Real Zorch

In San Francisco, some teen-agers dye their hair green. Others pencil their eyebrows in red, paint cat's whiskers on their faces, wear purple lipstick. Their hats are trimmed with swizzle sticks, foxtails and pipe cleaners. Shouting the password "Zorch!" (fuzz-beard lingo for Hollywood's "colossal!"), they storm into a radio studio in the Palace Hotel five nights a week to pay homage to a bop-talking disk jockey named Richard Bogardus Blanchard. In five months "Red" Blanchard, 33, has zoomed from a routine job as staff announcer at station KCBS to a position that his pressagents describe as "uncrowned king of juvenile Northern California."

Butchered News. Red opens his half-hour radio show by playing one of a variety of roles: either he is Louella Blanchard retailing gossip or Lowell Blanchard butchering the news; sometimes he is a hayseed called Barefoot Bogardus or a private eye known as The Flat Man ("I'm 9 ft. 12 in. tall and weigh 67 Ibs. When I stand sideways I disappear."). But the big deal in the show comes when Red takes his "raving microphone" and interviews his hepcat audience against a background of teen-age screams. Most of his fans identify themselves with Blanchardisms (e.g., "I'm Steinway Bogardus, the poor man's Liberace" or "I come from Parumph, the biggest city in the world, very nervous and mixed-up").

Blanchard, a refugee from Gardner, Mass., keeps his listeners occupied with zany projects. He does not openly suggest green hair or cat's whiskers, which seem to come naturally to his audience. He. has kept them busy mailing him dirt to "help fill up San Francisco Bay," or sending in empty orange juice cans to be used in building a 60-foot antenna. Twenty-five bottle caps earned a listener an "I Dread Red" card, and a usable joke is repaid with an "I Write for CBS" certificate. The jokes are frequently such morbid items as the jingle about a railroad train hitting a girl named Lucy; "The track was juicy, the juice was Lucy." His fans are currently enrolling in an "I Listen to Red in Bed" club.

Nervous & Mixed-up. In the presence of their elders, the kids profess to take Red in their stride. One junior high school girl says: "He's so corny, he's good." Another teen-ager existentially says: "He exists." A third explains: "You're not a real cool cat unless you listen to him. Everybody at school discusses his show next day, so you have to know what he said." Pleased with his fans, Blanchard is even more pleased with the eight sponsors who last week were paying him $12,000 a year. He has no notion of going network: "It's a good thing this show happened in California. It's too zorch for the rest of the country--they're not nervous and mixed-up enough or they'd be out here, too."

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