(upbeat music) (funky music) - As part of WSIU TV's 50th Anniversary Celebration I'm honored to bring a dear friend and colleague back into the studios of WSIU TV.

Where he became a household name to generations of public television viewers.

During a long and distinguished career here at WSIU.

The one and only Erv Coppi.

Welcome back Erv.

- Thank you, Jak.

You're very, very kind.

- It's good to have you here.

You know, for over 20 years, you were the face of this public television station here.

Countless pledge breaks, classic movie presentations, apple festival parades.

You are Uncle Erv.

- It was embarrassing at times.

I don't know if you've heard this story, but we sent out a survey once.

I, don't remember the reason, but one of the questions on that survey was who owns WSIU?

And of course the answer was a SIU University and we get back all these answers.

About nine out of 10 of them said Erv Coppi and everybody, oh, it was so embarrassing.

And I made a lot of people mad.

- In fact, you probably did own it in a lot of ways.

You always had, I've gone back through your air checks and your demo reels.

And I'm trying to figure out where you got all the energy to do what you did, because you were so enthusiastic and out there about the things you were talking about.

You, you had such zesty.

- A lot of caffeine, I guess.

When we'd have the festivals, everybody, when they'd bring in the food, Ken Gary was in charge of bringing in all the food and everything.

And I'd say, remember, you got to save me a couple of cans of that soda that has the most caffeine in it.

It was fun.

I had the energy because I loved what I was doing.

And it was just when those phones would ring.

Of course, when the phones didn't ring, I didn't have all that energy, but it was fun.

- You've had a long history with SIU.

You went here for a year, as I understand it.

Before going into the army.

- Before going into the army that's right.

And back then it had just changed to SIU.

Back then it was almost still SINU, Southern Illinois Normal University.

And of course it was a very small school then and it's grown.

And when I look at this university now, everyone in Southern Illinois should be very, very proud of it.

I mean, it's just something to be proud of.

- What did you want to major in, when you were here?

- I wanted to be an actor.

I was always a ham and I wanted to go to the Goodman Theater in Chicago.

Couldn't get in, after the war.

So, I went to Columbia college, radio and drama.

I wanted to do something that had something to do with show business.

I was never good at athletics.

I played football one year and I got a letter only because my dad was on the school board then.

So I said, well, I better do something that I love.

And most of my friends knew all the baseball statistics.

They knew the batting averages of everybody.

Me, I knew all the directors of the movies.

I mean, I was a movie buff.

I went to the old Royal theater in Royalton, Strand Theater in West Frankfort, the Marlow Theater in Herrin and all the, of course the Varsity here when it was, even the other theater, the Rogers here in Carbondale.

But I was a movie buff.

- So you were just bitten with that right out of the... - [Erv] Yes.

- Yeah.

Now after the war, you like a lot of folks, you mined coal for a while.

But you got your big break in broadcasting at WFRX in West Frankford.

- WFRX in West Frankfort.

My wife and I were driving to a movie towards West Franklin.

I see this antenna, the lights up there.

And I said, what is this?

I made some inquiries the next day.

They said, yeah, they're starting a new radio station in west Frankfort.

I went over and took an audition.

And luckily I got on weekends, I was working weekends.

Did a little show called Coppi's Carnival, where I did all the voice characterizations.

See, I told you I was a ham.

In a little, sort of a ventriloquist dummy voice, like this.

And I did all that kind of corny stuff.

But then I went to WGGH at Marianne, back when it was first on the air and I did, I guess my best show, the Egyptian Ballroom.

And people still ask me about that.

They thought that it was a real place - [Jak] And it sounded like it.

You actually went to some pains to make it work like that.

We've got a clip of that - [Erv] Oh really?

someone was able to prepare for us.

This goes back a number of years.

But you conjured up what it must have been like to be at a grand ballroom with the big bands of the day playing.

(jazz music) - Yes.

Hello again, everyone Erv Coppi speaking from little Egypt's favorite dance spot, the beautiful Egyptian Ballroom, located deep in the heart of Southern Illinois.

Where today on bandstand number one is the music of Les Brown and his Band of Renown.

- [Jak] Now Erv, that really created a real image in your mind.

It sounded like you were right on the spot of one of the great hotel ballrooms in a major city like St. Louis.

- Martin Block had a make believe ballroom show about that time.

But we went one step further.

We went up to the Chase Club in St. Louis and took our little tape recorder.

And at every intermission we recorded the sound effects, the clinking of the glasses and the crowd noise and so forth.

Came back and put it all together.

We had a good hour of sound effects.

And then we had a, of course, every radio station had a transcription library and they had sound effects on that.

And I had the cheers.

So back then as I see your equipment around here now, I could never do this.

We had the three pots, one for the microphone, one for this turntable, one for that turntable.

