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CHAPTER ONE
Genesis
After almost forty years in show business and broadcasting Jack Steck,
program director at WFIL-TV in Philadelphia, thought he had seen everything.
Summoned to the office of general manager Roger W. Clipp one afternoon in
1952, Steck arrived in the boss's lair and was greeted by Clipp and "this
good-looking kid."
"I know this boy's father," said Clipp. "Audition him and tell me if we ought
to hire him."
It was not out of the ordinary for Steck to conduct a job audition at WFIL, so
he barely gave a thought to Dick Clark as he escorted the twenty-two-year-old
prospect into the program director's office and handed him the usual
assortment of tongue-twisting material he used to audition would-be
announcers. Steck then showed Clark into a studio and said, "Look them over,
son. I'll come back in fifteen minutes to listen to you."
Clark, who was then employed by a small television station in upstate New
York, said in 1994 that the WFIL position "was the biggest one" of the three job
offers he had at the time, and was the one he wanted so badly that he literally
had something up his sleeve to help land it. "God, if I could jump from Utica,
New York to Philadelphia, that'll be amazing," he thought to himself.
Steck, who began his show business career on the vaudeville circuit ("some
of my best friends said I helped kill it") as a dancer, comic, and an emcee, did
not expect to hear anything out of the ordinary when he returned to give the
dapper job applicant a listen. At that point, Dick Clark was just another pretty
face to the veteran program director, who sat with arms folded and head down.
"I didn't want to look at him," recalled Steck. "I needed a man for radio and I
didn't want to be influenced by his appearance. I wanted a voice!"
Steck had just begun to concentrate on Clark's delivery when he was interrupted
by the engineer on duty, who said, "Hey Stecky, look at this kid!" Steck
raised his head and observed Clark standing in front of the microphone, "with
no notes in his hands, no papers, doing the commercials word-for-word,
introducing the music, the sports, doing the whole thing."
"How the hell's he doing this?" wondered the program director. "Has he
got a photographic memory?"
What Clark had was "Elmer," a Webcor wire recorder that was hidden
from Steck's view. In one of Clark's ears was a tiny earphone connected to the
recorder by a wire concealed under his clothing. As he surreptitiously listened
to the recording he had just made of Steck's audition material, the young
announcer repeated it for the program director without so much as a glance at
the script.
It did not take Steck long to discover Clark's wire recorder and earpiece,
and when he did he was impressed, not so much by Clark's ingenuity, but by the
fact that he was able to repeat the playback without a faraway concentrated look
in his eye. "He had mastered that thing!" recalled Steck, who fired off a memo
to Roger Clipp: "In spite of his university education, this is a smart kid. Let's
hire him."
* * *
Whether Clark would have landed the WFIL announcer's position without
the assistance of Elmer will never be known, although the subsequent course
of his career indicates that to think otherwise would be foolhardy. In order to
display greater broadcasting skill than he then possessed, Clark relied on his
hidden tape recorder for assistance, making himself out to be something
greater than he actually was. But after being hired by WFIL and embarking
upon his quest to become a twenty-something millionaire, Clark adopted a
new, self-effacing tack, portraying himself as something less than he actually
was. Despite his introduction to America as a benign television host, when it
came to advancing himself, Clark was more akin to a wolf in sheep's
clothing--a sharply focused self-promoter and cunning businessman who
went to great lengths to contrive his public image.
As Jack Steck observed that fateful day in 1952, there was more to Dick
Clark than met the eye.
* * *
Richard Wagstaff Clark was born on November 30,1929, the
second son of Richard Augustus and Julia Barnard Clark, in the tiny village of
Bronxville, a corporate executive haven of turn-of-the-century homes, located
just north of New York City. Although Dick Clark was not born with the
proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, his father's position as sales manager
for a New York-based cosmetics firm ensured that young Dickie, as he was
called, would enjoy a comfortable, if isolated, childhood.
In 1933 the Clarks moved to the affluent Westchester bedroom community
of Mt. Vernon, just south of Bronxville, where they leased a garden
apartment adjacent to spacious grounds where Dickie and his brother
Bradley could romp freely. The younger Clark brother, a frenetic, contentious
nail-biter of a child, idolized Brad, who was five years his elder, and in later
years would describe him as a "quiet, very loving, wonderful guy ...
everything I wasn't."
