Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle

Peter Boyles Column

July 2009

The Night They Killed The Mockingbird

If you’ve ever read Harper Lee’s outstanding novel To Kill A Mockingbird, you know that when Atticus gives Jeb his first rifle, which is in fact a BB gun, he says there is really only one rule when shooting birds:  Never kill a mockingbird because mockingbirds do no harm.  They only entertain us all day long not only with their songs but with their ability to mimic other birds. 

Twenty-five years ago, Alan Berg, the greatest professional wrestler I ever knew, and by his own account, the greatest talk show host that ever lived, and the one bird that Atticus said never to shoot, was murdered in his driveway on Adams Street at 9:30 at night on June 18, 1984. 

Now that neo-Nazis and white supremacists have again received media attention, I think it’s appropriate to look back at what I believe was the first true hate crime in Colorado and for the record, I believe there was only one other one in recent years:  When Omar Ja was shot at a bus stop simply because of his skin color.  I’ve given up requesting Denver’s mayors, past and present, to put a plaque up on that portion of Adams Street where Alan was murdered.  They seem to care more about protecting illegal immigrants. 

I met Berg, at now legendary KWBZ radio, which was Denver radio’s answer to “WKRP in Cincinnati.”   It was the proving ground, the test track, the minor league, if you would, where so many of Denver’s talk radio hosts, like mob members, made their bones.  I worked there; Mike Rosen worked there, Woody Paige, Gary Tessler, Judy Muller who went on to work for Dan Rather, along with the late Mr. Bill Barker.   The whole story of radio station KWBZ is for a much longer and future column. 

Berg, clearly one of Denver’s great womanizers, once went on the air and told Denver, Colorado that he was gay.  It got so much attention that channel 9 sent a crew down to the station to see if it was true.  He always had a once a year radio topic that said that the only reason white people wanted to be tan was because they secretly wanted to be black.  He would do a whole show on which side does the toilet paper come off the roll; the inside or the outside. 

I would always prep for a show like I was going to grad school with text books and news articles and things that I found in scholarly works to do what I thought would be a good radio show.  Conversely, he would walk in the door impeccably dressed with a little news clipping from the National Inquirer that the Virgin Mary was recently seen and living in Cairo, Egypt.  He would do a fifteen minute monologue on how she was back, black and totally blasting Christianity as a zombie religion.  Meanwhile I would witness every phone line in the building light up.  Now mind you, at that time were in the same building as channel 4 and various and radio stations.   The radio switchboards would be buzzing; the trunk lines would be overloaded for the blasphemous things he had said.  He would take a break for commercials, sit back, light a Pall Mall cigarette and smile like the Cheshire cat.  He would cruise through three hours of radio making fun of practically everyone with little or no effort.  He was indeed, the mockingbird. 

What none of us knew until much later, although we were both sued by the newspaper the Primose Cattleman’s Gazette, was that listening in as he worked at the Gazette as a part time printer by the name of David Lane. David Lane, a white supremacist who later became a member of the Silent Brotherhood was taking mental notes of everything Alan Berg said.  Lane recently died in prison and drove the car the night when Alan’s life was taken.  Alan was shot 13 times in the back of his head with a machine pistol named a MAC-10.  The brave guys that did it thought that Alan was actually the spokesperson for the ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), a mythical organization that was the enemy in a book entitled the Turner Diaries that had taken over the United States government.  (By the way, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s only source of income came from traveling to gun shows selling copies of the Turner Diaries.   And many people believe that McVeigh thought of himself as Earl Turner). 

The Turner Diaries was the bible of the Silent Brotherhood that stalked Alan and murdered Alan Berg. They also robbed an armored car in Ukiah, California, amongst their many crimes, and knocked off porno shops in the state of Washington because they believed Jews controlled pornography.  The night they killed Alan changed the face of talk radio in Denver.  I truly believe to this day that talk radio was one thing until Alan was murdered and after that things were never the same. 

Other books have been written about Alan’s life, and the men that took his life, but to me he’s the one who taught us all how to do this job and truly how not to take yourself too seriously about what it is that we do.  Tragically, the men that killed him took him far more seriously than he took himself.  As a lasting example of how Alan played life, after his murder, I met his brother-in-law who had come from Chicago for the funeral.  His name was Marty Sachs.  Because of me being ethnically Irish, Berg had told me for 20 years that his mother, Ruth, was also Irish.  We were sitting in Rabbi Foster’s office prior to the service; Marty, myself, Barry Fey and Rabbi Foster when I asked about Ruth being Irish and wondered if they want Catholic services as well as Jewish services.  Marty laughed for ten minutes and said “What?”  I said, “Well with Ruth being Irish….”  He said that Ruth’s mother and father actually came from the Ukraine and in spite of what Alan told me, she was Jewish. 

I knew at that moment that Alan mocked me for being a Mick and then rested in peace. 

Peter