Then we had a little connection for our tape machine.

So I would put the tape machine on, turn it on, bring up the crowd noise.

Turn on one of the turntables, had the recording of the cheers on that.

And then the rest of it, I was, the ham in me talking to these people.

The show was on at 12:30 on the afternoon, for an hour.

And how could we have Benny Goodman and Les Brown and Artie Shaw, all those people.

But people actually thought it was a real place.

- And people call in wanting to know who was going to be there and how to get there.

(Jak laughing) - This fella had a filling station right on the four way stop there in Marion.

And he said, every day somebody would stop in and say how do you get to this Egyptian Ballroom.

Guy said, there's no such place, that's that crazy Erv Coppi, out there, an announcer, and it's all fake.

No, no, he says, there's steak and seafood and chicken and all this stuff and everybody's dancing and we can hear them.

And they couldn't convince him otherwise.

- You moved over to WJPF in Herrin in 1958.

- Bob Walker was working there at the time.

Many of your viewers will remember Bob very talented person.

He went on to work for ABC.

At the time of the Kennedy assassination, he was in Dallas and it was a big break for him and he went to ABC.

But he was at WJPF.

He said, come over here.

I'm going to give you a job at WJ.

He said you shouldn't be over there.

All right.

So I left the, I don't want to keep moving around all the time here, but it was a good break.

- You came back to SIU in the late 1960s, about what 69?

- 69.

- There were some folks over here, Pete brown, who was in the university of new service, JC Garvol, Fred Huff.

- Yeah.

- They said, you know there's a place over here for you.

- Exactly.

Information and scheduling was what we call this.

When I first came over here, it was in where the president's office is now, I guess, or no the chancellor's office, Anthony Hall.

And I didn't know what I was doing.

I said, oh yeah.

He said, just come in.

And we're going to make you some slide shows and with the university exhibits, Meyers and people like that.

I said, all right.

So Pete Brown wrote the things, I narrated them.

And first thing you know, John Kurtz and Bill Shipley and Charlie Lynch had guys from radio TV said, well, why don't you come and work for us?

And I said, okay.

So I did.

And the first thing, you know, I'm doing a spotlight on Southern Illinois and airing that.

And then we started having the festivals and parades and things like that.

And then we hit on this idea of having movies and Al Pizzato was stationed in Nigeria.

And he said, you have free reign, do what you want to do.

And I said, well, I can do horror movies, but I don't want to do that corny stuff of having the coffin and the cobwebs.

Let's just do it with a stool and a microphone and that's it.

He said, okay, you do the whole thing.

And we did, and it just became so successful.

On Friday night, we had Abbott and Costello, and then we had the old gothic universal horror movies, Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein with Karloff and Lugosi.

And I still have people come up to me and say, I was in a fraternity and we didn't have anything to do on Friday night, but watch Erv.

We'd pick up a six pack and a pizza.

And the girls in the sororities, they'd say the same thing.

They'd say, well, that's what we would do.

We just sit and watch these.

And they were corny, you know, but I kept my intros and a little bit, I said about them that was from the heart.

Because that went back to the old days, when I first, I loved it.

And I knew everything about them.

And I swear, I passed them on.

- Around the holidays everybody runs, It's a Wonderful Life, but you actually kind of started the whole movement on that.

- There was a guy in Kansas city had copies of it on 16 millimeter.

Now only NBC can run it.

But back then, I guess we were the first station.

We ran it twice around Thanksgiving and twice around Christmas.

And people still tell me, thank you for introducing me to It's a Wonderful Life.

And I kept it short.

I've talked about George Bailey and we talked about the angel and that was it.

And then showed the movie.

- [Jak] Well, we've got a clip of that.

Let's take a look.

- [Erv] Really?

This year, our Christmas Eve programming will be enhanced by two more Yuletide favorites.

It's a Wonderful Life and Holiday Inn.

Let's watch this preview scene from It's a Wonderful Life.

(cheerful music playing) - Hello, Darling.

- Hello, Daddy.

- Hello, Daddy.

How do you like it?

(man sneezing) - Bless you.

- [Erv] Yes, another fine movie for your Christmas Eve enjoyment along with Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.

You know, Frank Opera lost the copyright for It's a Wonderful Life.

That's why we could run it then, but now, since NBC does it, it's only shown in once a year, Christmas time by then.

- And it kind of started right here.

- That's true.

- I love that.

You know, we're talking about the monster movies.

We've got a clip, where you're introducing the Bride of Frankenstein and this is the one that made you kind of a cult figure with generations of college students right here.

Let's take a look at that.

(creepy music) - [Erv] Hello, and welcome again to horror night on movie theater, I'm Erv Coppi, your movie host and tonight a real classic.