Noted dancer Kathryn Murray was a neighbor of the Clarks and
sometimes baby-sat for Dickie. Mrs. Murray remembered him as "the sassiest
baby, always busy, always into something." But despite Dick's
cantankerousness, the Clark brothers developed a tight bond. Brad "lugged
Dick around everywhere and was so patient with him," Julia Clark told a
reporter for the New York Post in 1958.
By the time Dick became a teenager, the personable, good-looking, and
star athlete Brad was a Big Man on Campus at Mt. Vernon's A.B. Davis High.
Meanwhile, Dick, who envisioned himself as "peculiar looking and generally
odd," was handicapped by a severe inferiority complex. Not even his election
as junior class president helped overcome any shortcoming Dick felt from
being overshadowed by his revered older brother.
Brad graduated from Davis High in 1943, and, as World War II raged, he
applied and was selected for a coveted spot in the army air corp' pilot
training program. The realities of war were overshadowed by what Brad saw
as a golden opportunity to learn to fly at the government's expense, and he
elatedly shared his good fortune with his thirteen-year-old brother. But Dick
did not share Brad's enthusiasm. "I sat on the bed in the room we shared and
I sulked," wrote Clark in his autobiography, Rock, Roll & Remember. "It was
like he was deliberately deserting me."
By the time Dick entered Davis High in September 1943, Brad was flying
P-47 fighter missions over Europe. Cowed by the school's labyrinth of
corridors crowded with upperclassmen who appeared to be a million years
older than they actually were, Dick Clark's greatest fear was about to be
realized.
A few days after Christmas, 1944, the Clark family received the
devastating news that Brad had been shot down and killed during the Battle
of the Bulge in Germany. The death of the older brother he idolized has had a
profound effect on Clark, who each year finds it more difficult to comprehend
that Brad died before reaching the age of twenty-one. "My children are all
older than this man I visualize as my big brother," he told Ralph Emery in
1992.
Debilitated by his grief, Clark embarked on a mad spree to become the
equal of his dead brother. He headed for the football field where Brad had
starred as a first-string tackle. But the 120-pound novice quickly discovered
that aside from being a tackling dummy he was not much use to the team. He
tried other sports at which Brad had excelled, but failed to make the swimming
and track squads as well.
Frustrated by his athletic failure, Clark retreated to his bedroom, turned on
the radio, and sought refuge in what he called "the disembodied fantasy
world that came out of the speaker." He had recently discovered what he
termed "the magic world of radio" when, at age thirteen, his parents took him
to New York City to see a live broadcast of the Jimmy Durante--Garry Moore
radio program. Captivated by the performances of the radio personalities as
well as by the behind-the-scenes activity in the control room, Clark told his
mother, "That's what I want to do."
Clark was able to break the shackles of insecurity through his participation
in the high school drama club, which his parents encouraged him to join.
Clark's dramatics teacher recalled that because of his emotional performance
in the senior class play, "there wasn't a dry eye in the house." Clark gave
serious thought to becoming an actor, but his father--who once harbored
those same youthful aspirations--dissuaded his son from the pursuit of
what he viewed as a capricious facet of show business.
By the time Clark was ready to graduate from high school, vestiges of his
future were evident. He gave great consideration to the pursuit of a radio
career, and was deemed by his premonitory peers to be "The Man Most
Likely to Sell the Brooklyn Bridge."
In the spring of 1947, just prior to Clark's graduation from high school, his
family moved from Mt. Vernon to Utica, a small city located in the rolling hills
of central upstate New York. Clark's uncle Bradley Barnard lived nearby in the
city of Rome, where he owned the local Sentinel newspaper and the
ABC-affiliated, Utica-based radio station WRUN. Aware of his
brother-in-law's sales and promotion savvy, Barnard asked Dick Clark's father
if he was interested in making a career change.
After twenty-six years, Richard Augustus Clark and his wife had had
enough of the cosmetics business rat race and longed to return to their
upstate roots. In addition, the elder Clark, who was aware of Dick's interest in
a radio career, realized that a move to WRUN would enhance his son's
broadcasting opportunities. So it was that when Barnard offered his
brother-in-law the opportunity to become the station's first promotional
manager, Richard Clark accepted.
When it came time for Dick Clark to apply to college his first choice was
Yale, but Clark's grades were not up to Ivy League snuff. Rejected by Yale,
he opted for nearby Syracuse University, his father's alma mater.
