News

By Thom Smith

    “You’ve got a nice voice; you should go over to the all-girl radio show,” a newscaster at WEAT (radio and TV then) suggested to the Palm Beach Junior College student he was dating in the mid-’60s.
    “And that was it,” Deidre Hall recalled. As many as 700 women applied for jobs when the new radio station in Lake Worth, WLIZ, went on the air in 1959. Six were hired.
    The second station in the nation with an “All-Girl” staff, it was the “sister” station of WHER in Memphis. Both were the brainchild of Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records who helped launched rock ’n’ roll by recording the likes of B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and, of course, Elvis Presley.
    Hall never met Phillips, but his radio venture laid the foundation for her career.
    “The pay was so little that I can’t remember,” said Hall, who eventually gave up the radio console for a psychiatrist’s couch as Dr. Marlena Evans on Days of Our Lives. “It was really for the experience and the fun of it. I was probably the youngest girl on the staff, but it was wonderful training. There’s something about putting on a headset with a microphone in front of you and hearing the sound of your own voice, your enunciation and your expressions, your pace and your volume. It’s an enormous learning experience. Communicating without the visual, you had to be more effective.”
    The job also required them to operate the equipment and pass an FCC test.
    “Once we did that we were thrown into the deep end,” Hall said during a phone interview. They pulled their own records, recorded commercials, ripped and read news items from the Associated Press teletype machine in the back and interviewed guests who had something — a book, a show, a product or a cause — to promote.          “Plus we had to read the meters every 15 minutes to make sure we were in the right wattage,” she said. “It was fun, local radio, seat-of-our-pants entertainment. We just made it up as we went along.        “The most exciting times were when we would have a hurricane, with 10-minute updates on what was happening, what to do, what to stock up on, public service. With a storm coming it was a lot more important what we were telling people.”
    Specific dates have dimmed with the years, but Hall was on air in the mid-’60s, for at least two years. She also let on that she also spun records on weekends at WQXT, which overlooked the Atlantic from atop the dunes at the south end of Lake Worth Public Beach.
    “It wasn’t near as much fun,” she confessed. “It was actually a little frightening being the midnight person on the weekends in that empty parking lot.”
Hall, who turned 69 on Halloween, joined Days of Our Lives 40 years ago. In so many ways, the show is her life. And largely because of her character, the show still has life. When she debuted, 14 daytime dramas competed for viewers. Only four remain. Hall attributes its success to its adaptability, realistic story lines, production flexibility and doing more with less, budget-wise.
    “We cracked the code for staying on the air and hopefully we’ll be there for a long time,” she said.
    Though she cherishes the memories of her youth in Lake Worth (she currently lives in Los Angeles), she doubts she’ll return anytime soon. But she still wants to keep in touch.  
    “I have a Deidre Hall fan page on Facebook. People can check in and tell me what’s going on back there,” she said. “There was a joy to growing up in a small town. Everyone knew everybody else. It was such a safe, protective and loving environment.”