Tuesday, April 20, 2010

On Parr



A veteran of five years in radio, Mr. Parr joined the staff at WRTA in the spring of 1965,coming here from WKVA in Lewistown. He has also worked at WPAM in Pollsville and
WBUT in Butler, where he served as program director.

A native of Pittsburgh where he went to school with and later married the former Donna Warner, Mr. Parr and his family, now reside at 2609 Wren Ave.

The couple has two children, Dana, 2 and Dari, 7 months.

A graduate of Capital University, Columbus, Ohio, he was affiliated with radio stations in Pittsburgh and Lewiston prior to coming to WRTA last June, 1965.

So read the newspapers in Dave's homestate of Pennsylvania prior to him coming back to Columbus.

I first became aware of Dave when he was music director and evening host for WTVN in the early 70's. Maybe even the late 60's.

Dave later moved to host afternoon drive on the station when Bob Conners left for WBNS in 1973. About a year later, he was replaced by Phil Whitelaw as Dave moved to host mornings and become responsible for programming beautiful music WTVN-FM.

I briefly worked for Dave hosting overnight Saturday-Sunday mornings on WTVN-FM. The sounds of the Hollywood Strings, George Melachrino, Frank DeVol among others were played from large reel to reel tapes. And the one liner I remember was the ever popular "At FM 96 the difference is the music."

I was only on the station for a short time as I was moved back to hosting the overnights on 610. I remember Dave as just a nice, easy going guy.

When WTVN-FM became Q-FM-96 Dave came back to the AM side as sports director and later once again music director.

If I recall, he spent some time at Channel 6. Later he was the press box announcer for many years at Ohio Stadium. A quite different job from the more colorful play by play task. Got to see every play of OSU when playing at home. The Columbus Dispatch did a nice column on Dave and his press box work in 1991.

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