Frank Harden, longtime radio host, dies at 95

Every morning at 6:55, they played a hymn on the radio, and at 7:25, they broadcast a good old march. If someone in the D.C. area lost a pet, they’d announce it on the air. From 1960 to 1992, Frank Harden and Jackson Weaver ran the most popular program in a gentler and more polite Washington.

Harden, who died June 15 at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, while watching a movie with his wife, was the straight man to Weaver in a 32year morning routine that was as vital to Washington’s identity in that era as the Redskins, the Beltway and the greenand-white awnings on so many D.C. rowhouses. He was 95.

His son, Robert Harden, confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause.

Six mornings a week on WMAL (630 AM), using an approach they dubbed “dynamic inaction,” Harden and Weaver reeled off a four-hour roll call of news headlines, weather and traffic reports, school closings, a bit of middle-of-the-road music, some spoofing of the commercials, and visits with a roster of made-up characters, including a nameless lady with a highpitched voice whom they introduced as being “informed on nothing and has opinions on everything.” She would mangle the language come springtime with blather about the “venereal magnavox” or worry in summer about people getting “heat prostitution.”

Their goal was to appeal as broadly as possible to an audience that they believed was more drawn to amiable companionship than to the agitation of polarized politics or the thrill of breaking taboos.

“We’re not in the business of alienating people,” Harden wrote in 1983.

As one of their show’s jingles put it, the show existed “to pass the time away and catch the world as it goes by.”

Characters from Harden and Weaver’s stable became part of the region’s daily conversation in offices, schools and shops. Rocky Rockmont, a fictional car salesman at the real-life Rockmont Chevrolet, turned into such a household name that the actual salesmen at the dealership donned buttons saying, “Hi, I’m Rocky.”

They were more interested in serving listeners than in stirring the pot. On nights when snow was in the forecast, they’d sleep at the station to be sure they’d be on hand for their 6 a.m. sign-on.

“The focus today seems to be controversy,” Harden said in a podcast interview last year. “I think the most controversial thing Harden and Weaver ever said was, ‘Good morning!’ “

After Weaver died in 1992, Harden continued the morning show with Tim Brant and Andy Parks until 1998.