He did spot reporting of local events, at one time being with the legendary comedy team of Abbot and Costello as they opened the first Baskin-Robbins in Southern California. During a remote with the Harry James Orchestra, he ended up holding film star Betty Grable’s leg on his lap after she injured her heavily insured limb while dancing with a serviceman as a favor. During this time, he was the announcer for various big band remotes, once sitting in with the Stan Kenton Orchestra on the piano. He landed his first professional job in 1948, joined AFRA and a career was born. He also had his own daily show, The Radio Shop, excellent training for what he wanted to do when his time in the service was done.įollowing his discharge, he returned to Southern California and began looking for work in radio. The program used AFR talent to dramatize the week’s news items from home and around the world on a show called News in Review. His job would be to write, act in, direct and produce a weekly news show for the GIs in the area. Luck was with him though, and shortly after arriving at his new duty station, his background in radio was pointed out and he was sent to the town of Kokura to be a part of the Armed Forces Radio team.
On his completion of the course, Jim was sent to Japan as part of the occupation forces. Jim joined the Army in August of that year and after several weeks of training, the military decided, in its strange and convoluted wisdom, to send the student whose math grades in high school weren’t anything to make his parents proud to artillery school, where a good working knowledge of mathematics was essential. However, as happened, in 1946 Uncle Sam had other plans. It was a start and, as far as Jim was concerned, a sure way to the meccas of Los Angeles or New York.
Somewhere around 1944, he managed to wrangle a spot on local station KXLA as a as a piano player on a kiddie show. He was going to be a big-time national network voice. He was determined that was where his future lay, as the man he heard between programs saying “This is the NBC Network” (or CBS, Mutual or Mutual Don Lee). He would spend hours in front of a mirror in the bathroom, because of the acoustics, reading articles from magazines and newspapers, pretending to be the announcer or reporter he heard every night coming through the loudspeaker of the family’s large walnut-cased family console radio. From an early age, he was fascinated by the medium of radio. 23, 1928, in the Southern California town of San Gabriel to James Forrest and Mabelle Rowley French.
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