Profile of Al Lohman on Famous Like Me

Al Lohman (b. January 15, 1933, Sergeant Bluff, Iowa; d. October 13, 2002, Rancho Mirage, California) was a Los Angeles, California radio personality who, along with Roger Barkley, had the top-rated morning drive "Lohman and Barkley Show" on KFI Los Angeles through most of the 1970s and early 1980s. Their fame extended beyond the Los Angeles area as the duo were frequent guests on the "Ed Sullivan Show" and were hosts of two short-lived television shows. The first was a 1969 game show, "Lohman & Barkley's Name Droppers" while the second was a comedy/variety show from 1979 called "Bedtime Stories."

The "cast of characters"

Audiences tuned in by the thousands to hear Lohman's quick wit and vast array of character voices play against Barkley's straight man routine. Among Lohman's characters were dim-witted hayseed "Maynard Farmer" who supposedly drove to the Wilshire Boulevard studio each morning on his tractor all the way from Brawley, an real town in Imperial County nearly two hundred miles (320 km) away. "Otis Elevator" was a good-natured handyman. Con man "Ted J. Baloney" was a regular as was his wife, socialite "W. Eva Schneider-Baloney." These characters and others were also regular occurrences in a segment called "Light Of My Life," a spoof of daytime soap operas.

One character had a more lasting impact than the others. "Dominic Longo" was the real name of one of the show's sponsors, the owner of a fledgling Toyota dealership in nearby El Monte. The commercials for the dealership were live, mostly ad-libbed and might run as long as two minutes. Roger Barkley "interviewed" Lohman's Mafioso-sounding Longo in the commercials. Dominic Longo didn't simply "wheel and deal." Instead, he "whelt and dealt like no one ever whelt and dealt before." Longo also didn't habla español. He "hobbled spaniels," and so on. The commercials were an incredible success and played a huge part in helping make Longo Toyota the nation's largest Toyota dealer.

The unexpected split and post-radio contributions

In 1985, Roger Barkley suddenly and unexpectedly quit the duo after twenty-two years, much to Lohman's shock and surprise. Barkley left KFI for a solo stint at KBIG-FM and later teamed with Ken Minyard on talk radio KABC as co-host of the morning drive show "The Ken and Barkley Company," a play on the station's call letters. Lohman stayed at KFI and teamed for a while with Gary Owens, a legendary Los Angeles personality best known as the wisecracking announcer on the Laugh-In television show.

In the early 1990s, Lohman semi-retired to Palm Springs where he hosted a morning show on easy listening KPLM-FM. Upon the station's move to a contemporary country music format, Lohman moved his morning show to KCMJ-AM, Palm Springs' oldest radio station. Released when this station changed formats as well, Lohman retired from radio for good and dabbled in local theater, earning rave reviews as the host of the Palm Springs Follies, a vaudeville show in which all of the performers are age 55 and up.

Lohman also appeared in film and was credited as simply "Lohman" for his parts as a film critic in the 1987 comedy Amazon Women on the Moon and the narrator of the 1988 comedy, Spies, Lies & Naked Thighs.

Al Lohman died at age 69 of complications from bladder cancer. Bandleader Ray Conniff passed away at about the same time, and while Conniff's obituary in the Los Angeles Times rated an entire column, Lohman's took up nearly three pages.

His partnership with Roger Barkley earned Lohman a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the only Palm Springs radio personality so honored.

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