Good Morning, Vietnam DJ Adrian Cronauer

Adrian Cronauer, who served as inspiration for Robin Williams’ breakout character in the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam, has died in Virginia aged 79.

Like his eponymous character, Cronauer was a radio presenter in Saigon in 1965 and 1966, known best for his enthusiastic early morning greeting and penchant for playing rock ’n’ roll tunes to raise American troops’ morale during the Vietnam War. But Hollywood took a lot of liberties in its depiction of the air force sergeant.

Cronauer was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in September 1938, to a steelworker father and teacher mother. A keen broadcast fan throughout his life, he landed a semi-regular slot on local children’s television aged just 12.

After enrolling in his home city’s university in the 1950s, he helped found a student radio station and worked with local broadcasters throughout his studies in Pittsburgh and later in Washington.

Cronauer joined the US Air Force, doing his training in San Antonio and Wichita Falls, Texas. His first deployment was to the island of Crete in Greece where he spent a year and a half and developed his signature radio greeting. He told the Fayetteville Observer in 2011 that his initially timid “Good Morning, Iraklion” gradually became “wilder and wilder” into the dramatic, booming and protracted form he would become notorious for in Vietnam.

Keen to travel, Cronauer said he volunteered for a transfer to Vietnam, where he was hired initially as a news director for Armed Forces Radio there.

After his morning presenter left, he took up the 6am Dawn Buster show mantle, greeting troops with an enthusiastic yell of: “GOOOOOOOOD morning, Vietnam!”

Cronauer soon found out while interviewing troops that his ironic salute was often met with “the GI equivalent of: Get stuffed Cronauer” on bad days, he recounted at a veterans event in 2008.

“On one occasion, a guy picked up his M16 and blew away his radio,” he told the American Veterans Centre conference.

The famous greeting would be adopted by the show’s presenters after him.

Cronauer shunned traditional favourites and shelved them for music of the time: treating US troops to jams from the Righteous Brothers, Tom Jones and the Beatles.

He told the Fayetteville Observer he wanted to serve as an antidote to the homesickness and culture shock affecting thousands of young American men in Vietnam.

“The crowning achievement for me was when I heard from some guys that when they tuned into Dawn Buster for the first time, they assumed they had picked up some radio station from the States,” he told the Chicago Tribune.

But Cronauer was never the local celebrity or subversive that late comedy star Robin Williams made him out to be.

The role instead became a showcase for the frenetic Williams, who ad-libbed much of the broadcast depictions.

Williams acknowledged that the real-life Cronauer was not the “radio desperado” he portrayed.

Cronauer was keen to point out the drastic changes: “There’s a lot of Hollywood exaggeration, and outright imagination.

After being honourably discharged after his prescribed year, he returned to the US, where he met juvenile probation officer Jeane Steppe while doing local community theatre. They married in 1980 and moved to New York, where he gained a master’s degree in communications and picked up voice-over work in television and radio commercials.

The veteran is survived by a stepson, daughter-in-law, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Adrian Cronauer.