Burning Up the Air: Jerry Williams, Talk Radio and the Life in Between »

Steve Elman was born in Rochester, New York. In 1972, he began producing "The Jerry Williams Show" for WBZ in Boston and worked with Williams through the end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. During his thirty years with public radio station WBUR, he was host of music programs and became assistant general manager as the station became one of Boston's most important sources of new information. He lives in Brighton, Massachusetts.

Alan Tolz was born in Philadelphia. In 1979, he became executive producer for WWDB-FM in his hometown, where he began producing "The Jerry Williams Show." At WRKO in Boston, he was William's right-hand man during the anti-seatbelt law campaign. He is presently executive vice president and chief operating officer for Marlin Broadcasting. He lives in Bedford, New Hampshire.

At the peak of his influence on WRKO Radio in Boston in the mid-1980s, when he helped repeal a seatbelt law and ran a one man wrecking crew against Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign, Jerry Williams was dubbed "The Dean of Talk Radio." What few knew was that Jerry wasn't merely the Dean, he was also arguably the Inventor. It was in 1957 that the Brooklyn-born talk show host first put listeners on the air at the old WMEX in Boston-after primitive time-delay technology made it possible to bleep callers' naughty words. From then on, while guys named King and Limbaugh were cutting their teeth at the microphone, Williams set standards for the form. He stood up for civil rights when such talk could get you killed, questioned Vietnam long before Walter Cronkite, savaged Richard Nixon while forty-nine state were reelecting him, and put frank talk about sex on the air when Howard Stern was still a DJ.

Authors Elman and Tolz, who produced Williams's shows at high points in his career, had total access to the Dean's files and memories. The result is an enlightening biography that gives readers an inside view of the glories of radio and the pitfalls of fame.

"Jerry Williams changed American broadcasting with the force of his personality . . . He showed me what one man and a microphone can do." -Phil Donahue

"Whether I agreed with Jerry Williams or not, I always considered him a force to be reckoned with, and radio isn't the same without him." -Michael Dukakis

"Night after night, with an equal measure of intelligence and strength and perseverance, Jerry Williams took talk radio to a level that's rarely been achieved."-Roger Ebert

Boston Magazine

This bio (the authors are both former producers for Williams, who died in 2003) makes like quality radio: no cheap superficiality, or lingering on any one point. Fast-paced and crisply written, it succeeds at placing William's rise and fall in vivid historical context. As the host would have wanted, there is no dead air in this show.