John Zacherle

Zacherle was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 26, 1918. He was the youngest of four children of George a bank clerk, and his wife Anna who was a homemaker. He grew up in Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood, where he went to Germantown High School.

After graduating, Zacherle enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an English degree in 1940. He enlisted in the Army at the start of World War II and served in England, Italy and North Africa with the Quartermaster Corps, rising to the rank of major.

Returning to Philadelphia after the war, he joined the Stagecrafters, a small theater troupe in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Before long he found work doing commercials for local drug companies.

Zacherle's first horror gig was posing for before-and-after pictures for some new brand of tranquilizer. In the ‘before’ shot, he was chasing his wife with a carving knife like a maniac. Then, after he took the pill, he was transformed into a kind and loving husband!

In 1954 he gained his first television role at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia, where he was hired as an actor playing several roles (one was an undertaker) in Action in the Afternoon, a Western produced by the station and aired in the New York City market. Three years later, he was hired as the host of WCAU's Shock Theater, which debuted on October 7, 1957. As the host, Zacherle appeared wearing a long black undertaker's coat as the character "Roland," who lived in a crypt with his wife "My Dear" (unseen, lying in her coffin) and his lab assistant, Igor.

The hosting of the black-and-white show involved interrupting the film to do numerous stylized horror-comedy gags parodying the film, an influential change which pioneered a now-standard television genre. In the opening sequence, Zacherle as Roland would descend a long round staircase to the crypt. The producers erred on the side of goriness, showing fake severed heads with blood simulated with Hershey's chocolate syrup.

During the comedy "cut-ins" during the movie, the soundtrack continued to play on the air, while the visual feed switched briefly to a shot of Zacherle as Roland in the middle of a related humorous stunt like riding a tombstone, or singing "My Funny Valentine" to his wife in her coffin. The show ran for 92 broadcasts through 1958.

The purchase of WCAU by CBS in 1958 prompted Zacherle to leave Philadelphia for WABC-TV in New York, where the station added a "y" to the end of his name in the credits. He continued the format of the Shock Theater, after March 1959 titled Zacherley at Large, with "Roland" becoming "Zacherley" and his wife "My Dear" becoming "Isobel." He also began appearing in motion pictures, including Key to Murder alongside several of his former Action in the Afternoon colleagues. A regular feature of his shows continued to be his parodic interjection of himself into old horror films.

He would run the movie and have "conversations" with the monster characters. He kept his "wife" in a coffin on stage. His co-star was in a burlap sack hanging from a rope. The on-air conversation consisted of Zacherle repeating the words he heard from the sack.

He was a close colleague of Philadelphia broadcaster Dick Clark, and sometimes filled in for Clark on road touring shows of Clark's American Bandstand in the 1960s. Clark reportedly gave Zacherle his nickname of "The Cool Ghoul."

In 1958, partly with the assistance and backing of Clark, Zacherle cut "Dinner with Drac" for Cameo Records, backed by Dave Appell. The record broke the Top 10 nationally. Zacherle later released several LPs mixing horror sound effects with novelty songs. Sequels included, “Eighty-Two Tombstones,” “I Was a Teenage Caveman” and “Monsters Have Problems Too.”

In a 1960 promotional stunt for his move to WOR-TV, Zacherley—by then, a Baby Boomer idol—staged a presidential campaign. His "platform" recording can be found on the album Spook Along with Zacherley, which originally included a Zacherley for President book and poster set which is highly collectible today. He was a guest on CBS-TV's What's My Line, on Halloween Eve, October 30, 1960 as the final guest on the broadcast.

When WABC had run through its stock of horror films, Zacherle took his act to Channel 9 and then Channel 11, where he became the host of “Chiller Theater,” “The Mighty Hercules Cartoon Show” and, briefly, “The Three Stooges Show.”

Disc-O-Teen c.1967

In 1965, WNJU, a new UHF television station broadcasting from Symphony Hall in Newark, put him in charge of an afternoon dance party called “Disc-O-Teen.”

The show simply grafted Zacherle’s “monster of ceremonies” persona onto a low-budget version of “American Bandstand.” Somehow, it managed to attract well-known groups like the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Young Rascals and the Doors during its three-year run.

