Mac

By Frank Absher

His nickname was Mac, and everyone who worked with him called him that.

To the people on the other side of the radio, he was known as John McCormick, the Man Who Walks and Talks At Midnight.

And he was a character. I wish I’d had a chance to really get to know him, but Mac was a very private person.

I know he had a Harley and he loved to ride it. Someone once told me he also had a Corvette.

Nothing would have surprised me. Mac was the embodiment of the way radio used to be and should be.

He was class – all the way: pencil-thin moustache, silver hair perfectly coiffed, well-dressed (with a very expensive overcoat and matching ascot when it was cold.)

And this guy had pipes, but that wasn’t all. He was very, very intelligent. Unlike the young announcers who began to surface in the late ‘70s, this man would no more be content to read liner cards than he would have been to bale hay. When he spoke, you believed he really know what he was talking about.

And he was worldly. Lord knows how he came by this, but all one had to do was listen to his reading of temperatures and conditions from cities around the globe. You’d swear he’d been to every city.

Three wonderful memories stand out about Mac.

Those of us who worked in the newsroom while he was on the air quickly became accustomed to fielding calls from all of his groupies, who, it seemed, were scattered all over the country. Mac was happily married, but he gladly took the calls from the admiring women.

One night I answered the phone while Mac was talking and a woman with a very sophisticated Eastern accent said she didn’t want to bother Mr. McCormick but asked if I would deliver a message to him. She said her name was Margaret and when she gave him her phone number she forgot the area code, 212.

I humored her and went into the studio. “”Mac,” I said. “Were you just talking with a woman named ‘Margaret?’”

He had been.

I told him about the area code and he immediately got out a little black book and entered it beside her name.

The second memory is a perfect example of another thing that has been missing from radio for a long time. He had a great sense of humor about himself. Mac was supremely confident, but he was not egotistical.

He would walk into the newsroom to get ready for his shift, carefully smooth his silver slicked-back hair and announce: “Hello, boys. The Man is here.”

God, how I loved that guy!

And the third memory is something I only learned about after his passing.
On Christmas Eve during my first year at KMOX, Judy Simms, the titular program director had royally screwed up and failed to tell John his music shift would start at midnight, after all the taped seasonal programs ended. In his mind, the shift would begin at 2:00.

I was getting ready for the 15 minute midnight news break and it was getting a little tense because Mac hadn’t showed up. (To compound the problem, he was the only one with a key to the music library.)

I stretched the news as long as I could while the news writer on duty (Tom Dehner) frantically tried to reach Mac by phone. It soon became obvious that we had no programming once the news ended, so we made the decision to go with talk programming. I’d never hosted such a show before. We had no producer, which meant the engineer would have to answer the phones.

Somehow, we pulled it off, and the airwaves were soon filled with callers remembering their favorite Christmases and talking about what they were doing up at that hour (food preparation, bicycle assembly, etc.). We had really hit a responsive chord with all the listeners.

Unbeknownst to me, Mac came into the newsroom about 1:15, and after Tom told him what had happened he made a beeline for the stairs to head up to the record library. But Tom told him to wait…and to listen.

As Tom Dehner later told me, Mac sat there for awhile and listened to the on-air banter. He smiled, turned to Tom and said, “You know, the kid’s all right.”

I wish I’d known this when Mac was still around. I’d love to have shaken his hand once again to thank him.

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