Great Radio Talkers

Here's one to start some debate at the dinner table. A radio industry trade paper listed the top 25 radio talk hosts of all time. Their list:

1. Rush Limbaugh
2. Howard Stern
3. Don Imus
4. Larry King
5. Sally Jessy Raphael
6. Bruce Williams
7. Laura Schlessinger
8. Barry Gray
9. Barry Farber
10. Joy Browne
11. Michael Jackson
12. Art Bell
13. Ronn Owens
14. Jerry Williams
15. Neil Rogers
16. Bob Grant
17. Long John Nebel
18. David Brudnoy
19. Arthur Godfrey
20. Bill Ballance
21. Neal Boortz
22. J.P. McCarthy
23. Jean Shepherd
24. Gene Burns
25. G. Gordon Liddy

Granted, comparing a Howard Stern to the likes of Barry Gray and Long John Nebel - radio talkers from a generation long departed - is apples and oranges. The real shock is why Dr. Laura, sex-obsessed sensationalist, is so high on the list, and Jean Shepherd, humorist and storyteller, is so low.

And where's Brad Crandall?

Well, at least some personal faves made the list, like Don Imus (whom I first listened to as a kid in the 70's despite the well-meaning resistance of my mother) and Barry Gray. And aforementioned Long John Nebel, who was actually said to invent the radio call-in format, and, from what I always heard, may have developed one of the first delay devices by moving a playback head on a tape machine way ahead of the record head - the birth of the Seven Second Delay! The website Radio Free New York has a page full of Long John Nebel/Candy Jones prank phone calls in RealAudio from WMCA's days as a talk station, before they reverted to a Christian format.