" The Royal Coachman "
 

Bun Drive In pre 1959
Northern Lights Blvd.

At 6 p.m., the man in the booth put The Coke Show, Anchorage's only rock 'n' roll radio show, on the air. The show, which had been playing from a studio for the previous year, went -- in broadcasters' jargon -- live and remote.

The man in the booth was The Royal Coachman.

"I was scared to death with that (first live) show. If people didn't show up you'd feel like it was a flop," said The Royal Coachman, who off the air answered to the name Ron Moore.

The booth's small electric heater failed to keep its windows free of ice. To see out, Moore had to scrape furiously whenever he had the time.  Worse yet, the cold caused the turntable to spin reeeeal slooow. Between 45s, Moore picked up the chilled turntable and held it over the heater.  For an hour, Moore scraped and thawed and played a string of rock heavies -- Elvis Presley, Bobby Darin, Buddy Holly. In the cars below -- and all over town -- teen-agers snapped their fingers to the beat from their radios.

The Coke Show had become a spot on the map, not just a spot on the radio dial. In the cars, in the parking lot, it was teen heaven.

For a generation of Anchorage kids, The Coke Show was THE event, and the Bun THE place, until both disappeared in the summer of 1970. There were other hangouts, but the Bun had The Coke Show.

Earth angel, Earth angel,
Will you be mine.
My darling dear,
Love you all the time.
I'm just a fool.
A fool in love with you.
-- "Earth Angel," The Penguins, 1954.

Moore ended every Coke Show with The Penguins' love lament. As the song's last refrain slowly faded, dozens of teen-age girls sighed, wishing the song was meant for them. The Royal Coachman was their dreamboat.

Moore developed The Royal Coachman theme not long after he came to Anchorage to work in radio.

"In the '50s and up until the English Invasion, a lot of disc jockeys were what I called 'true personalities,"' he said recently.

Moore invented The Royal Coachman while watching TV in the Whittier hospital, where he was recuperating from a hand injury. The idea came from a movie about a prince and an ad featuring Budweiser's Clydesdale-drawn coach.

"The music of The Royal Coachman took you were you wanted to go," he said. "I didn't want to be limited. That's the way you did things back then."

Moore hit Anchorage with a fashion style that took local teens by storm. He wore gold-lame jackets and ruffled satin shirts with "RC" embroidered on the front. He always drove the showiest car in town.

One of his first cars was a black 1958 Cadillac with painted gold hubcaps and musical notes on the seat covers. On the driver's-side door was "RC" in tall, gold letters. Later he owned a red 1967 Cougar with "Here comes Ron Moore" spelled backwards across the hood so it could be read in rearview mirrors.

Blushing teen-age girls, dressed in tight pink cashmere sweaters and strapless gowns, crowded around Moore during sock hops at their schools or local teen clubs. In their hands, the girls clutched their "Ron Moore Fan Club" cards.

In the broadcast booth, Moore was a rebel. He insisted on playing rock 'n' roll music despite the objections of station managers who didn't believe that rock music could attract advertising dollars.

"In those days you didn't play rock 'n'roll on the radio. I was the renegade," Moore said. "I was the first disc jockey (in Anchorage) to play Elvis. The first to play the Beatles."

The Coke Show was born when Moore got Coca Cola, which sponsored many of the teen dances in town, to sponsor a radio program for teen-agers. Despite the radio executives' misgivings, the seven-day-a-week show drew the largest radio audience in Anchorage for more than a decade.

Mooore now is one of those executives, president of Northern Television Inc. He long ago traded in his flashy clothes for subdued woolen, pin-stripped business suits. A gold belt buckle with the initials "RM" and a small gold bracelet are all that remain of The Royal Coachman. These days Moore hosts a weekly radio program that features Big Band music.

We gotta get out of this place.
If it's the last thing we ever do.
We gotta get out of this place.
Girl, there's a better place for me and you.
-- "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" The Animals, 1965.

Jim Brown and his classmates played that song like it was the national anthem at West High School in 1966.

"We had a jukebox in the lunchroom and we played it endlessly. We felt trapped here. Music was our link to the Outside," Brown said. "I thought there was more to life than Anchorage. I thought if it was OK here, it must be real good someplace else."

For most of the 1960s, Anchorage had three high schools, two television stations, two movie theaters and four radio stations. Television showed weeks- old programs. New movies were months in arriving.

There was one road in and one road out of town, much narrower than they are today. Within the much smaller city limits than exist today, local teens found room to carve up the town into cliques -- greasers, soches, basies and in-betweeners.

