Breakfast Special Dave Sposito And Ken Hopkins, Kzzu’s Popular Breakfast Boys, Aren’t Nearly As Crazy As When They’re Off The Air

This story is the second in an occasional series on morning radio drive teams.

The Breakfast Boys of KZZU-FM (The Zoo) are on the air, crying like babies.

Actually, only Dave Sposito is crying like a baby. The other half of the team, Ken Hopkins, is merely trying not to laugh as his partner sobs into the phone.

“I’m so upset,” wails Sposito in a high-pitched voice. “How could you pick the 50 most beautiful women and then (sobbing) leave off someone who really deserved it?”

“Now, now,” said the concerned receptionist at The Star, a tabloid newspaper. “Don’t cry, dear. Who did we leave off?” “(Uncontrollable sobs) Janet Reee-no,” wails Hopkins.

Welcome to the Breakfast Boys’ morning broadcast, where you’ll find such recurring bits as the above-mentioned Crying Man, The Phone Ranger and the great Tom Brokaw hoax.

The Breakfast Boys are the most venerable tradition in Spokane morning radio. It takes only about 12 years to be venerable in radio, which is how long the Breakfast Boys have existed in Spokane. And Hopkins and Sposito as a team get credit for only the last four years, since they inherited the Breakfast Boys name in 1992. Still, they are undoubtedly the best-known morning team in Spokane.

Not always the top-rated team; KZZU-FM’s dance-hit format doesn’t exactly pack in the baby boomers. The audience skews young and female. But the Breakfast Boys are a ubiquitous sight on billboards and buses; as volunteer emcees at many charity and civic events; and even on compact disc, with their collection of on-air bits, titled “Daved and Kenfused.” They even have their own TV show on Saturday nights.

As mischievous as they are on the radio, their listeners might be surprised to discover how normal and down-to-earth they are in person. Sposito, 34, looks like the kind of guy who might anchor the company Hoopfest team (he does). Hopkins, 35, looks like the kind of fit young jogger who plays softball on his church team (he does). Both have children, and their lives are centered around kids and lessons and practices.

Yet these are the same guys who got Dan Rather to threaten them with (legal?) “trouble”; the same guys who got President Bush to say, “This is George Bush and you’re listening to Dave and Ken”; and the same guys who came within a whisker of getting through to President Clinton under an assumed name.

That assumed name: Tom Brokaw.

All three of the above incidents came during Sposito’s run of impersonating Tom Brokaw in 1993. He would call up celebrities using his dead-accurate Brokaw voice and chat for a few minutes before confessing his identity.

Many of these conversations ran on the air (except when the victim requested that it not).

Sposito hooked people such as Katie Couric, Connie Chung, Barbara Walters, Jay Leno, Kathie Lee Gifford, Peter Jennings and Andy Rooney, as well as Bush and Rather.

“It was a great run, and we hit pretty much who we wanted to hit,” said Sposito, whose real voice sounds nothing at all like Brokaw’s. “We were that close to getting Clinton on the phone.”

“I think that’s when the FBI called,” said Hopkins.

“They wanted to do a background check on me,” said Sposito.

Another of their recurring gags is called The Phone Ranger, and it started off by having listeners call in with practical joke ideas.

“They’ll say, ‘My parents are going on a trip to New York. Call them and say that the plane’s overbooked and they have to ride in cargo,”’ said Sposito. “Just little jokes you play on the phone.”

The Crying Man began as a Phone Ranger-type gag when Money magazine picked Spokane as the 281st best place to live out of 300. Sposito called the Money magazine front desk and started crying despondently over the fact that Spokane scored so poorly.

“She was, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,”’ said Sposito. “She was really concerned that I was emotionally ruined.”

Sposito admits to getting a charge out of these kinds of DJ stunts.

“I was talking to my parents over the weekend and I said, ‘When I was in fourth grade, I was doing this and getting into trouble, and now I’m getting paid pretty good money to do it on the radio.”’ Sposito was born in Tucson, Ariz., and spent 10 years in California, but he considers Vancouver, Wash., his hometown. He went to high school there, and then he came to Spokane Falls Community College because his friends had football scholarships there, and he wanted to play basketball.

But he already had noticed something unusual about himself.

“I remember being out late with friends and hearing Dancin’ Danny Wright (a legendary DJ in Portland and Seattle),” said Sposito. “I realized that my friends were listening to the songs, but I was listening for him to talk.”

