Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman, who wrote and performed for Cordic & Co., relax in Hardman's recording studio on the South Side. Hardman is in the process of closing his studio. (Heidi Murrin/ Tribune-Review)

When Rege Cordic ruled morning radio in Pittsburgh, competing stations developed a foolproof method for dealing with his dominance: They battled fiercely for the No. 2 spot behind "Cordic & Company."

John Rook programmed KQV during its Top 40 heyday in the 1960s. He proudly recalled KQV's success, noting that his signal-impaired station outpointed KDKA's 50,000 watts in some ratings. But Rook was quick to add the requisite qualifier.

"We beat them from noon on," Rook said. "I used to say, `Who can possibly do better than God in the morning?' - and God was Rege Cordic."

"Cordic & Company" commanded an 85 share at times during its long run on WWSW and KDKA. That means that of every 100 radios in use, 85 were tuned to "Cordic and Company" - if you weren't plugged into "Cordic & Company," how could you keep up with workplace conversation during the mid-morning coffee break?

"It was amazing to me the audience pull that show had," said Bob McCully, who wrote for the show. "People really lived that show. Someone told me that when R.K. Mellon was still living, they had a board meeting of Mellon Bank and Mr. Mellon started off by asking if they had heard the Cordic show that morning. It reached everybody."

Rege Cordic is pictured 'goofing around in the early days at WWSW,' notes his sister, Pittsburgh resident Martha C. Shanley. 'He did not play the piano!' (Photos courtesy of Martha Shanley.)

For 18 years, "Cordic & Company" was as much a part of the Pittsburgh wake-up routine as Town Talk bread in the toaster and Breakfast Cheer coffee in the percolator. Evidence of its lasting impact came when Cordic died in April, and talk show callers reminisced about their favorite "Cordic & Company" moments. They were able to vividly recall characters and comedy bits from a show that left the local airwaves in 1965.

That's why Karl Hardman, one of the key members of Cordic's company, notes that although there will never be another show, the show isn't over. The legend gets passed down, just like the stories of the 1960 Pirates and Franco Harris' "Immaculate Reception."

Cordic was the leader and straight man in a complex show that created marvelous mental theater every morning. Radio can be the least-complicated mass medium: play music, announce the time and temperature and you're in business. The antithesis of that approach was "Cordic & Company," which had the kind of production schedule and creative workload more often associated with a stage play or television series. The difference was "Cordic & Company" did a new show every day, six days a week from 6 to 10 a.m.

"His success was no accident," said Gil Haag, who worked in KDKA's programming department for part of Cordic's stint. "I was always impressed with how hard they worked day in and day out, perfecting the skits. Once they got off the air, they would work until 2 or 2:30 p.m. every day. There was a lot of sweat equity put into that show."

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Maybe the most amazing thing about the success of "Cordic & Company" is that the show happened by accident. Cordic had the radio bug early and started as a teenager, working as Davey Tyson's junior partner on a kids show from the Enright Theater. Cordic was a regular staff announcer at WWSW when Tyson left for WCAE in 1948. WWSW used its staffers to fill in while it searched for a permanent host for the morning show.

Hardman rustles up some grub as Col. Beauregard J. Cornpone, a character he created for Cordic & Co. (Photo courtesy of Karl Hardman)

Cordic, the third in the series of replacements, had been working in sports, serving as Joe Tucker's understudy. Because the morning show wasn't his and Cordic didn't have a burning ambition to claim it, he bent some rules.

"He used to play with the commercials and would lift voices from them," said Art Pallan, the long-time KDKA personality who started at WWSW with Cordic. "Everything was on discs then. Rege would do funny things with these lines from commercials."

Radio was still the primary entertainment source in American homes. Network programming was prevalent and had an air of starchy formality. Cordic's booming baritone made him sound like the other announcers; what he was saying set him apart.

Years later, Cordic would identify a defining moment: he slipped "East Overshoe University" into a long list of football scores. Instead of taking offense at the kid's freshness, the audience laughed. Cordic became more comfortable unleashing his sense of humor.

