A Letter To John Landecker From Across The Pond

About a month ago John Landecker appeared on a British radio duo’s show (Geoff Kemp & Paul Peters). They were in Chicago to start a radio tour of Route 66 (which was also broadcast locally on WRLR), and John was there to promote “Records Truly Is My Middle Name”. Yesterday we received this very nice letter from them…

I am writing to you, as I want you to know that both Geoff Kemp, and I, were so pleased that we met up with John Records Landecker at Lou Mitchell’s last month, as we started out of our journey along Route 66.

We had the most wonderful time, but best of all for me was meeting up with John, who had so much to tell us about his life in radio. I could have spent a day, just listening to everything that he could tell me, but sadly he, and we, had to leave and go our separate ways.

Ever since I was a young kid I have been mad about radio. I even managed to get myself a job as a d.j. on a pirate radio station when I was just 16, in November 1965. This station broadcast from an old WW2 Naval Fort called Knock John, 18 miles out into the North sea. I never became that big name on the radio, but I have so much enjoyed the small part that I have played over the years. I still get a great thrill, all these years later, hearing myself on the radio.

When we came back to the U.K. we found that there had been quite a lot of interest, in the local press, in what we had been doing. We were also asked to be guests on the Dave Cash Radio Show on the BBC. If you are interested, here is the ‘Internet Archive’ link where you can ‘Stream’ or download it and have a listen.
https://archive.org/details/DaveCashTalksToPaulPetersGeoffKempAboutTheRoute66RadioTourBBCShow22ndJune2013

Please pass all our very best wishes and thanks onto John, and tell him that Geoff and I spent the few days that we stayed in Grayslake, after the trip, sitting in the sun reading our copies of his GREAT book, that he so kindly gave us. We shall treasure them, and our meeting with John forever.

All the best,

Paul Peters
P.S. Geoff sends his best wishes too!
I’ve added a few photos to remind you of us. The B/W photo was taken of me out at the fort in the 60’s, the far right photo above was taken on the LV 18, the same ship used to make the film ‘Pirate Radio’, when I did ‘Pirate BBC Essex’ for the BBC in 2009.

The photo below is from the day at Lou Mitchell’s…