What many considered to be the best of the Frankenstein series, The Bride of Frankenstein.

I'll be back at intermission time to tell you about some of our other movies.

But now let's join Mary Shelley with her husband and Lord Byron on a stormy night in a spooky castle far, far away.

As she continues the story of Frankenstein.

- You had a flare for the dramatic there.

(Erv laughing) - I can't keep from entering a little movie trivia here.

Elsa Lanchester, who played the bride of Frankenstein also played Mary Shelley at the beginning of it.

When she's telling the story of the, it was the best of the Frankenstein because it had great music.

It was just people can get a copy of this now, you can sit and watch it, really classic.

- You did a great job setting up each movie.

You knew about the cast.

You knew the production values.

The viewer got an insider's look at what they were about to see.

It was very well-informed.

- That's why I wanted to want to do it the way we did.

Al Pizzato gave me the permission to do it.

He said, do it any way you want?

And I said, I want to tell the people a little bit about the movie.

Things maybe they don't know about it and maybe they'll enjoy it more.

- How long did we run those movies over the years?

- Wow.

About 10 years, I guess, altogether.

- And then, of course, we started doing the typical PBS pledge breaks that, you know, we've been doing over the years.

But you started that here back in, I believe the seventies, because I remember going to college here.

I started seeing those things and my friends would be on the crew and stuff.

They'd wave at us and they weren't supposed to do that.

They were all here in the studios and I really loved all the showbiz flare you brought to it.

It was a big deal.

We've got a great clip queued up here.

And I believe this is the night of your 55th birthday.

Is that right?

- [Erv] My anniversary and radio too, I think the 30th anniversary.

- [Jak] Yeah - Right - They've got a cake and everything.

Let's take a look.

That's all great stuff.

- [Erv] Good shot a birthday cake with a caricature on it.

(people clapping) You don't have 55 candles on there do ya?

- Yeah, exactly.

- We'll burn the place down - [Jak] That was a blast.

You had a lot of fun with those things.

- [Erv] There were a couple of people in it, I'd like to mention.

Ken Gary, who really was responsible for making those things such a success.

Going on and getting the underwriting and bringing in the food for the volunteers and so forth.

And Bill Criswell was in that too.

Bill died not too long ago.

He was a sports man here at WSIU.

Of course, Al Pizzato, I recognize Hutch Rudnick and Margaret Sweeney.

Everybody had a good time.

I think that's why they were successful.

- There was a very special person though, that you had a terrific chemistry with.

A lady from originally born in Carbondale but made her career, her great journalism career in Chicago, Virginia Marmaduke.

- But she started in Herrin with a Herrin paper, over there.

And then of course, she goes on a you might say an actual fame in Chicago.

And we went up to Taper for some program that we were doing.

And I first met her, she lived in a log cabin south of town.

And we talked her into coming down and doing one night.

Just to come on and be on the air.

And it was like, I don't know, the phone calls and she was such a character.

And that's, I say this in a loving way because I'm going to use two of her favorite words to describe her.

She was a classy Dame, and that's, she always used that word "classy" and being a newspaper person she spoke just like they did up in Chicago.

She knew her Cubs and all those people.

But she was quite a gal and we had a lot of fun working together.

And I think she enjoyed it as much as we did.

- We have a clip of you and Virginia doing coverage of the Murphysboro Apple Festival Parade.

And you can see the chemistry and you can see how she played, how the two of you played off of each other.

Let's take a look.

- The theme of the Murphysboro Apple Festival Parade this year is Television, America's pastime.

And I'm telling you, we are happy to be a part of all of that.

Well Virginia, it's a great, beautiful day with that temperature about 75 degrees.

Isn't that something?

- I'd think maybe somebody up there likes us.

- I do too.

I think so too.

- They tell me that it has never rained here for 20 years.

- That's right.

35th annual Murphysboro Apple Festival Parade and it's getting underway now.

It's coming down the street there, you can see it.

- [Jak] That looked like a lot of fun, Erv.

- [Erv] It was and we'd always get free food from 17th street and all the other places.

- [Jak] Well, it was a big effort to, I mean, of course, all the folks in Murphysboro do a terrific job with that parade and the weekend's events.

But there were dozens of people behind the scenes of WSIU making that happen.

The students from the radio television department, the professional staff.

- [Erv] The students who, everything they did, they all worked so hard.

From the person who was the floor manager, the person that held the cue card, the directors and everybody.

That's why even today, all over the country, these students have gone out to get good jobs in radio and television - That's what's made this department, the department of radio television, one of the best in the country, because our students actually get hands-on experience.

Right now, as we're doing this, there are students running all the cameras in the studio.

They're running switchers and everything else.

And that's a tradition, that tradition goes back to the very beginning of WSIU, over 50 years ago.

