Big-Band Booster Warren Durham Keeps The Sound Of The ‘40s Alive With Radio Broadcasts, Film Clips And Memorabilia

He has hobnobbed with Mickey Rooney, Les Paul, Rosemary Clooney and Tex Beneke in New York and L.A.

He has a radio show syndicated in 142 cities.

He has a TV show that has been running on cable for 10 years.

He has a large collection of Big Band era film clips and recordings, some of it gleaned from his own broadcasts in the ‘40s.

Yet most people in his hometown of Spokane have never heard of Warren Durham, 72.

“I keep a low profile here,” said Durham. “Most people don’t know what I do. That’s fine with me.”

People of a certain age might remember him as a Spokane broadcasting veteran. In the ‘40s, his voice went sailing through the ether on both KHQ radio and the old KFPY (now KXLY). But in the last 10 years, he has turned himself into a virtual one-man Big Band nostalgia industry.

Take, for instance, his syndicated radio program.

“It’s called ‘Big Band Classics,’ and it got under way about two months ago, and it’s already up to 142 stations, which blows me away,” said the effusive Durham. “It’s a one-hour show, and I have already made 125 of them. In a week, I’ll do 40 more in three days.”

He jokes that the people at his syndicate “put me in a little room and handcuff me to a microphone.”

Actually, he flies to the Portland studios of the Nostalgia Broadcasting Group. There, he does the talk portion of the show, which takes up about 20 minutes of each program. The producers plug in the music later, all from his own recording collection.

“It’s totally ad-libbed,” said Durham. “You can hand me a microphone with no notice, and just like a fire horse, when the bell rings, I’m out the door.”

He also draws upon some of the treasures he had the foresight to save as a young broadcaster in New York and L.A. in the ‘40s. He was an announcer for those late-night Big Band broadcasts from ballrooms, which he calls “the very fuel of the Big Band era.” Between songs, he interviewed the stars, such as Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton.

“Back in those days, there was no such thing as tape, but there were big (recording) disks,” said Durham. “If I was out on a broadcast, I’d call the engineer and say, ‘Lay this down, I think this is going to be good.’

“I went out one time, and there was Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Jack Teagarden on trombone, Barney Bigard on clarinet, Cozy Cole on drums and Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines on piano, every one of them a major legend, all in one place. I knew it probably wasn’t going to happen again.”

So he had it recorded and eventually transferred to tape, and now he can use the interviews with Armstrong on his radio show.

“His collection, and his recollection, are remarkable,” said Dean Gavoni of the Nostalgia Broadcasting Group.

“Big Band Classics,” by the way, can be heard on Deer Park station KAZZ-FM (“K-107,” 107.1) every Saturday night from 7 to 8. The signal covers most of the Spokane area.

That radio project is a brand-new baby compared to Durham’s TV show, “Big Band Days,” which has been airing for 10 years. The 52 episodes can be recycled yearly, “like ‘Gilligan’s Island,”’ he said.

Each one-hour show consists of sofa-and-chair chats with Big Band legends along with rare footage of Big Bands in action.

If you’ve never run across “Big Band Days” in the TV listings, that’s because it was on the obscure Channel America cable network, a network that isn’t even carried in the Spokane area. However, Channel America recently went out of business, and now Durham says he is approaching various stations, including the Public Broadcasting System, to pick up his catalog of shows.

He thinks it would be the perfect show to run either before or after the “The Lawrence Welk Show” reruns on PBS stations.

The celebrity interviews are filmed around the country. In one episode, for instance, he interviews Tony Martin and Gini Mancini (a former Big Band singer and the widow of Henry Mancini) in the Mancini apartment overlooking Central Park in New York.

However, the true treasures of the show are gleaned from Durham’s library of film clips.

“I have the largest library of American entertainment on film anywhere,” he said, and he may be exaggerating only slightly. “I crawled into attics, basements, garages to find these clips. I blew dust off old film cans. It will just blow you away, what I have in my library. There isn’t a celebrity in entertainment that isn’t there.”

His 7,000-plus clips, all converted to video, include everything from musical short subjects, to home movies, to “soundies,” which were the precursors of music videos.

