Dan Ingram

Daniel Trombley Ingram (September 7, 1934 – June 24, 2018)^[3] was an American Top 40 radio disc jockey with a fifty-year career on radio stations such as WABC and WCBS-FM in New York City.

Career

"Big Dan" started broadcasting at WHCH Hofstra College, Hempstead, New York; WNRC, New Rochelle, New York; and WALK-FM, Patchogue, New York.

Ingram was one of the most highly regarded DJs from his era. He was noted for his quick wit and ability to convey a humorous or satiric idea with fast pacing and an economy of words, a skill that rendered him uniquely suited to, and successful within, modern personality-driven music radio. He was among the most frequently emulated radio personalities, cited as an influence or inspiration by numerous current broadcasters. One of Ingram's unique skills was his ability to "talk up" to the lyrics of a record, meaning speaking over the musical introduction and finishing exactly at the point when the lyrics started.

Ingram was well known for playing doctored versions of popular songs. The Paul McCartney & Wings song My Love Does it Good became My Glove Does it Good. The stuttering title refrain of Bennie and the Jets went from three or four repetitions to countless. In the same vein, the distinctive refrain added to Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede, Ooga-chucka-ooga-ooga would start repeating and listeners would never know when it would end. Paul Simon's 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover became "50 Ways to Love Your Leaver" and "49 Ways to Relieve Your Liver", and Ingram "rearranged" the spelling of "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y" on the Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night.

His longtime closing theme song was "Tri-Fi Drums" by Billy May. An edited version of the song was used for broadcast.

TV commercials Ingram narrated include a 1970 promo for free cut-out records of Archies songs on the backs of Post Honeycomb and Alpha-Bits cereals.^[4]

Ingram was also featured prominently in his son Chris's book, Hey Kemosabe! The Days (and Nights) of a Radio Idyll, a fictionalized account of the Musicradio WABC era.

Name

Ingram was not related to Clarke Ingram, another top 40 radio personality in New York City who worked at Z-100 during the early 1990s. Clarke has said that he was reluctant to use "Ingram" (his real name) because of Dan's prominence, but that Z-100 encouraged him to do so because at the time Dan was not on the air at any station. About six months later, Dan returned to the air, doing weekends at WCBS-FM, and the two sometimes competed in the same time slots. Some listeners mistakenly assumed that Clarke was Dan's son, or another relative (a photo of Dan and Clarke meeting each other for the first time appeared in the radio trade publication FMQB in 1997). However, Dan's son, Chris, was a DJ at WVOS-FM in Monticello, New York and most recently at WRMF in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Ingram sometimes commented about the pronunciation of his name: jingles often are heard pronouncing his last name as "Ing-ram," but Dan said it is correctly pronounced "In-gram." As a tribute to Ingram in later years, ESPN's Chris Berman would do the same when saying the name of Giants wide receiver Mark Ingram, pronouncing it "Marrrrrk In-gram", a take-off of Dan's soundcheck.

On air history

• 1958 — WICC, Bridgeport, CT (under the name Rae Tayler)
• 1958 — WNHC, New Haven, CT
• 1959 — KBOX, Dallas, TX
• 1959 - 1960 — WIL, St. Louis, MO^[5]
• July 3, 1961 - May 10, 1982 — WABC, New York City. He and Ron Lundy were on-air as the station switched to TalkRadio.
• April 1984 - December 1986 — Hosted CBS Radio's Top 40 Satellite Survey
• 1984 - June 1985 — WKTU (92.3 FM), New York City
• 1986 - 1987 — announcer for Nightlife, a late-night TV talk show hosted by David Brenner
• 1987 - 1988 — The Weekend Music Review, a weekly Adult Contemporary radio program that counted down the top 20 AC records today, and highlighted what was going on 20, 15, 10, and 1 yr ago that weekend. JAM Creative Productions, Dallas TX^[6] produced and syndicated from 1987 to 1988. Julie Sizemore handled affiliate relations. Dan Ingram was host of "The Weekend Music Review" 3 hour AC show.
• October 1991 - June 2003,^[7] September 16, 2007 — New York Radio Greats on WCBS-FM, New York City
• June 1998 — KRTH-FM, Los Angeles. One week as "guest DJ," ostensibly a tryout for the morning drive spot previously held by Robert W. Morgan, who had died a month earlier. The job went to Charlie Van Dyke.
• February 8, 2004 — Fab-40th Weekend on WAXQ, New York

Awards

• Edward R. Murrow Award for an anti-smoking campaign
• Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews for public service announcements
• National Radio Hall of Fame nominee in 2004 (although not inducted)
• National Radio Hall of Fame inductee in 2007
• New York Achievement In Radio (A.I.R.) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005
• Hofstra University Estabrook Alumni Award given to less than 1% of honored graduates

References

External links

• Musicradio77.com
• Musicradio 77 tribute page featuring pictures of Ingram and Lundy broadcasting their last radio show before the music died.