- One of the people that helped me so much, when I first came over here was Bill Shipley.

Bill had worked previously with Walter Cronkite on the 20th century show.

And he was the guy that gave me a tip.

He said, when you come on, whatever you do, come on with a little catchphrase of some kind.

And he said like, "Hi, I'm Erv Coppi."

I said, all right.

And he said, and then you tell the people, who are handling things to put your name down there.

Keep it up there for three seconds cause you got an unusual name.

And I said, well, they always misspell it.

It's E R V, not I R V. So there you go.

And he said, I've never seen many Coppi's.

And he said, put that and do it at the same time say, "Hi, I'm Erv Coppi" down below.

People often said, why do you give your name and it's down below?

So that's the reason.

That's the reason I do it.

Now if my name were Joe Smith or something, that'd be different.

But that is just a little showbiz trick, you know?

- Well, and everybody remembers that, "Hi, I'm Erv Coppi."

- [Erv] Yeah.

- You were here during an incredibly important part of this station's life.

And there were so many things happening.

You had a great understanding of what public television could do as a force for people's lives.

In terms of education, young kids in particular.

I've seen you on the air doing pledge breaks for the kids programs and how it would get the kids off to a good start.

You were really part of something special here.

And it came through in the way you talked about it.

- Well back then I think it was called SITA.

I don't know if you still call it that now.

Mr. Meyers and Candice Isberner and those people, it was so important to them that we should help them and we did.

Because it wasn't just Sesame street.

It was a lot of other things.

And I know mothers, housewives were so happy that we helped those kids learn.

- That was the old Southern seat of the old Southern Illinois Instructional Television Association.

And a lot of folks may not know this today, but when WSI you started in 1961, we aired, I think the majority of our schedule was instructional programming.

And they taught.

College professors came in and taught classes here.

They taught home economics and things like that.

And it was largely, there was a big partnership with all the K through 12 schools in this area.

And they understood what having a central station like this could do for schools.

Huge deal.

- This university not only gave jobs to people.

It was the biggest industry in Southern Illinois.

But as I said, it helped, all the mothers really appreciated it.

Another little fopa I've made on one of the, I thought it was clever, and I was trying to be a ham.

One of the people who was directing that day said, you know something we can make you disappear.

I said, what do you mean?

He said, yeah, we'll do a little trick here.

I said, oh, okay.

That'll be good.

So I close out one of the horror night shows by saying, there's no such thing as a monster, no invisible man.

Nobody can make themselves disappear and of course, then I disappear.

And the day after that broadcast, it was telecast.

This lady calls me and she says, Erv.

She said, my children just love you.

And she said, why did you do that now?

My little boy was scared, said, Erv's gone.

He disappeared.

- [Invisible Erv] Good night.

We'll see you next season.

Pleasant dreams.

(creepy music) - [Jak] You always did have a flare for showbiz.

And people were really upset?

Huh?

The kids were upset?

- Yes.

(Erv laughing) - That's a great story.

Erv, what it is, we kind of come to wrapping this up.

What are some of your favorite memories of the place?

What are some of the things that stand out the most to you about what you and all of your coworkers and colleagues were able to do here at WSIU?

- Well, I think they have to go back to the things like the parades because back in those days, not many stations were doing the parades.

And the festivals, oh, there were so-called telethons, but this was different.

Even though we were asking for help, asking for money, we tried to do it in a way that was fun.

Some of the sponsors would come on and I'd say, now I'm going to kid you now.

And they'd say, oh, okay.

And then I'd get a little bit rough with them, you know?

I think, I can't remember who it was but it was one of the car dealers.

He was all dressed up and he had a pair of red shoes, beautiful patent leather red shoes.

And I told the cameramen, I pick those up and said, my gosh, he looks like a Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, here or something, you know?

And I said the wrong thing again, and he's going to get mad but they took it in stride and everybody laughed about it.

And it was a lot of fun.

- You really did some important work here and people have been building on it for years.

And we're just so grateful for what you were able to do.

- Well, I appreciate you saying that.

And I've been retired now, I guess, almost 18 years and I still miss it you know?

People say, do you miss it?

I said, well, yes, being the ham that I am, you know?

And I said, I was very pleased when you asked me to come over and be on with you.

And then I watch you all the time.

And this station is just so important.

- Erv, you have an open invitation to come back anytime and do anything.

We can work that out.

As we wrap up, I really appreciate you doing this but I want to hear your signature line that you always used on the station breaks here, as we bring this to a close - I said, "Hi, I'm Erv Coppi.

And we want to thank you for your continued support of WSIU public television."

- Thank you so much.

Thanks very much.

It's been a blast.

Thank you so much.

(funky music) - [Narrator] Video copies of this program are available.

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