“So Long!” Dick Clark (VIDEOS)

"America's Oldest Living Teenager," Dick Clark, shuffled off to the big sock-hop in the sky this past Wednesday. Sadly, we've lost another Amerian icon.

I enjoyed your Dick Clark stories, and songs that remind you of your youth, Thurdsay afternoon with Dennis and Judi.  Your stories are better, and a few degrees of separtion closer than mine, but here goes!

In the mid-90s, I had been working at a Philadelphia radio station for about a year, commuting back and forth from Central Jersey, on a daily basis, when I decided it was more than time to move closer. I ended up just to the south of the city, in Delaware County Pennsylvania.  When the apartment people found out where I was working, that I was a radio "Star," they were very quick to point out that both Dick Clark and Ed McMahon had lived in my very well-known apartment complex in the 1950s.

In the spring of 1997, Dick Clark is opening a restaurant in King of Prussia.  My buddy (the late) Big Ron O'Brien is doing our morning show, and he snags a 2-part interview with Dick.  Ron hands me the raw interview tapes to edit for broadcast.  "Dick Clark's American Bandstand Bar and Grill" lasted a few years. It was chock full of Bandstand memorabilia! Including the studio door from the old channel 6 building in the Bandstand days! My radio friends and I would often gather to talk shop, at "Dick's." Now, I really wish that I had been walking around with a camera, like I do today...

Somewhere in a box, with other radio and media-ralated memorabilia, I have a few Bandstand Grill napkins...with the logo. Thats about all that I have.  In another box, is the 1970s Dick Clark autobiography "Rock, Roll & Remember" (1976) that I read as a kid, and again when I was living in my "famous" apartment complex.  The book is long out of print. I have to start searching...its time for another re-read.

Thanks for the memories, Dick Clark! "So long!"