"He had some guys who were all very talented," Pallan said. "Instead of lifting things from commercials, they started creating their own character voices. The show grew, and the audience was growing along with it."

Cordic's friend John Whited was the studio organist and began portraying a character called Drigsy. He was also Manuelo, a bandit on the lam, and Horace, an elevator operator. Charlie Sords, another Cordic crony, created the East Overshoe coach whose team never won. WWSW switchboard operator Tecla Marsico became Baby, a sultry-voiced siren.

The show picked up steam when Sterling Yates joined the cast. Yates wrote and voiced some of the show's first enduring characters: Baldwin McMoney, Dad and Quick-and-Easy O'Brien.

In 1952, actress Phyllis Jones of the Pittsburgh Playhouse steered Hardman to Cordic. Bob Trow joined the group around the same time, McCully came aboard as a contributor and Cordic & Company was in place.

Throughout the run of the show, the members had other careers. Yates was an on-air performer who left the program when he got his own shows on KDKA radio and television. Trow worked in the art department at Westinghouse. Hardman designed and built custom furniture. McCully worked in public relations and advertising.

From the start, the writing-team approach was nixed. "None of us agreed with that kind of writing," Hardman said. "With stand-up comedy you can do that - gather a group of clever people and they can throw lines out. This was situation comedy. For it to really work, you need to sit and think about the structure and write it - and then go over it with someone else. Then you begin to hone down. That's what we did."

The unsung heroes were the skillful engineers: Phil Asher at WWSW and Bill Stefan at KDKA. They worked with primitive equipment, yet artfully assembled a seamless finished product. At WWSW, Cordic & Company relied on an Army surplus disc cutter. Tape came later, but Cordic, who was masterful at running the controls, continued to keep a lot of his material on discs.

The Cordic & Company cast was pure Pittsburgh: The performers understood the city, its people and its quirks. "I've always said it was the right group of people working together at the right time," McCully said. "We all came from Pittsburgh. We all had different instincts about these things but we all knew the city, and that was the important thing."

Cordic & Company made the 77/54 streetcar famous. They dubbed it the "Flying Fraction" and noted its daily circuitous path covered more miles than some inter-city Greyhound routes. Cordic & Company created a fake travelogue that opened, "Pittsburgh ... where the Susquehanna and Ohio form to meet the Mississippi ... Pittsburgh ... whose principal export is pickles. ..." Because they were natives, they could poke fun - and they always did it with gentle affection.

"There was never anything cruel or hurtful about the Cordic show," McCully said. "It never made fun of any specific person in a vindictive way." Nor was there anything terribly risque; in his memorial tribute to Cordic, show archivist Jon McGrew noted that the agenda of Cordic & Company never included trying to "get away with" things.

"We never did anything off-color," Hardman said. "The only comment like that Rege ever made was on very cold mornings. He'd say, `Hmm, it's cold out there. Better bring in the brass monkeys tonight.' That was the only piece of `blue' material."

MOVING ACROSS TOWN

Cordic & Company was booming in Pittsburgh's post-war renaissance. Characters like Louie the Garbageman and Brunhilda became household names, and the WWSW audience grew.

A few blocks away, KDKA was trying to modernize. Westinghouse executive Chris Witting came to town to evaluate KDKA, and he ordered local management to get Cordic & Company away from WWSW. In the summer of 1954, the deal was done. Cordic was to start at KDKA on Labor Day.

"It was kind of an unwritten rule then that you wouldn't steal from a competitive station within the same market," Pallan said. "This was the first time I think it was done. He moved to KDKA, and they gave him 50,000 watts to really blossom."

When news of the move broke, WWSW pulled the plug on Cordic & Company.

"Rege really didn't have competition," said longtime WTAE-TV promotions director Dave Crantz. "People weren't doing those kinds of shows, nor did they have the capability of doing them. He was funny and he had real good people with him, like Karl, Bob Trow, McCully and Charlie Sords. They owned the market."

Were Rege Cordic and his zany radio troupe everywhere? It seemed that way; the bus-trolley transfer, above, issued by Pittsburgh Railways Co., carried a plug for the morning show. (Transfer courtesy Martha C. Shanley)

The move wasn't easy. Cordic and his cohorts were not immediately welcomed by KDKA's staff or listeners. The old guard at KDKA was initially dismayed by Cordic & Company's irreverent style.

