A million! And this is just an old bunch of old songs together. The listeners still call and write non-stop in hopes of getting their names or those of their loved ones on the air. Laboe takes the top off a box in his mailroom filled with a few hundred letters, the vast majority of them from a captive audience — prison inmates are among his most loyal listeners, he says. This is just the haul from the most recent few weeks.
He is so well-known, he notes, that he tried an experiment once, telling listeners to just address their letters to Art Laboe, Palm Springs, California: The mail got through just fine, he says.
But he is not so well-known that the sidewalk hawkers on Hollywood Boulevard know him by sight, though. Everybody was cheering and screaming and all that. So now, Morones and screeners only take phone dedications and some requests from their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram followers.
Still, Laboe is inundated with phone requests for dedications. They come in every way you can think of. We get them from Missouri and all over. You call in almost every night. He gets so many requests, he barely has time to fit in an interview with a reporter. Laboe lets the last song carry him away, transcending the pressure of radio, and falls into his schtick. We get a request for that one now and then. I think we were within two years of each other.
After all, Laboe has been spinning oldies and love songs since He still takes to the airwaves from a Palm Springs studio six nights a week from 7 p. I would listen to him until my last breath," says longtime listener Rosie Morales, of Sylmar.
She calls in every single day with a dedication to her husband Scrappy, who's serving a life sentence in Kern Valley State Prison in Delano. She can't call her husband directly right now, because he's in solitary confinement. But she can hear Laboe smooch kisses sent by her husband into his microphone. Some prisoners send in a week's worth of dedications to their spouses or lovers, with a different love song for each day of the week. I won't be able to go see him for two weeks, but I can talk to him on the radio.
Laboe's obsession with radio started when he was eight years old, when his sister sent his parents what he called "this box that talked. The station had lost its engineers to the draft — this was World War II. The manager offered him a job on the spot. As long as he changed his last name, which the manager thought sounded "too ethnic" for the airwaves in But his music, and his fan base, have never been whitewashed.
Laboe has built a huge fan base, starting with the teenagers who attended his live concerts or dances back in the s. He made a name for himself hosting rock 'n' roll concerts in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte, pioneering racially integrated, all-ages dance parties with live bands. But I can do almost that good in Spanish, too," Laboe smiles.
At 94, Laboe is still hosting live shows across California and the west, wearing his signature bedazzled track suit and a sparkly bowler hat. Laboe says he knows people his age always say this kind of thing, but he is nostalgic for the old days — a time when people used to have a little more kindness for each other.
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