With Bradley Barnard's approval, Richard Clark hired his son Dick as a
summer replacement at WRUN, where the college-bound student worked in
the mailroom, ran the office mimeograph machine, and longingly eyed the
broadcasting microphone. Dick's initial broadcasting opportunity came when
he was assigned to read hourly weather forecasts for a vacationing FM
announcer. Although Clark admitted he was buried at WRUN, "about as
deep as they could bury someone without experience," it was of little
concern. He was on the air, and the following morning he rigged up a home
antenna so his mother could hear his voice on the radio.
Clark entered Syracuse University in the fall of 1947 as an advertising
major with a minor in radio. Although he was required to concentrate on his
major area of study, Clark was not deterred from seeking out WEAR-FM, the
campus radio station known as Radio House. After auditioning for Radio
House student manager Jerry Landay, Clark joined the WEAR staff as a disc
jockey and newscaster. But the would-be announcer was already looking
beyond the microphone. In 1987 Clark revealed that he "never fully intended
to make radio announcing a lifetime pursuit," and that as early as his WEAR
days he was eyeing the business aspects of broadcasting.
Clark worked at the campus radio station during his four years at college,
and in January 1951--during his last semester before graduation--he
landed a weekend job at WOLF-AM (1490hz), a tiny 250-watt station in
downtown Syracuse. In less than a month he was working a full forty-hour
week at WOLF, in addition to completing his studies at Syracuse University.
From WOLF's Onondaga Hotel studios Clark announced the news and
hosted a show called The WOLF Buckaroos, on which he spun country
records by the likes of Gene Autry, Eddie Arnold, and Roy Rogers. After
graduating from Syracuse that May with a B.S. degree in business
administration, Clark stayed on at WOLF, where he earned a dollar an hour.
It was the wish of Richard Clark, then the communications-sales manager
at WRUN, that his son eventually succeed him in that position. That June,
Dick Clark quit WOLF and returned to Utica and a summer replacement job at
the station where his father worked, but the younger Clark, who had moved
back in with his parents at their home, was no longer comfortable working in
his father's shadow. It seemed that whatever he accomplished, someone
stood ready to credit the feat to his father's influence. "I was working too
hard to prove myself to get put down like that," said Clark.
Determined to make his own mark, Clark left WRUN in the fall of 1951. To
punctuate his emergence from his father's shadow, he changed his name to
"Dick Clay." Clark was certain the name change hurt both his parents, and he
even confessed to his own dislike of the moniker. But he kept it.
With his new name, "Dick Clay" went looking for a new job. He auditioned
for a newscasting position at Utica-Rome's WKTV, where he was hired by the
general manager, who had come to know Clark's father. It was while Clark was
employed at WKTV that he was taken aback by fellow newscaster Bob Earle,
who, rather than rely on a hand-held script to deliver the news, stared directly
into the camera and did the entire newscast--up to fifteen minutes at a
stretch--as if he had it memorized. Unable to contain his curiosity, Clark
asked Earle how he was able to manage the feat, and Earle shared with him the
secret of "Elmer," his wire recorder.
As impressed as Clark was, he set out to one-up Bob Earle. After
purchasing his own Webcor wire recorder Clark devised a system that
incorporated a foot pedal, which enabled him to start and stop the tape
whenever he chose and then move about freely in front of the TV cameras.
When Clark was not working he spent many hours secreted away at WRUN's
radio studio, where, out of sight of his WKTV colleagues, he practiced his
tape-recorded delivery. WRUN's Al Cole recalled that after Clark began doing
televised news commentary on WKTV, "Utica teenagers suddenly became
very interested in current events."
Clark's chores at WKTV also included playing Cactus Dick, the host of the
television station's country and western music show, Cactus Dick and the Santa
Fe Riders. Besides serving as the show's announcer, Clark did some singing.
"Badly," he confessed to Ralph Emery in 1992. "They used to make fun of
me."
Clark, who now earned $52.50 a week and was the proud owner of a 1941
Oldsmobile sedan, began to be courted by Syracuse's WHEN-TV. WKTV
general manager Michael Fusco promptly upped Cactus Dick's salary to $75 a
week, which kept his budding star from jumping to WHEN, but, salary
increase or not, after less than a year, "Dick Clay" had grown too big for
Utica. When he told his father he was ready to move on to a larger city,
Richard Clark, knowing exactly who to contact, telephoned a colleague in
Philadelphia whom he had befriended through ABC's executive channels.
