~ 1975 ~

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, graduated from the University of New Haven, enlisted in the USAF when Uncle Sam came to call and began my radio career in 1969 in the tiny town of Naugatuck, (Pop. 22,000) Connecticut (the home of Naugahide and UniRoyal Tires). The station was WOWW. I was the morning DJ and then added program manager to my title. About 5 years later I was “discovered” on the air by Dave Klemm of Blair Broadcasting when Dave was driving back from WDRC in Hartford to his office in New York City. (Blair represented the top 100 radio stations in the country at that time, and WFLA AM/FM was one of them). The phone call requesting an air-check was in March of 1974. Nothing happened until July that year when the Program Director of WFLA-AM, Rod Weller needed to replace Jack Harris when Jack got an offer to move to WRC in Washington, D.C. and work with Willard Scott.

The station flew me down to Tampa for the interview. I liked what I saw, and apparently the station did as well. I moved from a station in the perhaps 140th market up to the 16th radio market for a whopping raise in pay of $15 dollars a week. I was promised a chance to grab all the sunshine I could stand. I didn’t want to make the move by myself, so I proposed to my then girlfriend of 3 years, she accepted, we married on a Thursday, left by Autotrain on Saturday, arrived on Sunday and I began work on Monday.

At first the WFLA management wanted me to change my name because they thought nobody could wrap their ears around “Offenbach.” The program director suggested I think about changing my name to something easier for the locals to remember. I knew that I had to be able to remember it too, since I had been an “Offenbach” all my life, to that point!

By the time I arrived on August 26th 1974 and took to the airwaves, a promotion campaign had been airing inviting listeners to “Stick An Offenbach In Your Ear.” Even though the ad campaign ran for only a couple of months, more than 28 years later, people still remember having “an Offenbach in their ear.” I was on WFLA-AM for 6 years and moved over to WFLA-FM in 1980.

I decided to leave WFLA to pursue free lance voice work in 1982, first as the national voice of Winn Dixie television commercials, then as the voice of “Inside The PGA Tour” and the monorail at Walt Disney World around the time EPCOT opened. A few years ago I added a studio in my home (called “in-house productions”) and lend my voice to commercials, programs, corporate narrations and all sorts of stuff for clients all over the US, and a few international clients in Japan and Mexico. I have been one of the voices on WFLA-TV NewsChannel 8 for more than 26 years. Russ and Maxine recently celebrated their 28th anniversary.

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