Damon), and Dee Caruso (who would become a TV writer and producer for ''Get Smart'', ''The Monkees'', and ''The Smothers Brothers Show'').

Up until now, he had been using his name "Dick Bertelmann" on WNLK, WGCH, and WNAB. Other announcers at WSTC used stage names so he decided it was time to coin one for himself. At WSTC he started calling himself "Dick Richards."

One night in September 1954, one of Bertel's colleagues conceived a plan for them to meet women working as nurses in residence at Stamford Hospital. He would call a dormitory on the hospital's campus under the pretense of being a producer seeking requests for records to be played on ''The Dick Richards Show,'' then ask the nurse on the phone if she and her friends would like to meet Dick Richards and his coworkers at a pizzeria. That led to Bertel's courtship with Jean Thies, a native of Dunkirk

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