Hardman said KDKA's chief engineer referred to the new people as "Cordic and his goons." Stefan said there was tension between him and the other engineers because of his association with Cordic's show. Cordic & Company replaced "Ed and Rainbow," which had featured Ed Schaughency and Elmer Waltman. Schaughency moved to afternoons, much to the dismay of his loyal listeners, and Rainbow disappeared altogether.

"That was tough," Hardman said. "The station got bags and bags of hate mail directed at us. The station kept the majority of it from us, which was very wise. Mail like that in that volume is really demoralizing."

But Schaughency befriended Cordic and crew. Within a few years, KDKA recast Schaughency as a newsman, and he harmoniously worked the morning shift with Cordic. The audience adjusted to the transition, and Cordic & Company's ratings and acclaim grew in a golden age Hardman defines as from 1954 through 1963.

Esquire magazine saluted Cordic for "an inventiveness and dedication that is truly inspired." TV-Radio Mirror profiled Cordic in a piece that awed a young broadcaster in Bozeman, Montana.

"I was reading an article about a guy who had all these characters and some mysterious brew called Olde Frothingslosh, the pale, stale ale that had the foam on the bottom," Jack Bogut said. "I thought, `Boy, wouldn't it be nice to live close enough to Pittsburgh to be able to steal some of Rege Cordic's material?'"

Cordic was an inspiration closer to home, too. Mt. Washington native Terry McGovern had the good fortune to land the all-night shift at KDKA in 1965 at the age of 20. He would hand off to Cordic every morning. It was a heady experience for someone who fondly recalled waking at 6 a.m. during summer vacation specifically to hear Cordic's sleepy sign-on over the strains of an ultra-slow version of his theme, "Up a Lazy River."

"He was my idol," McGovern said. "He was who I wanted to be."

McGovern left KDKA for San Francisco in 1969 - and carried Cordic's example with him. "I was inspired by what he did, and I think it made me reach a little bit deeper and try a little bit harder to make radio sound like something was going on that wasn't," McGovern said. "He created theater of the mind like nobody did. I thank him for that. He was truly masterful with his words and images and most of all, his sense of humor."

Cordic's comedy routines were recorded in advance, and Stefan would finish producing them and leave the material organized for the next show. Cordic worked alone in the studio most mornings, manipulating three turntables, tape decks and the control board. Through images and sound effects, Cordic so convincingly created the illusion of a theater with a studio audience that the station regularly received ticket requests.

Everyone who fell under the spell remembers how it happened. Marilyn Eastman, Hardman's partner who would eventually write for the show, had her epiphany on her first morning in Pittsburgh.

"I heard a marvelous profundo voice bantering with the muffled voice of an anonymous complainer who was living in the walls of the studio and didn't like the music being played so loud," she said.

Later, she witnessed the power of the show when drivers pulled off the road during rush hour rather than enter a tunnel - and risk missing the end of a routine.

Rege Cordic, in top hat and tails, was the original poster boy for Olde Frothingslosh. (Photo courtesy Pittsburgh Brewing Co.)

T.J. Escott, a partner in a Los Angeles talent agency, was a student at Carnegie Tech in the early '60s and an avid Cordic & Company listener. Twenty years later, Escott represented Cordic in voiceover work. Escott described Cordic's style as combining, "the intelligence and gentle humor of a Dave Garroway and the zaniness and cutting-edge satire of Ernie Kovacs."

For all the fiction spun by the characters, Cordic was genuine. He would sometimes yawn, he'd lean away from the microphone to check weather conditions and he'd let the listeners know he wasn't any happier about being up at 6 a.m. than they were.

"They were really ahead of their time," Crantz said.

In addition to expertly weaving in and out of the routines and drop-ins, Cordic's other great strength was his literate style and appreciation for language. On the first frosty morning of autumn in 1965, he advised, "It's rather bracing, so have a care before you jump on those cold leather seats in the car this morning." Excellent weather earned the designation of "a champion day." On one tape, he's heard saying, "It's Cordic & Company, here to beef with the vicissitudes of the new day." Records would, "fade into the morning mists." There was subtle word play, like, "This is `Cordic & Company,' resented by KDKA."