(WRUN was an ABC affiliate.) It was that call to WFIL's Roger Clipp that led
to Dick Clark's audition with Jack Steck.
After Clark was hired by WFIL Steck offered him a summer replacement
slot on the station's FM band, but not before the veteran program director,
who envisioned the coming age of television, admonished the young
announcer that he was crazy to even consider returning to radio--particularly
FM radio, which was then considered a broadcasting graveyard. After
his TV experience in Utica, Clark was not at all certain he wanted to return to
radio. A job offer he had recently received from a television station in
Schenectady, New York only served to complicate matters. But Schenectady
was no larger than Utica, while Philadelphia was a major city where Clark
knew he would attract more attention. Philadelphia was also closer to New
York, an important consideration for a young man on the move who still
considered himself a New Yorker. "After all," said Philadelphia's newest
announcer as he bid farewell to Utica, "WFIL has a TV station, too."
Dick Clark may have glided into broadcasting on his father's coattails, but
the innuendos that linked Clark's advancement to being the boss's son
understandably rankled him. His initial broadcasting success was due at least
as much to his considerable professional aplomb as it was to his father's
broadcasting connections. Nevertheless, Clark was once again beholden to
his father. But what mattered most to the young announcer was that he
would now be heard in Philadelphia, a city whose three-and-one-half-million
potential listeners--a far cry from Utica's one hundred thousand--made it
the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States. Clark began work at
WFIL on May 13, 1952.
One of the country's oldest commercial broadcasters, WFIL was founded
as WFI in 1922, became an affiliate of the fledgling American
Broadcasting Company in 1943, and was purchased in 1945 by Triangle
Publications Inc., a blossoming communications empire owned by Walter
Annenberg, the wealthy son of a publishing magnate. In 1947 Annenberg
established WFIL-TV, which was Philadelphia's first commercial TV station.
WFIL-TV not only became ABC-TV's initial affiliate, it quickly developed into
that network's key TV outlet outside New York City.
Forty-eight-year-old Roger W. Clipp, who ran WFIL for Walter
Annenberg, was the quintessence of the obdurate organization man, and
then some. After earning a degree from the University of Pennsylvania's
prestigious Wharton School of Business, Clipp had embarked upon a
banking career cut short by the stock market crash of 1929. Clipp received his
baptism into the backroom world of broadcasting via a stint as an NBC
accountant before advancing to assistant manager of NBC's
owned-and-operated stations. He became WFIL's business manager in 1935,
after which he methodically climbed the station's executive ladder until he
oversaw WFIL's entire operation as its general manager.
Clipp "was a very unreasonable, temperamental man ... very cruel and
pretty vicious," said Jack Steck, who recalled the time a young announcer
committed a mispronunciation gaffe on the air just before Christmas and was
summarily dismissed by Clipp. Many on the WFIL staff grudgingly characterized
Clipp as "a son-of-a-bitch, but our son-of-a-bitch," which, thought
Steck, "was a pretty good description." But despite Steck's animosity towards
Clipp, whose antics were "carefully shielded" from Walter Annenberg, Steck
conceded that the station's general manager was a "great administrator ... [who]
turned WFIL into a $210-million property for the boss."
* * *
During the summer of 1952, WFIL combined its center-city radio facilities
with the station's TV operations, already housed in a warehouse-type
structure at 46th and Market Streets in West Philadelphia. No one had the
slightest inkling that the beige brick building situated in the shadows of the
Market Street elevated railway would spawn the longest-running network
television show in history and for a time enable Philadelphia to become the
pop music capital of the world. By then, WFIL was one of over three hundred
ABC-affiliated radio stations, but those numbers were illusory, for when the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lifted its four-year ban on the
establishment of new TV stations that summer, network sponsors abandoned
radio in favor of television. Local radio affiliates such as WFIL were thus
forced to develop and expand their own radio programming in order to
generate local advertising revenue. Since the most economical form of
programming available to a radio station was a disc jockey with a stack of
records, WFIL became one of hundreds of radio stations across America to
fire their costly resident studio orchestras and embrace such a format. Due
largely to such cost-cutting motives, the golden age of the disc jockey was
about to begin.
As the summer drew to a close Roger Clipp and radio station manager
George Koehler informed Dick Clark that WFIL was about to undergo a
radical change in format and they wanted him to be a part of that change.
