John Nebel

Using the name "Long John Nebel," he was one of the pioneers of talk radio shows that amplify listener phone calls for a wide audience to hear. Engineers working for the Nebel radio show used a new piece of technology called a "broadcast delay" in case a phone caller used foul language, confessed to a crime or other behavior that could get the station in trouble with the Federal Communications Commission. Based in New York City, Nebel was preceded by another New York local radio talk show host who had amplified listener phone calls, but Nebel was the first to discuss a wide variety of topics such as flying saucers, whether television comedian Jackie Gleason had the right to express his many political opinions to the public, the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald and American involvement in Vietnam. The first New York radio station that carried Nebel's show, WOR on the AM band, could be heard more than a thousand miles away from New York because of the tendency of AM station signals to "skip" over long distances in the middle of the night. In addition to radio listeners on the phone lines, Nebel had conversations with guests who joined him in his studio five nights / early mornings a week, sometimes six. Guests included Malcolm X, who visited Nebel's studio at the WNBC station in 1964. The radio station(s) (on the AM band) in New York City and elsewhere that broadcast Long John Nebel's show varied between 1954 and his death in 1978. In 1972, the show became more "CIA conspiracy-oriented" because during that year Nebel married a former model named Candy Jones who had been a World War II pin-up girl, and she consistently told radio listeners that the CIA had brainwashed her during her modeling career and sent her on a secret mission. A book that reported her story was bought by the movie studio 20th Century Fox for a movie project in which Jane Fonda expressed interest, but it was aborted. WOR no longer carried Nebel's radio show. Despite publicity that Nebel was getting in national magazines, his show was broadcast between 1972 and 1977 by one station, New York's WMCA, which had a relatively short broadcasting radius compared to WOR. So the phone callers who got on the air starting in 1972 consisted mostly of insomniac eccentric New Yorkers, many of whom commented or expanded on the CIA-conspiracy-oriented stories that were told by Candy Jones, who now co-hosted the show with Nebel. In 1977, the Mutual Broadcasting System began circulating Nebel's talk show to AM radio stations nationwide. This might have enhanced Nebel's career to the extent that he could have become the first American media personality to discuss virtually any topic while phone callers waited on hold to join him without fear of censorship, a role for w hich Larry King became notable later in the 1970s. As King did, Nebel could have paved the way for a basic-cable TV news-oriented talk show that amplified phone calls from viewers throughout North America. Sadly, this was not to be. Shortly after the MBS began circulating Nebel's radio show throughout North America, his health deteriorated from cancer. He died on April 10, 1978, several days after his last visit to the New York radio studio for hosting his show. Although Candy Jones hosted the show by herself after his death, officials of the MBS decided to replace her with the much-younger Larry King, who until that time had a radio talk show that was only accessible in the vicinity of Miami, Florida. Less than seven years after MBS officials hired King to broadcast the all-night radio show from a studio in the Crystal City section of Arlington, Virginia, CNN hired him for basic-cable television, and he became more visible on a regular basis than his interviewees. Less than ten years after Long John Nebel's death, many viewers of Larry King Live (on CNN) did not recognize Long John Nebel's name or know he had existed, nor did they know who the widowed Candy Jones was, though she worked as the "health and beauty editor" at WMCA until shortly before her death from cancer in 1990.