Richard Lavigne

He was the first radio personality I ever met, and I was so excited, I thought I would pee.Very few people probably remember him, but before there was a Paul Harvey, there was Richard Lavigne.
I was about 10 years old when I first met him. My mother worked at the Holyoke Daily Transcript, and had met him before. Richard was the voice of Holyoke radio. He was always on our radio, the old brown bakelite thing that sat on the kitchen table. So one day, I went with my mother to Newberrys department store on High Street for something. There was a big popcorn machine in the front of the store, and in front of that popcorn machine, I first met Richard, the owner of the voice on our radio at home. Richard was a diminutive man, but I remember looking up at him. My mother said, " George, this is Richard Lavigne." I think I broke into the Ralph Kramden humina, humina, humina stutter when I met him. I remember he was wearing one of those ties like a shoestring wrapped around his neck, and clasped in the front with a medalion of some sort. He always wore them, never a normal tie.
I don't know why it was such a thrill for me to meet this man, years later, I would work with on the radio. Why do we remember things from so long ago, so precisely, that we know where we were standing, or who we were with when we met someone. Richard never pronounced his last name the standard way, like Lavine. He used Lah-ving-yay. I never knew why. He was a curious little man who knew every person in the city, every thing that was going on around town at any time, and most importantly, he had a mind like a vault. He rarely forgot anybody or anything. Let me say here that when I worked at WREB radio, it was a talk show format, the first in the area, so there was no music. You relied on callers to get you through your show. If nobody called, well, you had to be prepared to talk about anything for as long as you could or the dreaded "dead air" thing would happen. When you got to the point of not having a clue of what to talk about, you asked Richard to come in the studio. After all, he was there all day every day doing whatever it was he did.
When Richard came into the main studio, all you had to ask him was what's new. Bam.. You were all set. This man was amazing. He just went, and one thought led to another, and that thought to another, and he never failed. He did a half hour news cast from 8:05 AM till 8:35 AM every day and just talked. No sound bites, no guests, one 2 minute break, and he never had enough time to finish.
Probably my best friend ever in life is a guy I met through that radio station, Jonathan Evans. WREB was a daytime only radio station, so in the summer months, the station could stay on longer, so the owner, Joe Alfano hired a girl named Chris Plasse, and on those summer nights, she hosted a show titled, "Personals of The Air", a talk show where callers used CB handles when they called in, as the CB craze was in full force during those days in the late 70's. I listened to that show every night. I never called, but I got hooked on it. Jonathan, a.k.a. Chip, called all the time, and he became such a good caller, Joe hired him for his own show. I met Chip at a little tiny mall in Holyoke during a "live" show that nobody was listening to, and we became friends.About a year later, I got hired at WREB. The place Richard Lavigne worked! During my first week, Chip showed me around, gave me the do's and dont's of the place, and one of the dont's was.."Don't watch Richard when he does his news". I thought that quite odd, as Richard did his news every half hour, then the 8:05 half hour news cast, then the 12:30 extention of the 8 O'Clock news, (I swear, that's what he called it), so why can't you look at him? Phobia? Nervousness? No. Polident. Yup, Polident. Richard had false teeth, and a bizaare life style do to illness that caused him to eat breakfast at 5PM or supper at 2 AM, and he slept strange hours, so when he did his half hour news blocks, it was commonplace for him to lean on his elbow, talk, and start to close his eyes. He did this all of the time, and he was never aware that all of that talking would make him drool. A puddle on the counter under his mic was what Chip was referring to. A puddle of Polident and saliva. Ergo, nobody looked at Richard when he read the news. One day, a flourscent bulb burned out in the news room while he was on the air. He talked for 15 minutes about that bulb, and he made it interesting.
Richard drove around in an old brown Buick, emblazoned wit a licence plate that read,"AM 930" the frequency of the station, and his travels would take him to some daily or weekly stops for news of the community. One of those stops was a visit to an area hospital, for a medical news update, or something like that, that he thought might be interesting. After one of these hospital visits, I was on the air when it came time for Richard's updates, and he started to talk about patient proceedures in the hospital. Richard just had some notes. On everything. He never read news verbatim, he just expounded on his notes, and I must say, there were times he would ramble, and I think just make stuff up because he thought it was interesting. So he's going on about the hospital and starts to go into a story that he"thinks" is based on facts, but he can't reveal his sources, (of course),and that doctors and nurses at this hospital allow folks to die if they believe it is in the best interest of the patient. They ignor the patients. The hospital was listening and every phone in the studio lit up. WHAT THE HELL IS HE TALKING ABOUT??? The station owner came racing into the studio from lunch. I was sitting there with the monitor off as usual, but the reel to reel tape recorder was running. Joe ripped the tape off of the machine and told me that tape never existed. I said OK.
Then the Transcript Newspaper called, and the 163rd call from the Hospital administrators. It was a nightmare. Richard's response? " I was only reporting the news". It was a rare occurance, and one of the few times the owner went on the air to apologize to a large organization for what surely was," factual error".
Richard was at that station for years, once getting fired for some other infraction, but the public outcry for his return was so enormous, he was hired back, something inconceivable today.
He never missed a day unless he was very ill. The diabetes he suffered with for years with finally took it's toll, and on a cold January morning in 1986, Richard's voice was forever silenced. There's nothing to be found of him on the net. Except for Mike Dobbs "Out of the Inkwell" blog, you can find few references to that great Holyoke station. I don't even have a picture of Richard. Just some old tapes of he and I chatting it up on the air, or him breaking into the studio one morning to tell the audience Reagan had just been shot. Richard coined the phrase, "The best little town by a Dam site", a reference to the dam between Holyoke and South Hadley.
When he finished his daily broadcasts, he would always tag the last one with this: "Untill tomorrow, God Willing, this is Richard Lavigne, hoping you all have a pleasant evening, and a better tomorrow".
Thanks Richard. God Bless you Richard. You were and always will be the radio voice of WREB.