Radio

IF you liked my show, buy my jams and jellies. They're on sale in the lobby."This is the way former WBAL radio disc jockey Jay Grayson ended his three-hour show every weekday afternoon for almost 40 years.Mr. Grayson was one of the most popular disc jockeys ever to broadcast over Baltimore radio. For most of this half of the century, from the early 1950s into the 1980s, his weekly cumulative audience was estimated in excess of 400,000 people. At any given time from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, he was reaching more than 100,000 listeners -- far and away more than any disc jockey playing opposite.

Gov. William Donald Schaefer never met a constituent he wouldn't pick a fight with.The governor, with a trail of 1,766 state workers' pink slips fluttering in his wake, took on the citizenry yesterday with unflinching sarcasm and hostility."

Former state Sen. Larry Young, a Baltimore Democrat who was expelled from the General Assembly on charges that he used his public position to enrich his private businesses, said yesterday he has chosen to continue his radio career rather than attempt a return to the legislature. Young had hinted for months that he would be a candidate for office in Senate District 44, and had already collected $40,000 in campaign contributions. But he said yesterday he is abandoning the comeback bid so he can continue his morning talk show on WOLB-AM and join the ministries of the Rev. Al Sharpton.

TELEVISION MAY BE the place to watch news of the war in the Persian Gulf with awesome immediacy, but radio is the place to talk about it.Ironically, in the days after Wednesday's launch of hostilities, some callers to Baltimore's two-way talk shows were using the freedom of speech implicit in the popular programming format to argue the rights of citizens to protest the war in the streets.Demonstrations and candlelight vigils in Baltimore which preceded and followed the outbreak of war, and especially Saturday's big march in Washington, triggered old debates about patriotism and the meaning of supporting one's government and our boys (and now girls)

BASEBALL IN Baltimore, as we have known it, has been threatened this season, and the blame doesn't lie with millionaire ballplayers, greedy owners or even the home-plate ump. In fact, we have been asking for this all along:Home Team Sports on basic cable.Area fans have long pined to have the local sports-cable channel, which carries most of the Orioles' games, included in their regular cable package. You could always buy it extra, for $15 or so a month. But most folks feel their cable bill is high enough and couldn't convince themselves (or their spouses)

Starting Jan. 24, Mark Viviano's sleeping patterns get thrown for a loop.That's when Channel 11's weekend sports anchor adds weekday morning sports reporting duties on sister station WBAL (1090 AM) to his job title. The combination of the two appears to be one that could drop a horse, but Viviano is looking forward to taking the ride."You're wondering why anyone in his right mind would do this? Well, I don't have a right mind," said Viviano yesterday. "Seriously, if it was work, I would say this is crazy.

Kenny Curtis swivels away from the microphone and asks the kids from Our Lady of Mount Carmel Elementary School for song requests."Pearl Jam? Pearl Jam makes kids go, like, aaaagh!" the deejay replies to the chorus of suggestions, contorting his face in mock horror. "It makes little kids climb the walls."Then he explains to his sixth-grade visitors that the music he plays every morning must be suitable for listeners from roughly 3 years old up to adulthood.Thus Pearl Jam, a hot "grunge" rock band, is not likely to be heard on Baltimore's first radio station just for kids.

Former Baltimore radio talk show host Alan Christian has been charged with misappropriating more than $675,000 in funds that almost 800 listeners sent to him to form a radio network company.Christian also was charged in papers filed by the Maryland attorney general's office with selling unregistered securities as part of an effort to raise money for Atlantic Coast Radio Inc. in 1988 and 1989.Also charged was Grace M. Starmer, once a vice president of Atlantic Coast Radio.Christian and Starmer are to be arraigned Oct. 12 in Baltimore Circuit Court.

FOR 20 YEARS on WQSR-FM, Alan Lee hosted a Sunday night radio program of forgotten oldies. Now, according to the brilliant thinkers in radio, and the ratings numbers and actuarial charts they employ in place of human hearts, Lee becomes a forgotten oldie himself. He is one of those banished in the recent purge at WQSR. And the songs he kept alive now slip deeper into rock 'n' roll's dustbin. While many publicly lament the loss of WQSR's morning gang of Rouse & Company, as they should, Lee was always the true keeper of the flame for that primitive era when rock 'n' roll was first crawling onto dry land.

Seventy years ago, the radio was the marvel of the century -- a little box, small enough to fit in your living room, where it drew in live sound from somewhere else.Today's Y2K models are just as innovative, whether kerosene lamps that allow families without electricity to stay up past dusk while catching the day's news reports, or wind-up, solar-powered boxes that give hours of entertainment without batteries.Visitors to a new museum in Bowie can see those and 250 more radios that at various times have been used to save lives, stir imaginations, entertain and become the center of family life.