For instance, in one ‘40s Count Basie Orchestra clip, a saxophone player falls asleep in the middle of “Take Me Back, Baby,” only to dream that he is begging his girlfriend to take him back. Only at the end of the song, when the Count shakes the sax player awake, does he realize it was all a dream. Plenty of MTV music videos have thrived on weaker plots than that.

Durham claims to own every soundie ever made.

And, as if his radio and TV projects weren’t enough, Durham also puts together in-person nostalgia shows for hotels and cruise ships. Five years ago, he took Morey Amsterdam and Kay Starr on a cruise to the Caribbean, where they entertained the passengers with stories and songs.

Then in January, Durham and his wife, Lucy, embarked on the Rotterdam, a Holland America ship, from Los Angeles to Hawaii and then on to Tahiti. Durham delivered eight presentations of his lecture and multimedia show, entitled, “When Radio Was King - The Stars of the Big Band Era Who Became Superstars.”

“People were crying and laughing,” said Durham. “I had to stay on stage for an extra hour answering questions.”

The nostalgia weekends at hotels are similar. He promises participants that when they walk into the hotel, it will be “almost like walking into 1940.” He plans to hold one at the Sierra Hotel on Spokane’s Sunset Hill in May. Keep an eye out for an official announcement.

And finally, there’s yet another national gig for Durham: on-air host for the Home Shopping Network. Or, as he calls it, “peddler.” The network hired him two years ago to sell reproduction radios and other Big Band era memorabilia. He said he is now booked for another two-hour stint in early April, and there is some talk of a monthly spot.

“They perceive me as the so-called Pied Piper of 60-plus people in America,” said Durham.

So how did a kid from Spokane end up as a purveyor of Big Band memories?

Radio is the unifying theme of his life. He was born and raised in Spokane and went to Rogers High School beginning in 1938. There, he met a “visionary” drama and speech teacher named Jess Purdy, who started a radio speech class. Durham took the class as a lark and soon became hooked hopelessly on radio.

“I found myself at age 14 announcing after school on Spokane’s four radio stations,” he said. “My voice had matured early.”

He went to Washington State University to major in “radio speech,” but after World War II broke out, he joined the Navy. The Navy sent him to midshipman’s school at Columbia University in New York, where he soon fell into a moonlighting job for the networks. Make that the kind of moonlighting job a music-crazy kid could only dream about. He did the remote broadcasts of Big Band shows from New York ballrooms. People all over the country, as well as soldiers and sailors all over the world, tuned into the broadcasts for cheer during those wartime years.

Durham himself later ended up in the South Pacific, where, he said, “I almost got my tail shot off.”

But he also continued to do radio work, even while still in the Navy, including a stint on the popular Honolulu-based show, “Hawaii Calls.”

When he got out of the Navy in 1946, he came back to the Inland Northwest and worked at KFPY, later KXLY.

“He was a good announcer,” remembers veteran Spokane broadcaster Bob Briley. “He had a good voice and a good delivery.”

From there, Durham moved up to CBS in Hollywood, where he picked up many of his show business connections. An inveterate name-dropper, he still uses the word “pals” to describe people like Jimmy Stewart, Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra.

And, in fact, “pals” is sometimes the correct word.

“Warren’s a real sweetheart,” said Jan Rooney, the wife of Mickey Rooney. “He loves Big Band nostalgia as much as we do. Mickey loves that about him.”

Durham eventually came back to the Northwest, where he bought and sold stations in Yakima, Moses Lake and Spokane. He built the radio station KXXR-FM, which eventually became KDRK-FM.

Somewhere along the way, he started collecting his library of film clips, records and tapes.

“I sensed there was a vacuum,” said Durham. “I got into this by default, because nobody else did it. Then I got so far into it, I couldn’t let go.”

He worked in broadcasting, advertising and marketing for years in Spokane. Today, you might call him retired, except “retired” is the exact wrong word to use for somebody juggling four or five projects at any one time. He juggles all of his projects from his home in a north Spokane subdivision.

“I don’t want to live anywhere else,” said Durham. “Our roots are here; five of our eight grandchildren are here. With the fax machine, the jet airplane and the telephone, I could be under a tent in a cornfield in Iowa.”

And he truly loves what he does. Not only is he keeping alive the music that he loves, but he is keeping alive the memories of his entire generation.

“One lady dropped me a line recently and said, ‘What you have done is give me back my youth,”’ said Durham. “Well, that makes it worth it all.”

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