He was hooked on radio, and he soon forgot about athletics and went into the broadcasting program at SFCC. When he graduated, he was hired by KREM-FM, which soon became KZZU-FM (93 on the dial).

“I was so ambitious, I mean, I was terrible, I was the worst,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “The only good thing I can say is that I just wanted to do everything.

“I would hang out with the morning guys and get ‘em doughnuts and do the lowest form of work. And I think that’s why they let me hang around.”

He gradually moved up into on-air work. He moved to KEZE-FM for a while and then on to a station in Temple-Killeen, Texas.

He was lured back to KZZU-FM in 1986 with the promise of being a Breakfast Boy with Jim Arnold. He Breakfasted with Arnold for two years before both went their separate ways: Arnold to San Diego, Sposito to Colorado Springs.

From Colorado Springs, Sposito went to New York City, where he did a morning show for a satellite radio network that served 45 stations. But before long he was sick of New York, and in 1992 KZZU-FM called and asked him to be a Breakfast Boy once again. He said yes.

Hopkins joined him a couple of weeks later, and the present Breakfast Boys lineup was set.

Hopkins was born in Kellogg and lived in Boise for a time while young. He graduated from high school in Pomeroy, between Pullman and Walla Walla, and then he went to Eastern Washington University, where he studied broadcasting.

“Even in grade school, I would be kind of a radio nerd,” said Hopkins. “I listened to all of the Casey Kasem countdown shows and all of that stuff. I thought, ‘Man, that’s what I really want to do!’ without knowing a whole lot about it.

“I thought it was just a couple of DJs and a bunch of records. I remember walking into a radio station and saying, ‘Who are all these salespeople? It’s an actual business? Wow!”’

He got an internship with KREM-FM in 1983 and was hired by the time it switched to KZZU-FM. He has been there ever since, almost unheard-of consistency in the volatile world of radio.

“It’s the most abnormal run you can have,” said Hopkins. “But a lot of good things happened along the way.”

First he became music director, then assistant program director, and, for the past seven years, program director.

“I think I was just kind of appointed program director because everybody else had left,” said Hopkins, who carries out his program director duties after he gets off the air at 10 a.m.

The Breakfast Boy job came about because Sposito had just returned from New York to take the job, and Sposito’s initial partner proved to be a disaster.

“It was to the point where I was thinking, ‘I’m going back to New York,”’ said Sposito. “But I knew Ken from when I was here before, and we always got along very well.”

“Instead of doing a massive search, we just thought, ‘Geez, why don’t we just try this?”’ said Sposito.

It worked because they didn’t try to play roles; they just tried to be “normal guys, on the radio,” said Hopkins.

“Just by hearing us, our listeners know a lot about us,” said Hopkins. “They call up and feel that they know us.”

In fact, said Sposito, they do.

“That is the real us,” said Sposito.

The partnership was successful from the beginning, despite what they see as a massive handicap. KZZU-FM’s parent company declared bankruptcy in 1990, and the station was up for sale for nearly six years.

“Other radio friends are amazed that we made it through,” said Sposito. “Not only that we didn’t get wiped out, but competed, and many times beat everybody when we had one arm tied behind our backs.”

Now, they have an owner for the first time - KXLY bought the station earlier this year - and they are brimming with confidence.

KXLY already has the Breakfast Boys on TV, hosting “Breakfast Boys’ Saturday Cinema” every Saturday at 8 p.m. on KXLY Extra!

“We’re just a couple of clunky guys saying, ‘Here’s a movie,”’ said Hopkins.

Still, their natural habitat is the radio studio, where they spend every morning running contests (“Where in the World is the Waveblaster?”), giving away prizes to Caller No. 9, and taking one more request for “Macarena.”

Do they like the music they play? The Top 40 playlist is not exactly aimed at 35-year-old men.

“I like some of it,” Sposito said diplomatically. “I like most of it, I guess.”

The fact is, they don’t hear much of it. They’re too busy organizing the commercial playlist, answering the phones, running the contests and preparing their next comedy bit.

It’s a frenetic life, fueled by coffee (Hopkins), Diet Coke (Sposito) and Taco Bell tacos (both).

When you’re a Breakfast Boy, there’s no time for proper breakfast.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos