I mentioned Henry Varlack today in an earlier post. Varlack was host of “Sleepers Awake,” the overnight show on WFLN in Philadelphia.

He was also probably my favorite radio announcer. I mean, I loved Dave Conant’s resonance, and I enjoyed listening to Bill Shedden, Terry Peyton, and the rest, but there was something about Varlack’s unconventional timbre and the fact that the guy was on from midnight to 6:00 every night that kind of endeared him to me. Many were the times that the side of a record would run out and you could hear the stylus bumping around, wearing a groove at the end. I’d call him up later, and Varlack would apologize, admitting that he was in the bathroom and he’d miscalculated the time. He may even have fallen asleep once or twice.

Not incidentally, he also happened to play some of my favorite music in those days, and introduced me to a number of pieces I’d never heard: Alan Hovhaness’ “And God Created Great Whales,” Morton Subotnik’s “Silver Apples of the Moon,” and Robert Schumann’s incidental music to “Manfred,” selections from which I’ll be airing tonight at 10:00 EST on “The Lost Chord,” on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org. Such was Varlack’s influence.

I’d never met Varlack in person, when he was described to me by a former WFLN engineer as looking like a black Santa Claus. Our paths eventually crossed at a remote broadcast, and finally, after all those late night phone calls, I was able to shake his hand.

Trying to find a photo of Varlack online is not an easy matter, since those were the days before social media, but I did find this very interesting picture of him singing in a Doo-Wop group called the Blend-Tones! Varlack is the one in the center, with his eyes closed. When he wasn’t spinning the vinyl, Varlack was also a baseball scout for the Chicago White Sox.

He impressed me as a very interesting man, and a good-natured one, totally without pretense. I still think of him whenever I hear Gabriel Fauré’s “Pavane,” his signature music for “Sleepers Awake.” Varlack died in 2006 at the age of 65.

Listen to some of the Blend-Tones’ records here:

http://doo-wop.blogg.org/blend-tones-c26505866

Gabriel Fauré’s “Pavane:”