Greasers were "car goons and piston heads," Brown said. "They'd wear those Cuban-heeled boots." They lived in Sand Lake and out on the back stretches of the Seward Highway, what's now called the Old Seward Highway.

Soches (a term derived from society) came from the west end of town -- Junior Achiever types. Basies were the military brats.

Brown and a group of classmates were in-betweeners. Calling themselves "The Rowdy Boys," they were as close to teen militants as Anchorage had in the 1960s.

They rebelled by going to school games, filling a Kotex box with popcorn and passing it around in the bleachers. They acted radical by trying to sneak long hair past school authorities.

"The principal and Bernie the Butcher (vice principal Bernie Warren) used to actually stand in the hallways and make sure your hair wasn't getting too long. You couldn't have a mustache and your shirt tail had to be tucked in."

Anchorage's isolation-spawned innocence also served as insulation from the political upheaval, student unrest and drugs that had begun shaking apart the rest of the United States. It was as if the 1960s had been put on hold and the 1950s extended.

Brown still lives in Alaska. He left for a while, but he came back.

Well I'm not braggin' boys, so don't put me down,
But I've got the fastest set of wheels in town.
When someone comes up to me he don't even try,
He says 'Is that a set of wings, man, I know she can fly.'
-- "Little Duece Coupe," The Beach Boys, 1963.

Even in the 1960s the local road warriors "cruised the gut" -- Northern Lights Boulevard. They do today, too, but back then there was no Benson Boulevard, just the narrow, two-way Northern Lights. Drivers circled along it from Spenard Road to the Seward Highway and back, each time passing the Bun.

The original Bun stood on the site of what is now the Office Lounge. A bigger Bun, with 311 parking spaces, was built in 1964 on the next block east.

The Bun was a real drive-in, complete with carhops -- girls with nicknames like "Putt Putt," who wore red pants, white shirts and red lip stick. Occasionally they dumped food in your lap. They didn't wear gloves, even in the coldest weather. It just wasn't cool. They didn't wear jackets, either. They didn't want to cover their shapes.

The carhops and drivers were actors in the Anchorage-style street theater. The director was the man in the booth.

Teen-agers would roar down the strip and blow their horns when they passed the Bun, knowing that Moore, or disc jockeys who later replaced him, would respond by blasting an air horn and send the cruisers' names over the airwaves. Some of those names were conferred by Moore, titles to match their cars. Guys like GTO Joe and Tommy T-Bird became big wheels.

Nobody simply drove to the Bun -- they made an entrance. Drivers would scream into the lot, slow down at the "action microphone," then peel out. The microphone sent the sound of spinning tires to listeners all over Anchorage. The traffic got so fast that the Bun's owners had to install the city's first speed bump in the parking lot.

"It was prestigious to cruise the Bun in a nice rod," said Jim Tryck, Save I Class of 1970. "If you were in a hot car you made a lot of noise. You wanted attention. If you were in your folks' car, you'd just go quietly and park the car and get out."

Like everyone else, Tryck cruised the Bun while listening to The Coke Show. He looked for parties and someone to buy beer.

He also eyed the girl of his dreams, Marti, and later married her. They have three children, including a 15-year-old daughter. They listen to the same music, except when she puts on The Clash.

This song goes out to Bobby dedicated from Jill.

If he won't dance and run around she knows his brother will.

-- "The Dedication Song," Freddy Cannon, 1966.

If high-schoolers were the stars of The Coke Show, junior high students were the supporting cast. They weren't old enough to drive to the Bun, but they participated from home, phoning in dedications.

"I would call in like everybody else from Wendler Junior High," said Janie Leask, "Of course, nobody really identified themselves."

Not even Leask, who was a cheerleader at East High until she graduated in 1966. These days the 36-year-old Leask is president of the Alaska Federation of Natives.

"Everybody listened to the Coke Show," said Jeff Gonnason, West High Class of 1969. "(It) was boss radio back then ... See, all the others were real middle of the road ... playing a lot of Burl Ives stuff.

"I couldn't have it on when my dad was eating. Said it messed up his digestion or something like that. He couldn't eat to anything with a beat."

Gonnason, now 34 and an optometrist, can afford all the radios he wants.

"The Coke Show was just one of those things that were part of life back then. When I think of the good old days, that's what I think of."

You can rock it, you can roll it.
You can stomp and even stroll it.
At the Hop.
Hop. Hop. Hop.
"At the Hop," Danny and the Juniors, 1958.