The decision was not surprising, considering that the hard-nosed
executive Clipp, who Clark described as "respected and hated" and a "very
difficult man" to work for, had hit it off instantly with his hard-driving young
employee. "I found him to be intimidating," Clark revealed in 1994, "but I felt
very close to him and he toward me." In fact, Clipp looked upon the recently
hired Clark not as the son of a friend, but as the general manager's own son.
"He took very good care of me and he didn't frighten me as badly as he
frightened some of the other employees," explained Clark. Indeed, Clipp took
such good care of Clark that he offered the young announcer a radio program
of his own.
Dick Clark's Caravan of Music (weekdays from 1:45 to 6:00 P.M.) was
added to WFIL's revamped radio line-up at a time when pop radio's biggest
hits were sung by the likes of Patti Page, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Jo
Stafford, and South Philadelphia's own Eddie Fisher. But Clark was ordered to
forgo even those insipid tunes (which were deemed too extreme for WFIL's
conservative daytime format) in favor of easy listening standards.
At that point, it did not matter much to him what type of music he played
on his new program. Clark was happy just to have the job, for he was now a
married man. One month after joining WFIL's permanent staff he married his
high school sweetheart, Barbara ("Bobbie") Mallery, a pretty, blue-eyed
cheerleader at A.B. Davis High when she and Clark first met at a Halloween
party. Although Barbara was dating Clark's best friend at the time, she soon
realized that "Dick was the only boy for me." She and Clark quickly
developed into a steady item, but Barbara's mother took a dim view of her
fourteen-year-old daughter seeing only one boy. "She liked Dick," recalled
Barbara, "but she insisted I was missing half my life, going with just one
boy." Barbara and Dick actually broke up for a time, but after dating others
they came to realize how much they truly cared for one another. In
1946--Dick's senior year in high school--the couple began to go steady
again, and this time, recalled Clark, "we were sure of ourselves."
When Barbara graduated from high school in 1948, the Mallerys moved to
Salisbury, Maryland, and Clark began to date other girls at Syracuse. But he
preferred seeing Barbara, who was then enrolled at Salisbury State Teachers'
College, which necessitated what Clark described as seventeen-hour "sheer
suicide" motor trips in his heaterless '34 Ford convertible in the dead of
winter.
After two years of this long-distance liaison Barbara transferred to
Oswego (N.Y.) State Teachers' College--a mere thirty five-miles from
Syracuse--for her junior year. The couple saw each other every weekend
until June 28, 1952, when, shortly after Barbara's graduation, they married.
After subletting a one-bedroom apartment in suburban Philadelphia, Barbara
obtained a job teaching second grade in a nearby school and Clark set out to
establish himself at WFIL. Clark would parlay this storybook romance into a
vital component of the "All-American Boy" image he so deftly projected to
his audience, but, unlike most storybook endings of that era, this one would
not find the parties living together happily ever after.
* * *
In 1952, pop radio in Philadelphia was dominated by WPEN-AM (950) and
WIP-AM (610), two stations that, not coincidentally, played a part in the
genesis of American Bandstand. If any program can be designated the
prototype for Dick Clark's legendary dance show, that distinction goes to
WPEN's 950 Club, named for the station's location on the AM dial. Originated in
1945 and hosted by the popular duo of Joe Grady and Ed Hurst, the 950 Club was
the first radio show on which a studio audience was invited to dance to
records being broadcast over the air. The show, which saluted a different
high school each day, quickly became the focus of the area's bobby-sox set,
who, seeking admission, deluged WPEN with two to three thousand pieces of
mail each week.
But the scores of teenagers drawn to the center city skyscraper that
housed WPEN also stuffed mailboxes, rode the elevators, and "created a
problem for the tenants of the building" as they ran wild, recalled Ed Hurst,
who added that WPEN eventually "got kicked out of the building." The radio
station found a new home in a nearby facility that contained a luncheonette
in the front and a dance studio in the rear, an arrangement that pleased
everyone. The 950 Club crowd could now munch on hoagies and hot dogs as
Grady and Hurst spun the top hits of the day, interviewed celebrity guests,
and occasionally allowed the teenage dancers to introduce themselves on the
air and mention the high schools they attended. By the early 1950s it was the
number one afternoon radio show in Philadelphia and was recognized as a
"must" stop by performers making promotional swings through the area.
Hurst and Grady interviewed all the top names in the record business.
The big gun at WIP was local favorite Bob Horn. Born in 1916 (d. 1966) in
Cherry Run, West Virginia and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, Robert L.
