Miami radio’s Sonny Fox of ‘Sonny in the Morning’ dies
DJ was familiar voice to many for decades
For decades, “Sonny in the Morning” wasn’t just the weather description for a typical South Florida summer day.
The phrase was familiar to thousands of radio listeners since the 1970s who heard it on the former rock station WSHE 103.5 FM, contemporary pop WHYI Y-100.7 FM, oldies format Majic 102.7 FM and WKIS KISS Country 99.9 FM.
In an entertainment business that is about as stable as the tropics in September, Sonny Fox was a seemingly constant presence on South Florida airwaves for a generation or two of listeners.
Fox came to prominence at a time when radio DJs became household names through the force of their personalities. Their personas, piped into our cars, homes and office transistors in the 1960s and 1970s, and later 1980s boom boxes and Sony FM Walkmans, became as familiar as the sound of Mom and Dad calling in from the other room to announce dinner’s on the table.
People like popular South Florida DJs such as Rick Shaw. “Crazy” Cramer Haas. Bill Tanner. Don “Cox on the Radio” Cox. Jo “The Rock and Roll Madame” Maeder. 97 GTR’s Patty Murray. These, among others, were Fox’s peers.
Just hearing Fox’s name puts the sound of his distinctive, nasal drawl into our collective heads. And listeners would call in to his studios and tell him just about anything.
“This guy wet his pants in the middle of the Orange Bowl while playing taps during a flotilla,” Fox once said to a little group assembled inside a small, rusticlooking DJ booth during his time at KISS Country in 1999. As he eyed the monitor, Fox, working the console with the dexterity of Stevie Wonder on a keyboard, edited phone calls and quickly decided, “We probably won’t use this call. We get more than we can use.”
And now Fox, who was seldom at a loss for calls and material for his morning shows, is silenced. His wife Janet posted on Facebook that the veteran radio DJ died at their Dunnellon, Florida, home on Friday.
Fox was 73. Two of his former partners in the DJ booth, Ron Hersey and Joe Johnson, said they were told he had liver failure.
“Today I lost my husband and best friend. Sonny,” Janet Stronger Speziale Fox posted Friday evening. She, too, worked alongside Fox, most recently for Sirius XM Satellite Radio, and on terpreparation. restrial radio, too.
“Back in the 90’s, you passed me in the hall at Majic 102.7 every day,” she wrote. “You told me later that you didn’t know my name. I was just ‘the brown haired girl from the Sales Department.’ Ever since then, you always called me ‘your Mousey Brown.’ You slipped away peacefully today, and I know you are now resting comfortably. I thank you for all our wonderful years together, the fun and adventures we shared, and I will miss you until I draw my last breath. You were my sunshine, my only sunshine. I love you, your Mousey Brown.”
Reaction from his former co-hosts and fans also populated social media Saturday morning.
“He was quite a character,” said BeatleBrunch host Joe Johnson, who worked alongside Fox for 10 years spinning oldies on Majic 102.7.
Fox was
astickler for He spent hours at his home pulling topics from the internet for his morning shows. He maintained a topic file. And he tapped his listeners for content. He had DJing down to a science.
“In his last year or so at Majic, he used to record his 9:50 a.m. break and leave the station. He told me his goal was to listen to his last break in the car on the way home,” Johnson said.
Fox, with his shaggy hair and beard looked the quintessential rock jock, as if he stepped off the “FM” film set, a movie set at a fictional album-oriented rock station in 1978. This was about the time he was on South Florida radio making personal appearances and gaining fans.
Fox was “one of my earliest influences when I used to listen to Y-100 and then WSHE. A radio superstar,” said former WSHE rock jock Glenn Richards, who is now operations manager at WUFT Media in Gainesville.
Fox was the new morning host on WSHE, its studios tucked inside a trailer park in Davie, when Boca Raton writer Richard Pachter was the South Florida promotion man for A&M Records in the late 1970s.
“Many a morning, I swung by and picked him up for a post-show breakfast, which usually began with a stop at the drivethrough of a local refreshment stand. Sonny was always kind, professional and very promotion-minded. He was a musician as well as a programmer and very open to all kinds of music. With A&M’s diverse roster of artists, from Supertramp to the Go-Go’s, it was a great fit,” Pachter said.
“In recent years, when I heard his voice on SiriusXM’s comedy and classic rock channels, it always brought a smile and good memories,” Pachter said.