"You know, kids danced back then. They danced all the way through the '60s," said Betty Poeschel.

Poeschel ought to know. She worked at record shops from the time she arrived in Anchorage in 1959. In 1965, she opened her own store, Betty's Record Den. Teen-agers would hang out at her shop, sitting in tall, glass booths to listen to records. Poeschel sold 45s for $1.

"You had to know how to order 45 records back then. I mean the Beatles, gosh, I ordered the Beatles from Seattle by the case."

But when the Beatles stopped over in Anchorage in 1965, Poeschel said, they never left their hotel rooms. They snubbed the fans who gathered outside the Westward (now the Anchorage Hilton), hoping for a glimpse of the Fab Four.

"They never gave the attention to the fans that I felt they should have," Poeschel said.

In the crowd the Beatles snubbed were teen-agers with the same dream four guys from Liverpool once had. Just about every teen guy played in a rock 'n' roll band. Poeschel said she counted 30 bands at one point.

The bands gave themselves names like The Nomads, The Shandels, The Profits, The Johnson Brothers and The Outlaws. Even The Quarrymen, a name John or Paul would have recognized.

They imitated everybody -- Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, The Kingston Trio, The Beach Boys and The Beatles. They wrote volumes of their own music and recorded it in makeshift basement recording studios.

The bands sometimes played on the roof of the Bun, alongside the booth. They also performed at local teen night clubs such as Shindig City, The Royal Pad and The Cinnamon Cinder.

Boosting Anchorage's music were Moore, Poeschel and her husband, Pretz. They operated Pacesetters, a non-profit group, from 1965 to 1969. Pacesetters managed many of the bands, sponsored countless dances and promoted dozens of rock concerts.

But by the late 1960s, dance fever had cooled. Poeschel blames experimental rock.

"By the end of the 1960s, you'd have a concert and they'd (teens) would sit and listen," she said. "What happened to the Pacesetters is the kids stopped dancing."

There's something happening here.
What it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a gun over there.
Tellin' me I got to beware.
-- "For What It's Worth," Buffalo Springfield, 1967.

"Are you kidding? Are you kidding? It was like meeting Dick Clark. It was just awesome. It was like meeting God," said Frank Kennedy. The year was 1968. Kennedy was 17, an East High student, and an aspiring deejay when he met Ron Moore.

Moore helped Kennedy cut an audition tape. Seven tapes later, Moore hired Kennedy to work at KENI radio, the station that aired The Coke Show.

While other deejays briefly hosted the Coke Show -- Jim Cannon, G. Morgan S., Jerry Rose -- Moore and Kennedy are remembered best.

In 1968, Moore handed the booth over to Kennedy, who used the radio name Jerry Valle.

"Well, I mean, here I'm not even a senior in high school and yet, here I'm hosting the number one station in the state," Kennedy said.

But times had changed. The 1967 Summer of Love had passed, acid rock was in. Teen-agers bought albums instead of 45s and disc jockeys were playing "album cuts" on the air.

"Things weren't so carefree anymore," he said. "Lots of guys were still dying in Nam. There was the riots in Chicago in '68, the Yippies. The militant underground was really starting to surface."

Anti-war sentiment caused the demise of a long-running local teen TV dance show, The Varsity Show, said Gene Shedlock. Back then, Shedlock hosted that show, and for awhile The Coke Show, under the nom de broadcast of G. Morgan S. The teen-agers wanted to hear protest songs, station management didn't want them played and The Varsity Show left the air.

But it was the politics of money and style that ended The Coke Show.

"I was probably responsible for the demise of The Coke Show," Moore said.

In the late 1960s, KENI radio executives decided to change the station's format to more adult music. Outraged, Moore defected to a rival station with several other KENI disc jockeys in tow.

From there, Moore sought to knock KENI off its ratings perch. He succeeded. He said that without the number one slot, Coke and other sponsors left the show.

Progress, 1970s-style, also had a hand in pulling the show from the air. The Bun's owners, Ken and Bobbie Haynes, decided to build a mall in the Bun's place.

"You should have heard the people when we took the (Bun) sign down," said Bobbi Haynes. "They said 'you can't do that -- that's a landmark.' "

But the sign came down. The cars stopped cruising the parking lot. The Coke Show was heard for the last time in July 1970.

Kennedy, 35, still works as a disc jockey on KFQD's evening shift. Like many kids who grew up in Anchorage, he left for a while then came back. Looking back, he says that life was different here for teens. Here, he says they got to be carefree longer than elsewhere.