Horn attended the University of Michigan before beginning his broadcasting
career in 1938 in Camden, New Jersey. He worked at WIP for a short time
before venturing to California, where he put in a brief stint as a Hollywood
newscaster. Horn returned to Philadelphia after World War II and landed a job
at WPEN, where he developed an evening hour Bandstand show consisting of
current top pop recordings. In 1951 Horn moved his highly popular Bandstand
to rival WIP.
As Grady and Hurst cavorted over the airwaves with the Philadelphia
area's teenage set, and Bob Horn drew large audiences to his radio Bandstand,
WFIL radio remained a loser in the local ratings race. As such, the station
began to eye Horn--considered about town to be the most knowledgable
man on music of the day--to close the gap. "He had the highest rating,"
recalled Jack Steck, "and we decided to hire him."
Steck, who was then manager of programs and production for WFIL-TV,
said Horn was "easy to get because he wanted to get out of radio and into
television, and we were his opportunity." So fervently did the video fires
burn within Horn that he jumped to WFIL even though there were no
immediate television openings at the prestigious TV station. In joining WFIL,
Horn reasoned that when such an opening did occur he would be there to
grab it.
By far the hottest properties WFIL possessed, Horn and his radio
Bandstand were assigned two shifts. But as he bided his time for a shot at
TV, he was unaware that he had been snookered by his new employer. When
the need for an afternoon TV show host arose at WFIL, Horn would be
bypassed for none other than Joe Grady and Ed Hurst.
* * *
It was of no concern to Dick Clark that the music he was ordered to play on
his WFIL radio program was not current and was certainly not aimed at
Philadelphia's "950 Club" crowd. The music be damned. Besides hosting his
daily radio program, Clark was afforded the opportunity to work as a
commercial announcer on WFIL-TV. In addition to Clark's base pay as a disc
jockey he received a fee for each TV commercial he read on the air. Radiating
an aura of equanimity, the boyishly handsome Clark set out to do as many of
them as humanly possible. "I was a great pitchman," he said. "I sold pots and
pans, vacuum cleaners, diamond rings, Mrs. Smiths pies, the works.
Eventually I landed the Schaefer Beer account. I did one hell of a beer spot."
Clark later revealed in his 1976 autobiography that, "It was the commercials
that kept me on the air."
Those close to Clark from childhood were not surprised at how quickly he
recognized the lucrative financial opportunities commercial announcing
afforded, for Clark had demonstrated a relentless proclivity for
entrepreneurship as a youth. The motivation for the boy businessman
apparently had had little, if anything, to do with the trappings that money
could buy, however, and much to do with the inherent satisfaction of
generating his own cash. Not content to draw freely from the family money
dish Clark's mother kept in a bureau drawer, Dickie had opted to earn his own
money.
As a boy, Clark did not have neighborhood friends so much as he had
customers. His activities included publishing a neighborhood gossip sheet
and peddling it for two cents an issue; running a "restaurant" in his family's
home (when the family peanut butter supply ran out, Clark scoured the
kitchen cabinets for old magazines and gum, which he proceded to sell); and
operating a shoeshine stand where customers could have one shoe shined
for three cents or both for a nickel.
Julia Clark said her son was also a compulsive collector who saved
"everything not worth saving." She would periodically clean out his room
only to find the same trash reappear, along with "whatever treasures the
neighbors had thrown away." But what Clark's mother saw as trash her
younger son viewed as valuable merchandise. He held a backyard carnival
and used his cache of castoffs as prizes.
As Clark matured, his propensity to earn money grew stronger. One
reporter wrote that Clark made himself "eminently hirable" while at Syracuse
University, washing dishes in a hashhouse, husking corn, crating chickens,
making frat house beds, and trying his hand as a door-to-door brush
salesman. "He's always been that way," Julia Clark told a reporter in 1958.
"He's always busy."
Indeed, once Clark managed to gain a national television audience of
millions and set out to create his own pop music empire, his seemingly innate
entrepreneurial drive would serve him well.
* * *
Dick Clark and Bob Horn gave each other a wide berth at WFIL. The fact
that Clark, with his fresh, photogenic face, had quickly become one of
Philadelphia's busiest commercial announcers particularly rankled the veteran
Horn, who coveted a television career of his own. Clark, on the other hand,
was solely intent on blazing his own trail and paid Horn no mind.