Long before merchandising became a big business, Cordic's outer space characters, Omicron and Noodnicron made children's records for RCA. Novelty brew Olde Frothingslosh hit the market every holiday season. Perhaps as a tribute to the remarkable Gracie Allen and her 1940s run for the presidency as the Surprise Party candidate, Trow's character Carman Monoxide mounted a presidential campaign ("Our Man is Car-man") with a whistlestop tour that drew 750 supporters paying $6 each to ride the train. Cordic & Company invented a sport - brick throwing - which had its own magazine, Thud. A crowd of 3,800 packed the Syria Mosque for "Miss Brick Throw Finals and Show" in 1961.

In 1964, actor Lorne Greene had a spoken-word hit record, "Ringo," the story of a sheriff who tried to tame the wild west. Cordic & Company countered with "Bingo," the story of a number-calling scandal tainting western Pennsylvania's favorite indoor game.

There were occasional misses. Efforts to spin the radio show off into television were, "an abysmal failure," Hardman said. Listeners had cast all the characters in their imaginations; they weren't willing to accept them as three-dimensional humans. An ambitious plan to do film shorts for national distribution didn't get far.

But the radio show was a monstrous success, and Cordic's total take was reportedly $100,000, a staggering figure in the early 1960s. The show was KDKA's cash cow, so management rarely interfered, and listeners clamored for more.

Cordic, though, decided that he'd had enough.

MOVING ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Cordic's success had always attracted the interest of other stations, and there were always opportunities available elsewhere. Cordic, born in Hazelwood and raised in Squirrel Hill, had a family of his own and had always declined to leave.

'Good for what ales you'

Oh my gosh, it's Frothingslosh. Olde Frothingslosh started as a mythical product on Cordic & Company, a simple spoof on beer commercials. A short-term member of Rege Cordic's company, Wally Martin of Duquesne, cooked up the idea of Frothingslosh around 1953, when the show was still on WWSW. "Wally invented the character," Karl Hardman said. "He asked me if I could do a voice for Sir Reginald P. Frothingslosh. I said, 'How about Nigel Bruce, the Sherlock Holmes sidekick?' It was Murchison and Cornpone with an English twist. I invented the voice, Wally wrote the first routines. Wally left to go to New York, and Rege picked up and wrote the routines from that point on." Frothingslosh became a real product in 1955 when Pittsburgh Brewing Company cashed in on the craze by slapping new labels on a batch of its Tech beer. Cordic was the spokesman through a variety of themes. It was best known as the pale, stale ale with the foam on the bottom. That, Cordic said, kept evidence off the drinker's mustache. Frothingslosh was only available during the holiday season, and folks bought it for giggles, not the brew. Cordic advised listeners to buy it "by the case or sick pack." It was advertised as being "Good for what ales you" and proclaimed that "Hippity hops make it tops." One year, Frothingslosh bottles came with labels falsely identifying the contents as sake, Chianti, Schnapps and Hop-scotch, the better to impress party guests. Olde Frothingslosh sales slumped, and the label was discontinued in 1982. But southwestern Pennsylvanians are a tradition-loving bunch, and Olde Frothingslosh was revived last year for the holidays.

CBS came calling in 1965. They offered Cordic a chance to move to KNX in Los Angeles. KNX had a sudden need for a morning man to replace Bob Crane, who was leaving radio to star in the new TV comedy series "Hogan's Heroes."

This time, Cordic accepted. The news broke in June that Cordic had signed a two-year contract with KNX. Why did he leave? It depends on who's answering the question. It was probably more than one factor, and there's a list from which to choose:

Acting ambitions. Cordic believed he had done everything he could in Pittsburgh and needed a fresh challenge.

Family ties. His then-wife wanted to leave Pittsburgh.

Show me the money. Insiders hint at a bit of discord within the Company over salaries that exasperated Cordic.