“Jim Morrison looked at our weird set and mumbled, ‘This is the damnedest TV show I’ve ever seen,’” Zacherle told The New York Times in 2012.

He moved to the New York album-rock radio station WNEW-FM in 1967 as a morning D.J. and two years later began hosting a program at night. He later worked at another rock station, WPLJ, and in 1992 joined WXRK, known as K-Rock. That job ended four years later when the station changed its format from classic rock to alternative rock.

DICK'S PICKS VOLUME 4

On February 14, 1970 he appeared at Fillmore East music hall in New York City to introduce the Grateful Dead; his introduction can be heard on the album Dick's Picks Volume 4.

It's September 18, 1975 at WPLJ, but Zacherley isn't doing much more than back announcing the records. There is a cool promo for a Summer-end concert featuring KISS, Orleans, John Sebastian, Don McLean, Chris Hillman and Brian Auger & the Oblivion Express for $6.50! [ LISTEN ]

In the early 1980s, he played a wizard on Captain Kangaroo, appearing without his Roland/Zacherley costume and make-up. He continued to perform in character at Halloween broadcasts in New York and Philadelphia in the 1980s and 1990s, once narrating Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven while backed up by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

WPLJ'S ROOTS OF ROCK
Sunday, April 16, 1972

In 1972, WPLJ was a year or so into the "New York's Best Music" format, but they were willing to break format a bit to host a "Roots of Rock" weekend. Many of the songs played are what we would now call "oldies", although some weren't all that old in 1972. But it was still impressive that WPLJ would deviate from format to play these tracks.

There were some bad choices: I don't see how "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" or even Johnny Horton's "Battle of New Orleans" were roots of rock, although they were hits in their day. Seems to me those songs could have been replaced with some real roots music: blues from Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and others or some very early R&B.

Hard to tell if Zach was picking the tracks, but there are a fair number of tracks out of Philadelphia, like Chubby Checker and Dee Dee Sharp and Zach spent a lot of time there. We even get to hear Zach's own "Dinner with Drac". We also hear some Beatles, the Who and the Drifters among others.

The show starts with an unnamed announcer. About 20 minutes into the aircheck, Zach takes over for the rest of the show. [ Part 1 ] (1:07:00) and [ Part 2 ] (1:02:06)

In 1983, he portrayed himself in the feature length horror comedy Geek Maggot Bingo produced and directed by Nick Zedd in sequences shot in Zacherle's apartment on the Upper West Side.

He hosted a direct-to-video program called Horrible Horror in 1986, where he performed Zacherley monologues in between clips from public domain sci-fi and horror films.

In 1988, he struck up a friendship with B-movie horror director Frank Henenlotter, voicing the puppet "Aylmer," a slug-like drug-dealing and brain-eating parasite, one of the lead characters in Henenlotter's 1988 horror-comedy film Brain Damage, and cameos in his 1990 comedy Frankenhooker, appropriately playing a TV weatherman who specializes in forecasts for mad scientists.

Zacherle joined the staff of "K-Rock," WXRK in late 1992, at a time when the roster included other free-form radio luminaries such as Vin Scelsa (with whom he'd worked at WPLJ) and Meg Griffin. He departed in January 1996 when the station switched to an alternative rock format and hired all new jocks.

In 2010, Zacherly starred in the documentary, The Aurora Monsters: The Model Craze That Gripped the World. The documentary includes a number of short pieces featuring Zacherly and his puppet co-host Gorgo.

Zacherle continued to make appearances at conventions through 2015. The book Goodnight, Whatever You Are by Richard Scrivani, chronicling the life and times of The Cool Ghoul, debuted at the Chiller Theatre Expo in Secaucus, New Jersey, in October 2006. Scrivani and Tom Weaver followed it up with the scrapbook-style "The Z Files: Treasures from Zacherley's Archives" in 2012.

Zacherley continued to make occasional on-air appearances, usually around Halloween, including a two-hour show at WCBS-FM with Ron Parker on October 31, 2007. Zacherley and Chiller Theatre returned to the WPIX airwaves on October 25, 2008 for a special showing of the 1955 Universal Pictures science fiction classic Tarantula!.

The Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia inducted Zacherle into their Hall of Fame in 2010.

John Zacherle died on October 27, 2016, at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.

Some materials found on this page were originally published by the following: Finetooning, New York Radio Archive