All of us at Binder and Binder lost one of our favorite people recently when we learned that Dick Summer had died. For Harry and myself, it was also the loss of a friend of some 50 years.
First, let me discuss Dick and his career. Dick was the voice of Binder and Binder. You heard him on every commercial and he was the voice on the phone when you called. He had a wonderful voice. His father taught voice and choir music and from him he learned to develop the Dick Summer smooth baritone.
Dick had three passions in his life: his wife Barbara, his Cherokee airplane and radio. His earliest passion which lasted all his life was Radio which I am capitalizing as it was a real entity to him. He started in the radio biz at Fordham where he was a student. After graduating, he was hired by a station in Albany before getting his career break in Indianapolis where his voice and his radio personality made him a star. He then went to WBZ in Boston with its 50,000 watts where he eventually became program director.
He was at WBZ during “the British Invasion” in the early ’60’s but I think he was prouder of some of the musicians he introduced on the air at WBZ including Tom Rush, Jose Feliciano and Harry Chapin.
He created “Mouth vs. Ear” where he (the mouth) challenged the audience (the ear) to a set of trivia questions. You could almost never win because he would change the rules on you if you were too smart. He’d asked which subway line covered the most distance and if you knew the answer he would say you were disqualified since you didn’t live in Brooklyn. It was all in fun and the audience love it. He enjoyed doing the late hour shows since these shows were more personality driven. In New York he was on WNEW-AM, WNEW-FM and later WNBC a station that has since switched to all sports. He met his idol William B. Williams a famous radio voice at WNEW-AM. Because he was one of the original DJs on the first album rock station, WNEW-FM in New York, he and the other originals were admitted to the Rock & Roll hall of fame. During his long radio career Dick worked with Dan Ingram, Scott Muni, Howard Stern (who called him “the voice”), Don Imus and dozens of other famous radio personalities. Dick would regale me with stories about some of the personalities—the Dan Ingram stories were hysterical.
I met Dick in the late 70’s early ‘80s. Harry had been his financial planner/tax lawyer for some time and Harry was invited to be on his show on WNBC starting at 10 PM. The show was entitled “Find a girl for Harry” and it was a spoof like many of his shows with call ins, ridiculous questions, quizzes and all the other elements that made Dick’s shows so popular. Harry and I were at a Ranger game and were told to drop by. We went to Rockefeller Center where WNBC had its studios.
Capital punishment was not allowed in NYS at the time as it had been declared unconstitutional by a brilliant Judge named Peter McQuillan who I would later appear in front of many times. But the statute said that the judge, the assistant district attorney and the defense lawyer all had to be there during the execution to make sure they got the right guy. There was no chance I was going to watch someone I had represented be executed but fortunately Legal Aid attorneys were not supposed to handle homicides. But we discussed that mandatory appearance at Sing Sing on the air. And every show had a different theme. Dick thought having a guest made it easy, that the show should be interesting enough on its own without the need for a guest. He spent a lot of time pondering what to say and do on the air—he never just showed up. Those traits—preparation, curiosity, thinking outside the box—were ones Dick exhibited through out the 25-30 years we worked together.
In the early 1990s when Harry and I were starting to make plans to expand from the east coast, we went over our previous not so great success with radio and newsprint. Harry wondered whether we could get Dick to be our “voice over”. Dick had been the voice for many national advertisement campaigns. The one I remember best, “Pep Boys” was a huge success. He had just left a radio station in Chicago where he was very unhappy and looking for a change. We spent months working on a plan and finally Dick agreed to be not only our voice but to actually produce all the commercials himself and to negotiate with the various TV stations as our communications director. Needless to say that worked out well.
Dick was of course the pilot. We landed, we finished the filming and then we went back up again to fly to some small airport near by. He always wore on his jacket a pin indicating he was a member of some pilot organization and would teasingly introduce himself on commercial aircraft as available if the pilots needed help. Dick and I even did a radio show together for a year or so—he was convinced we would be a hit if we devoted enough time but while he loved radio, my career was lawyering.
Dick was a wonderful man, kind, generous, warm, trustworthy and of course talented. We had a lot of wonderful times together and Harry and I and all the staff that knew him will miss him very much.