Staged DJ firing was a successful publicity stunt
60 years ago today, Minneapolis radio station WDGY announced that DJ Stanley Mack had been fired for playing "Dinner With Drac" by John Zacherle eight times in a row on the air. The station explained that it had labeled the song as a "shock record" and banned it from the airwaves.
The story of Mack's firing and the outrage of his fans was front page news the next day in the Minneapolis Tribune. But folks at the history website "Twin Cities Music Highlights" talked to another former WDGY disc jockey who revealed that the whole thing was a publicity stunt.
He said Mack kept his job and when an editor at the Tribune found out they'd been duped, he vowed that they would never cover WDGY in a news story again.
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