California dreamin'. Cordic had fallen in love with the California climate during a Navy assignment and yearned to move west.

It was a major mid-life decision for Cordic, who was 39 years old. He had been doing a morning show in Pittsburgh for 18 years, and it couldn't get any bigger. While listeners demanded the classic routines, Cordic cringed at the repetition. KDKA made a sizable counteroffer but Cordic had made up his mind.

"That was it, Rege was finished," Hardman said. "He wanted to move on. It had been a long run. He and I were each writing 400 routines per year. Toward the end I was tired, too. Marilyn was writing a lot of my stuff for the show."

It would appear that Cordic saw KNX as a means to an end. Moving to Los Angeles would afford him exposure and proximity to the entertainment business. Maybe there was a Freudian slip in his KDKA farewell - he told listeners his destination was Hollywood.

"He really wanted to be an actor," Stefan said. To support the theory, Stefan pulled from a shelf a tape of Shakespearian readings Cordic had recorded in 1964.

Bob Tracey, who spent 13 years on KDKA, said Cordic outlined his master plan to him during a station social function. "We were sitting there, reminiscing and crying on each other's shoulder," Tracey said. "I said, `Rege, you know that show's going to bomb out there' and he said, `Yeah, I'm pretty sure it will.' So I said, `What are you doing it for?'

"And he said, `To get into the movie industry. I want to get my foot in the door. I've got a firm two-year contract. If it bombs, I've got an income for two years. If it doesn't bomb, I've got a good income anyhow.'"

There were going-away parties and farewell roasts and Cordic's long goodbye was longer than he intended. He wanted to start at KNX in the summer, as soon as Crane left. KNX had billboards alerting commuters to Cordic's arrival. But there was a major hitch.

Said McGovern, "Westinghouse, being the absolute mind screws that they were, found a loophole in his contract and said they weren't going to let him go right now. He went absolutely ballistic."

Instead of leaving in July, Cordic did his last show for KDKA on Nov. 27, 1965. Aside from the personal inconvenience, the additional time in Pittsburgh cost him dearly in Los Angeles. KNX used fill-in announcers to cover the nearly six months between Crane's departure and Cordic's arrival.

That gap was critical in a business as habit-driven as morning radio.

L.A. STORY

Cordic still had part of his Pittsburgh company at KNX. Hardman and Eastman contributed material long distance, as did McCully. Trow didn't. KDKA wanted to retain some of the flavor of the Cordic show, so Trow was hired to continue his characters with Pallan cast as the straight man. Cordic also used Los Angeles talent, including well-known names like Paul Winchell, Pat Harrington and Marvin Miller. The show still had difficulty making inroads in California.

Rook said, "I always said that show wouldn't make it anywhere but Pittsburgh and it didn't. He bombed in Los Angeles."

That's the industry perception. Mention Cordic's name and people marvel equally at his incredible success in Pittsburgh and his inability to transfer it to Los Angeles. Cordic wound up being paid to not work for the final six months of his KNX contract as CBS changed the station to an all-news format.

For 34 years, Hardman has heard that the show bombed in Los Angeles - and he still gets aggravated.

