Looking for information on Don Chamberlain's California Girls
Dr. Pattidawn Horn, PhD.
thing the year was 1968 Any information would be helpful. Hubby is a
San Francisco native St. Joseph's Hospital. 1947. and raised on
Portrero Hill 1049 Tennessee Street. I am doing a show about his
growing up in the City..Dr, Pattidawn Horn
Rtnda
What do you want to know?
Don was working as a part-time newsman at KNEW in the late '60's and the PD
(Ron Reynolds, unless memory fails) asked him if he wanted to do a Saturday
morning fill-in talk slot. It paid scale, so obviously he did.
The subject turned to sex (very unusual in those days, but well tuned to the
time) and because Don was avuncular enough not to be regarded as salacious on
the air he was able to get away with being a bit more explicit than one would
expect.
Gradually he got more and more explicit and the show became more and more
popular and it soon became the hottest thing on the air. They named it
California Girls for the song of the time, obviously.
He started a magazine which never made any money and toward the end of the run
of the show he decided he ought to learn something about sex so he took college
classes (I've never been 100% clear whether from a real college or a diploma
mill) and got a degree. Which he used to open a practice and to treat people's
sexual problems.
My memory for details is not good---and never was: age has nothing to do with
it in my case.
But I knew Don well and can tell you that he was one of the finest gentlemen I
have ever known in or out of the radio business.
As I write, I realize I may be wrong about a detail up there. It may be that
Ron hired him to do the part-time talk show and the GM (Varner Paulson) forced
me to take him part-time in the newsroom. (I was news director of KNEW from
1968 to 1975.) I seem to remember being reluctant at first, but I know that he
became one of my top people. He could anchor and he could report and he was an
absolute joy to work with.
I had mixed emotions when California Girls succeeded as it did---like your
mother-in-law driving your new Cadillac off a cliff. I was delighted for him,
but I hated to lose him in the newsroom.
As you may know, he died several years ago.
Gil Haar
David Kaye
> Don was working as a part-time newsman at KNEW in the late '60's and the PD
> (Ron Reynolds, unless memory fails) asked him if he wanted to do a Saturday
> morning fill-in talk slot. It paid scale, so obviously he did.
Hmmm...I may be wrong about this, but I though John Hawkins was PD or
OD at the time. He always claimed to have come up with the name of
the show. (Hawkins got out of radio and has been publishing the
Advisor series of computer magazines.)
I also had thought that Don was a salesman at KNEW or (then co-owned)
KSAN at the time. I do know that after he left KNEW he went to KEST
1450, a time brokered station and that he sold time there.
> He started a magazine which never made any money
Oh yes. I believe I may actually have a copy or two of that mag. It
was during the era when mags such as Playgirl, Eros, Viva, and
Penthouse Forum started coming out. Had the mag come out maybe 5
years earlier it might have been very successful, but at the time it
came out it had a lot of competition.
> But I knew Don well and can tell you that he was one of the finest gentlemen
> I have ever known in or out of the radio business.
>
It's interesting in that his program was considered a take-off on Bill
Ballance's "Feminine Forum" in LA. Don had a voice like Bill's and
approached similar topics in a similar way. But whereas Bill Ballance
came across as lecherous, Don Chamberlain was always the gentleman
on-air.
Rtnda
recall that he had a rather too-elevated opinion of his own position. (Sorry,
John: if you're out there.)
Don could have been a salesman but I don't remember it. Before CA Girls he did
a little of this, a little of that.
Now that you mention it, some people did compare CG with Ballance's Feminine
Forum and it used to annoy Don mildly. (He was the kind of guy who never got
more than very mildly annoyed. He wouldn't have durvived five minutes in a
Usenet Newsgroup.) He was not copying Ballance or anybody else. I don't know if
Ballance copied him, since I don't know Ballance.
GH
Mike Ward
>Now that you mention it, some people did compare CG with Ballance's Feminine
>Forum and it used to annoy Don mildly. (He was the kind of guy who never got
>more than very mildly annoyed. He wouldn't have durvived five minutes in a
>Usenet Newsgroup.)
And oddly enough, his own daughter has shown up in this very newsgroup
from time to time...and as far as I know, she's still active in the
Santa Rosa market...
Mike
Buck
bunch of young studs working for me as laborers, and they claimed that their
women listened to the show, so they had to as well, in order to know what to
expect when they got home (at least those who weren't on work release!).
Hadn't thought about him in years.
A lot of the self-styled feminists of the time really hated him, but I doubt
that he minded very much.
Buck
"Rtnda" <rt...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20040326162351...@mb-m03.aol.com...
David Kaye
> John Hawkins was never PD of KNEW. I remember him only vaguely. I do seem to
> recall that he had a rather too-elevated opinion of his own position. (Sorry,
> John: if you're out there.)
When he left KNEW and moved to KWUN, he became PD there and made the
place very successful, so much that the owner was able to sell it in a
few years at a *very* nice profit for a 500 watt daytimer. He had a
knack as a PD and in doing station promotions, too. He also tweaked
their audio processing and made it sound pretty good for being the
small station it was.
