1. Joe Pyne was an American radio and television talk show host, who pioneered the confrontational style in which the host advocates a viewpoint and argues with guests and audience members.
29 Facts About Joe Pyne
1. 2.
Joe Pyne was an influence on other major talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Morton Downey Jr.
3.
Joe Pyne's father, Edward Pyne, was a bricklayer; his mother, Catherine, was a housewife.
4.
Joe Pyne saw combat in the South Pacific, where he earned three battle stars.
5.
In 1965, at age 40, Joe Pyne married 21-year-old Norwegian model Britt Karin Larsen in Las Vegas.
6.
Joe Pyne worked briefly in Lumberton, North Carolina, before he was hired at a new station, WPWA, in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania.
7.
Joe Pyne moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he was hired at WLIP.
8.
Joe Pyne quickly realized that he wanted more than playing music and reporting on community events like the county fair or a new business opening.
9.
Joe Pyne picked up a typewriter and threw it against the wall.
10.
Joe Pyne called his new show It's Your Nickel, a popular idiomatic phrase referring to the fact that calls from a pay phone cost five cents.
11.
The format was Joe Pyne expressing his opinions on various topics.
12.
At first, Joe Pyne didn't put callers on the air; he paraphrased for the audience what they had said.
13.
Joe Pyne became famous for arguing with or insulting those with whom he disagreed.
14.
In 1954, Pyne hosted The Joe Pyne Show on Wilmington's WDEL-TV, which was only moderately successful and ran for just a few months.
15.
Back in Wilmington, Joe Pyne hosted a daily radio talk show on WVUE and a weekly television companion piece on Friday nights from 11 pm to midnight, both of which aired in nearby Philadelphia.
16.
In early 1959, Joe Pyne worked briefly for Montreal radio station CKGM as a talk show host.
17.
In 1966, Joe Pyne hosted the short-lived daytime game show Showdown on NBC.
18.
In March 1966, the NBC Radio Network began syndicating The Joe Pyne Show, which connected Pyne to an audience nationwide.
19.
Joe Pyne never shied away from having provocative guests on his program.
20.
Joe Pyne frequently invited hippies, homosexuals, and feminists onto his show, and would ridicule their looks and their lifestyles.
21.
Author Donna Halper posits that these guests were brought on the show just so that Joe Pyne could argue with them and rile up his audience.
22.
In one such letter, addressed to FBI director J Edgar Hoover and dated March 1965, the writer stated that Pyne had referred to Hoover as a "flat-foot cop" and made other comments perceived as denouncing the House Committee on Un-American Activities, an opinion backed up by a 1962 FBI internal memo.
23.
In 1965, during the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, Joe Pyne was interviewing a black militant on his TV show.
24.
At one point, Joe Pyne opened his coat to reveal that he was carrying a handgun.
25.
Joe Pyne was a life-long smoker and was rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand, even when on the air.
26.
Joe Pyne stopped his television show after it became too difficult to drive to the studio, but he set up a makeshift studio at home to continue the radio show for a few more months.
27.
The organization Films Around the World owns a collection of over 100 episodes of The Joe Pyne Show and is working with videotape archival specialists to restore the reels of tape.
28.
In 2019, The Film Detective, an organization self-described as "a leading distributor of restored classic programming," published a press release stating they had obtained and restored six hours of footage from The Joe Pyne Show which would be available on their website starting in June of that year.
29.
Joe Pyne was posthumously inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame on November 16,2012.