Click HERE to download the BAA Alton Irwin Aircheck Tribute from MediaFire. It’s 2 hours and 30 minutes of personality radio for your ears!
March 9, 1951-April 30, 2022

Click Here To Download the Tim Byrd Aircheck Tribute from MediaFire. It’s 2 hours and 47 minutes of ear candy!
August 14, 1953-January 27, 2022

BAA is proud to present the Mark Driscoll Aircheck Tribute, an hour and 40 minutes of crazy radio candy! It can be downloaded from MediaFire HERE. 

Here is the Floyd Wright Aircheck Tribute. Thank you to everyone that contributed to it, especially his wife Susan Wright, and the always awesome Pete Salant.

May 26, 1950-April 30, 2023
 Download from MediaFire HERE.

Here is the Don Bombard/Bob Shannon Aircheck Tribute. It runs over 4 hours long. Thanks to everyone that contributed, especially his wife Connie Frances and his best friend, Bobby Jay. 

Click HERE to download from MediaFire.

Big Apple Airchecks is proud to present an Aircheck Tribute to the one and only, Duane “Supersnake” Weaver. In 2023, he did a site intro for us, which is included in the tribute. Thanks to Steve Goddard, Mike Abrams, Paige Nienaber, Rick Thomas, Dena Yasner and Paco Lopez for their remembrances. 

It runs 30 minutes and can be downloaded HERE from MediaFire.

Ron Britain was one of the most popular and influential Chicago radio personalities during the
1960s through the 1990s with a unique and wildly creative style which included his own voice,
an avalanche of sound effects and a huge pre-recorded cast of characters and audience. Known
to his fans also as “Ron Britoni”, “King B”, and “America’s Psychedelic DJ”, his real name Ron
Magel, born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1934. Radio was his life and he loved the theater of radio
and characters he created. Ron saw his shows as “theater of the mind” which provided the
sounds for listeners to visualize and experience. Perhaps this is why he is still so loved by his
radio audience, they were not just listening instead they were experiencing radio.
As a child, he broadcast a low-range AM signal from his bedroom down to his mother listening
in the kitchen to his “interviews” with character voices and de rigueur time, temperature and
news information. At 14, he was a local TV celebrity on the teen show “High Varieties” on
WHAS. He continued his radio career throughout his teen years in Kentucky and West Virginia
when he was drafted and joined the TV & Radio Group in the Army at Fort Monmouth at
WFMT-TV and WLBS-AM.

I am the son of Ron Britain and my mother Peach whom he met in 1958 while in the army.
They returned to West Virginia but soon moved to Cincinnati in 1960 where I was born and the
name “Ron Britain” was first used. In Cincinnati on WSAI-AM, Ron was a radio phenomenon
gaining as much as a 72% share of the radio audience. In 1964, Ron joined the WHK-AM “Good
Guys” as Rock & Roll blossomed and Ron’s circle of musical friends expanded to include The
Beatles, The Rolling Stones and others. In collecting the midwest’s top talent, WCFL Program
Director Ken Draper brought Ron Britain to Chicago where he became a radio institution for the
next three decades.

Ron’s raucous wall of sound and cast of characters on the weekday evening “Ron Britain Radio
Program” was compared to a cross between Bob & Ray and Fellini and introduced listeners to
characters like the guitar-twanging weatherman Rex King, station custodian “Cleo”, sage “Sam
Bird”, and regular bits like Marco Marcoco, Say-A-Song, The Green Hairnet, Fat Man and Robin
Birdlegs, random Christmas and Valentine’s Day greeting calls, and stand-along comedy bits as
well as collaborations with his friend and Production Director Dick Orkin such as “Amazon Ace”.
The Ron Britain Radio Program was very much a collaborative effort with talented engineers
including Al Urbanski, Dave Scheusler, Louis Sabatini and others who contributed to the
dynamically volatile show. The laughter and chaos was infectious.

