By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
Radio Sausalito, southern Marin’s only 24/7 community radio station, recently began airing historic broadcasts from San Francisco’s Club Hangover in the 1950’s.
COURTESY PHOTO
Club Hangover in its glory days
In its day, Club Hangover was the local touring destination for top performers like Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Earl “Fatha” Hines. Every Saturday, a half hour live show was broadcast to the entire west coast. Radio Sausalito has acquired the largest ever collection of the broadcasts and is re-airing them in chronological order. Hosting the series is Dave Radlauer, former host of Jazz Rhythm on Radio Sausalito, an expert on the music of this period and custodian of several of the recordings included in the broadcast.
Club Hangover opened in the late 1940s at 729 Bush Street, run by Doc Dougherty. Dougherty was a bandleader and co-writer of the standard “I’m Confessin’ That I Love You.”
In 1955 the Sausalito News announced that a local talent, Skip Morr, “did a week-long stint at the Club Hangover in San Francisco, replacing Kid Ory, who had wound up in the hospital nursing some broken ribs. The popular Sausalito trombonist expects to appear again at the San Francisco club sometime in June when Wild Bill Davidson’s band takes brief leave from Eddie Condon’s club in New York to perform for jazz fans here.”
Later the Oakland Tribune reported: “The Club Hangover became a bastion of dixieland jazz, with Earl Fatha Hines and trumpeter Muggsy Spanier and pianist Joe Sullivan, both the latter now dead, as its musical foundation. Owner Doc Dougherty sold the club in the 60s.”
One of the Club’s competitors was The Tin Angel at 981 The Embarcadero, operated by Sausalito’s own flamboyant entrepreneur and artist Peggy Tolk-Watkins.
Radio Sausalito’s half-hour Club Hangover broadcasts air on 1610 AM (or https://radiosausalito.org) Sunday mornings beginning at 9a.m. and 5p.m. through May 2025.
Radio Sausalito itself has become part of Sausalito’s history since it first went live in the year 2000. Station owner Jonathan Westerling recalls how it came about:
“The reason I started broadcasting was in order to listen to music from my stereo system on the radio in the kitchen while I was cooking. I had just moved from the midwest to a small apartment on Bee Street and my belongings were mostly in boxes. I found a small transmitter that I had built for a high school science fair project and hooked it up. The folks next door in the Rotary Housing started listening to my transmissions and telling each other about the new local radio signal. A few months later, the mystery about this new Sausalito radio station (which I called Radio Sausalito on the air, just for fun) was mentioned in Ralph Holmstad's column in the Marin Scope newspaper — much to my surprise. It was evident from that point on that there was a need for community radio in town!”
I asked Jonathan what inspired the vintage jazz programming, and he replied:
“Once I realized that other people were listening to my transmitter, I had to think about what kind of music to play and picked something that wasn't available on the radio dial in the North Bay. At the time KCSM had a smaller signal and didn't reach Marin, so jazz was the obvious choice. When KABL disappeared from the dial, I added Big Band to the playlists as well.”
What had been the high point of Jonathan’s Radio Sausalito experience, I asked, and he replied:
“The high points are changing all the time, but one consistent high point is the people. From the thousands of listeners, many of whom generously send financial support to keep us on the air, to the over one hundred volunteers that I have gotten to know and work with.” Full disclosure: I’m one of those volunteers, recording brief Sausalito Secret History spots to supplement the music.
“More recently,” Jonathan added, “one high point has been the importance of promoting and giving air time to the local jazz artists, who have fewer and fewer places to get airplay these days.”
Jonathan also described one of the low points of his long broadcasting career:
“Early on, Radio Sausalito was asked by Parks and Rec to broadcast the music for the 4th of July fireworks and everything went horribly wrong. I had coordinated with the pyrotechnics company who sent us a CD of patriotic music to go with their display. They also sent a second CD that had verbal instructions for the pyrotechnic engineer on the barge so he would know when to fire each one. If both recordings were started at the same time, the fireworks show would match the music that I would be playing on Radio Sausalito. That evening when the first firework went off, the loud noise caused our CD player to skip. Then it kept skipping with each subsequent boom! Within 30 seconds it had skipped to the finale of the show and stopped. As if that wasn't disastrous enough, people listening on the radio told me they never heard patriotic music and I realized I had accidentally programmed the transmitters to play the music at 9:15 a.m. (not p.m.), so people listening at home on the radio never heard the music to go with the show on their radios. I learned a lot that day and subsequent collaborations were obviously more successful.”
Radio Sausalito’s 20th anniversary celebration was cancelled due to the Covid 19 pandemic. During the pandemic, the number of listeners more than doubled as people found dependable reassurance in the shows and broadcasts which were all pre-recorded away from the studio.
Here’s to jazz and Radio Sausalito. May they both live long and prosper.