A cast of thousands

Some of Rege Cordic's best friends were figments of very active imaginations. The Cordic & Company morning show featured a cast of characters that evolved over the years and sprang from the fertile minds of Karl Hardman, Bob Trow, Sterling Yates, Bob McCully, Charlie Sords, John Whited, Tecla Marsico and Wally Martin, aided by engineers Phil Asher and Bill Stefan. Here's a look at some of the comedic foils who used Cordic as a straight man during the long run of the show: Louie Adamchevitz: The real-life inspiration for Louie the Garbageman was a guy who worked at the Verona Foundry. Hardman turned the hard-working, genial man into Louie, who became the most beloved of the Cordic & Company regulars. Louie's catchphrase was "Doggone right," his truck was named Catherine and they were once featured in "Better Homes and Garbage" magazine. Brunhilda was 455 pounds of loveliness who found it much easier to enter and leave the studio after Cordic installed a garage door. This was Trow's most popular character, a jolly bundle of cellulite and malapropisms - and the character voice continued to crop up on local commercials until Trow's death last year. Roquefort Q. LaFarge was a Hardman invention, the fussy studio announcer who was always upset with the sub-standard conditions in the announcer's lounge. Carman Monoxide was a Trow alter ego who reflected his creator's love of puns. His signature joke was to call the host "Re Cording." Max Korfendigas was a Trow character, a 90-proof golf pro who always packed a flask with his clubs. Tipsy Max offered basic tips: "Anything with feathers is good, Reger...you know...birdies, eagles." It was like Foster Brooks, only funny. Mr. Murchison was the mean boss devoid of people skills and the desire to develop any. Hardman created him. Screamin' Mad McEldowney was the football coach at East Overshoe U., which hardly ever won. This was Sords' only character. Perriwinkle ("A cross between Red Skelton's Mean Widdle Kid and Edgar Bergen's Mortimer Snerd," Hardman said), orchestra leader Paul Boomer, Granny Goempel and Brewster T. Galsworthy were Hardman inventions. Hardman also took over some of the characters that had been originated by Yates: Casey, the railroad engineer and con man Quick & Easy O'Brien. One character Hardman did not continue when Yates left was Baldwin McMoney, the richest kid on the block. "That was so totally Sterling's character I somehow felt it would not be right for me to mimic the character," Hardman said. Baby was the sexy girlfriend who was always scheming to separate Cordic from his money. The voice was provided by Marsico, who ran the switchboard at WWSW. Changing times eliminated some characters. Aliens Omicron (Cordic) and the Noodnicron (Hardman) were rendered obsolete by space exploration. The voices were created by recording on discs and varying the speed on playback, the same gimmick employed by Trow's Milkman character. Beauregard J. (for Julep) Cornpone was such a loyal a son of the South that he wouldn't walk on Grant Street. Hardman created Cornpone and Trow came up with Corporal Culpepper, who called cadence amid Cornpone's bluster. Cornpone disappeared in the early 1960s when the Civil Rights movement made Cornpone's stubborn loyalty unfunny. "That's when we all agreed we should kill it," Hardman said.

"That's one of the myths that really angers me," he said. "The show did not fail in Los Angeles. We were on it, we know. Too much time elapsed from when Crane left until we took over - much too much time. The station slipped to the No. 12 spot.

"We were only on the air for 18 months. In that year and a half, we brought the station up from 12th to 9th in the morning, which is not very good. But in Los Angeles, where there were 92 AM and FM stations on the air, that ain't too bad either.

"At that point, CBS elected to take all its stations to news, eliminating all other types of programming. That's what ended the show. I'm certain that had we stayed on the air, we would have become the No. 1 show. I have no doubt in my mind."

Crantz said he'd listen to Cordic on KNX during trips to Los Angeles for network meetings and thought the show was undermined by a cluttered format. "It was just a shame," Crantz said. "He was just as good as he ever was - except he had traffic reports, marine reports, water temperature reports, smog alerts. He never had a chance to do anything. It just wasn't the same kind of market."

Former WTAE DJ John Williams, who was working at Los Angeles Top 40 giant KHJ in 1965, gently suggests that Cordic's style may have been about two years too late for a rapidly-changing market.

McCully said Los Angeles was a completely different challenge. Even though Cordic had subscribed to the Los Angeles newspapers during his last months in Pittsburgh, he never had a handle on the city the way he did in his home town.

"Rege said the difference between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles was Los Angeles was like 200 Monroevilles," McCully said. "There was no central core like you had with Pittsburgh. Also out there you had probably 100 stations, and the audience was split in all different directions. It was never the same. The show didn't have the same bite."

Cordic didn't seek another home for his radio show. He used his KNX-subsidized down time to study acting, got an agent and began a 15-year career in late 1967 with small parts on "The Flying Nun" and "The Monkees." He landed character roles in hundreds of 1970s television episodes and often joked that his gray hair had typecast him as "a crooked judge who gets bumped off before the first commercial." He did some movies, Woody Allen's "Sleeper" among them.