Hawkins may have never been PD at KNEW, but it appeard that he was
once Operations Director there. Some years earlier I had applied for
a job as an assistant engineer at KNEW, to do maintenance on the audio
and some of the trasmitter stuff. He had run the ad and I interviewed
with him. I decided not to take the job when he told me that there
was absolutely *nothing* written down about anything at the studio or
the transmitter. I was teetering on the edge of being in over my head
as it was, and I wasn't about to try to figure out the predecessor's
intentions and making anything worse.
> Now that you mention it, some people did compare CG with Ballance's Feminine
> Forum and it used to annoy Don mildly. (He was the kind of guy who never got
> more than very mildly annoyed. He wouldn't have durvived five minutes in a
> Usenet Newsgroup.) He was not copying Ballance or anybody else. I don't know > if Ballance copied him, since I don't know Ballance.
Bill Balance invented the concept, there's no doubt about that. He
started the wave about 3 years before Don Chamberlain did. It was
such a hot concept that before long there may have been 100 stations
doing sextalk.
Having heard both guys do their shows, there's no question in my mind
that Don Chamberlain's version was far superior. While I admire Bill
Ballance as a radio personality and possibly one of the very best and
creative DJs of all time (play back some of his stuff at
www.reelradio.com ), his sextalk show was simply too slimy for my
taste. Don treated people with respect. Bill was, well, a lech.
David Kaye
> And oddly enough, his own daughter has shown up in this very newsgroup
> from time to time...and as far as I know, she's still active in the
> Santa Rosa market...
Yes. I'm on Candi Chamberlain's mailing list, so I get updates from
time to time. She was one of my very favorite DJs at the oldies
version of KYA.
Patty Winter
brouhaha about obscene langauge on radio and TV. For one thing, I
was wondering how a two-word insult got through on Gene Burns' show
a couple of weeks ago, given that tape-delay and bleeping technology
has progressed way beyond the "running the tape from the top tape
deck to the bottom deck and back" system that I was using on Don's show.
(At least at first; I think we got an electronic delay system at
some point while I was there.)
Second, Metromedia had a very restrictive language policy. I'm not just
talking about expletives, which of course were verboten. But so were
latin and similarly descriptive words for male and female genitals
and sexual functions. Some of you may remember "USF," which stood
for "ultimate sexual fulfillment" and was the show's alternative to
the disallowed "orgasm."
BTW, I was kind of skeptical about the show before I started working
on it. I assumed it was leering and titillating, as some people have
mentioned here about Bill Ballance's show. But in fact Don ran a very
classy show, and he was a pleasure to work with.
Patty
soulgi...@gmail.com
Posting a very new response to a very old thread.
I am not Don Chamberlain's daughter. To the best of my knowledge, we aren't related by blood or marriage. My father's name was Ross, and he was a Civil Engineer by trade.
It was a common assumption that wasn't correct, so I am just throwing that out there.
Thanks!
-Candi Chamberlain
1-29-2015
beli...@gmail.com
Recalling Don's California Girls Radio show is a monument to how much things have changed: some for the better and some no so! Having worked for the famous S.F. divorce lawyer, Walter T. Winter, I knew the "divorce business" pretty well, including having tried 48 divorce cases before I ever graduated from law school. Like your husband, I'm a SF native having passed through the old St. Joseph's Hospital in 1944.
Anyway, over the objections of the California Bar Association, I appeared as a guest on the California Girls Radio show ONCE in about 1972. Since that was before the days of "free speech" for lawyers, that stunt damn near got me disbarred at about the same time I was admitted to the bar. After one of the State Bar trolls had written admonitions delivered to my home the night before I was to appear, I went to the studio early the next morning to tell Don Chamberlain that I could not do his show.
Someone mentioned Dan Chamberlain being a "salesman"! He definitely was!
I ended up doing the show (92% of which was horrible as I following the State Bar's "recommended (like a gun pointed at your head) protocols". And I did get in trouble. Not for anything I said; but for "lowering the decorum of the legal profession" - and truly that's no joke! The State Bar's evidence: I appeared on a show that had a waterbed ad by Wolfman Jack. In his advertisement, a sales pitch is made to "get a waterbed: its like rowing a boat". You can row once and coast twice.
For years to come, Mr. Chamberlain's show replayed OK excerpts from that tiny portion of my appearance that were acceptable to an intelligent audience.
I think the State Bar's worst fears were realized. I became quite successful. From that first show, if my memory is correct, I received 263 new case referrals. Kept the best 90 for myself and referred the remainder to the SF Bar Association and/or Lawyer's Club who were just beginning to start their lawyer referral services and needed clients.
Over the years, I did something like 460 divorce/contested custody cases before giving that practice to someone who needed it more than I did. In not small measure do I owe that extraordinary success to Don Chamberlain and his conniving, pushing, intimidating, humoring, etc. etc. to penetrate my fears of the establishment and utter a few words on his show. Thanks Don! I wish I've have told you this in person when I had the chance. Like in the old Xmas movie, "Its a Wonderful Life", you never know how much you're done for others.
Joe Reisinger
Beli...@gmail.com