In contrast to the wild weekday program, Ron’s Sunday evening “Ron Britain’s Subterranean
Circus” was more “serious” which Ron felt showed the “proper respect” to the musicians. The
tone was a precursor to the laid-back “FM progressive rock” sound and the music highlighted the newly emerging and evolving longer “album cuts” which were not getting airplay in top-40
rotation. Here, he introduced the audience to hear new artists such as Janis Joplin, Jimi
Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, the James Gang, and countless
others with a strong support for Chicago bands. Many in the audience were local musicians
such as the band Chicago, the Flock, Rotary Connection, Electric Flag, the Mauds and others
who said they were influenced musically by the show. For Ron, it was as much about providing
a forum for “the music his friends made” as the music itself.

After WCFL, Ron did the morning show at WIND, then continued ground-breaking radio moves
by being the first major personality in Chicago to jump to FM on WLS-FM (then WDAI). He
continued to introduce new characters such as staff announcer Thomas Perfect, traffic reporter
Dan Thorsen, and bringing more of his audience into his bits and also expanded his creativity
with more technically complex bits including his live voice interacting with multiple tape-
recorded characters – all Ron. Usually, these were quickly prerecorded during a music break but
displayed his impeccable professional sense of timing. The audience was “inside” on his bits
and often participated including an April Fool’s Joke of a whale washing up on the Oak Street
beach which the audience then joined in calling in eye-witness reports — a bit which bothered
the general manager when the GM’s wife unwittingly drove to see “the whale”.

Ron expanded his audience in tape syndication in the 1970s and was also the first top DJ to
broadcast nationally via satellite on the Satellite Music Network. During the 1970s, Ron
returned briefly to Cincinnati at WKRC before coming back to WCFL-AM in 1978. In 1984, Ron
joined Chicago’s Oldies Station, WJMK aka Magic 104. Here, in 1992, he pulled off another
radio first by switching stations to WTMX by surprising the WJMK management by ending his
show and signing off with “a long song”, racing down the elevator to an awaiting limousine
which brought him to WTMX in time for him to pick up the outro to the same song and
continue his career at a new station in Chicago. Radio insiders laughed with him at this major
stunt. His career was perpetually fraught with arguments with management who did not fully
understand nor support his wild and unpredictable creativity on the air. But the sales
departments loved him, as did his audience who still reference phrases and comedy bits from
Ron’s program.

Off the air, Ron was a contrast to his on-air personality. He was quiet, somewhat shy and
gracious yet constantly joking and entertaining. Ron and Peach, my parents, retired and moved
back down to Louisville. They travelled the world, he continued to express his creativity in oil
painting which was a life-long passion, perhaps his greatest passion after radio — collecting and
designing his own suits and jackets which filled a 35’ x 25’ closet complete with an elevator
which was his refuge.

In October 2020, after my mother suffered a sudden fatal brain bleed, my father was inconsolably sad, as was I. Six days later, the night before her funeral, his aorta
burst and he died, of a true broken heart. His legend and influence lives on.
In his collections, were over 3,500 radio carts which he had used over the years as sound effects
and voice drop-ins which were hallmarks of his unpredictable radio programs. Also in his
collections were several reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes and CDs which had escaped his periodic
“tossing out” of hundreds of other tapes. I am pleased and thankful to Matt Craig at Big Apple
Airchecks who has begun to transfer those recordings to digital so that others may again hear
what made Ron Britain famous. Hearing them has made me laugh, along with my father, and
smile at his enduring creative entertaining and radio comedy.

Big Apple Airchecks is proud to present the Ron Britain Aircheck Collection presented to us from his son, Mark Magel. Below are links to download these airchecks from Media Fire.

WCFL 6/20/67 US 54m

WCFL 8/26/67

 WCFL 1968 23m

WCFL as Professor Showbiz and Tab Mathis 1966

and Tab Mathis 1966 10m

WCFL as Rex King The Happy Hippy 1968 28m WCFL into Barney Pip 1/28/67 1h 2m

 WCFL The Subterranean Circus 5/31/70 1h 5m 

KCMO 4/30/74 US 34m

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