There was a brief, inglorious radio comeback in Pittsburgh in 1969. WTAE signed Cordic for a 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. show on Sundays. The Company was complete again, with Trow rejoining after his KDKA show was replaced by Bogut. Some of the material was first-rate but Cordic & Company wasn't going to rebuild its franchise with just one day a week.

"It never went anywhere," Hardman said. "A show like that on Sunday morning just doesn't work. It's a drive-time show when people are busy getting ready to go to work."

Cordic was busy with acting and generally taped the radio show in California, using routines that had been produced in Pittsburgh and shipped west. Cordic abandoned the WTAE show in the summer of 1970 and signed off by calling it, "The end of the Cordic & Company radio career."

Cordic found a niche under the WTAE umbrella by hosting the TV station's Sunday afternoon movies. He took over after the sudden death of drama critic Harold V. Cohen. As a film buff Cordic was perfect for the role; he'd screen the movies, research them at the Screen Actors Guild library in Hollywood, then tape his wraparound segments. The show lasted 11 years and had great ratings, often beating non-Steelers NFL games.

"It was a hot thing," Crantz said. "He did it well. He worked at it, and it certainly was as good as anything they've done on American Movie Classics." Back in Los Angeles, Cordic eventually tired of the grind of auditioning for on-camera roles and focused his attention on voiceovers, a craft that makes its practitioners rich but not famous.

"He made a lot of money at it," Escott said. "There are people who earn in the high six figures and nobody knows their names."

That tradeoff was fine with Cordic, who didn't need or like a lot of attention.

"He was a very private person, almost a shrinking violet, to use that cliche," Hardman said. "He was very internal, and I think that goes along with the writer, the artist."

But advertising people knew him well and used his voice consistently in national ad campaigns. He did cartoon voices for Disney and Hanna-Barbera. It was a great deal for Cordic: he made a bundle and had ample free time to enjoy his grandchildren and pursue his hobbies: art, writing and model railroading. (Trains were a lifelong passion for Cordic, whose father worked on the B & O Railroad).

Despite the finality of his 1970 WTAE signoff, there was a little-known radio comeback in 1981. KRLA, an oldies station in Pasadena, needed a morning man, and Cordic surprised everyone by taking the job. It was not a good situation and Cordic only stayed a few months. He turned the slot over to McGovern, who didn't enjoy it any more than Cordic had.

"I had recommended Rege and Rege took it, after which he called me and said, `Don't do me any more favors,'" McGovern said. "Neither one of us really wanted to be in radio then. We were two used-to-be's."

Cordic focused strictly on his voiceover career and scaled back greatly in later years. He didn't have to pursue work because satisfied clients came back to him. Cordic remarried in 1995 and friends said he was happy and fulfilled.

Still, Hardman hoped he could coax one more return to radio.

"I kept bugging Rege about doing the show again in some special format - certainly not the 6 a.m. to whatever," Hardman said. "When we got together we all talked about missing the forum which radio afforded us. It was a forum from which you could talk about or make fun of situations, our lives, our political arena."

That dream died when Cordic did on April 16, a month short of his 73rd birthday and less than four months after he'd been diagnosed with brain cancer. There were memorial services in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. The local Mass featured a mention of Olde Frothingslosh from the pulpit by the Rev. John O'Toole, a detail which probably would have delighted Central Catholic graduate Cordic.

His friends gathered at St. Mary of Mercy on Stanwix Street. The church is just around the corner from the site of the old Sherwyn Hotel, where the teen-aged Cordic would peer through the glass to watch Davey Tyson work on WWSW. The congregation also included people who had never met Cordic but had fond memories of a Pittsburgh guy who lived his dream and shared the fun every morning for 18 years.

Every character-driven morning show owes a debt of gratitude to Cordic & Company. If he and his associates didn't invent the format, they certainly perfected it.

What Cordic meant to Pittsburgh is perhaps best illustrated by a comment someone made to his sister upon learning of his death. Martha Shanley recounted it in the touching tribute she wrote for her brother: "A dear friend said to me, `My heart is breaking, so why am I smiling? I can never say the name Rege Cordic and not smile.'"

John Mehno is a Baden free-lance writer.

Article posted with author's permission.