Art Finley
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Art Finley (born 1926 in Fairmont, West Virginia, USA) was a North American television and radio personality, mostly in San Francisco and Vancouver, until his retirement in 1995.
His broadcasting career began at KXYZ Houston in 1944. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, and in the Korean War, he was recalled to active duty as a reserve officer in the U.S. Air Force, where he helped establish radio stations in Newfoundland and Greenland for the Strategic Air Command. Afterward, he worked in New York City.
He is fondly remembered as "Mayor Art," the host of a live after-school children's show that aired weekday afternoons on KRON-TV in San Francisco beginning in 1959.
- Dressed in a top hat and tails, he addressed his live audience of attendant children, who also wore top hats (with their first names written on them), as the "city council."
- The hour-long show (eventually reduced to a half hour) was largely filled by animated cartoons featuring Popeye, Q. T. Hush, and others. Cartoon segments often were introduced by a rousing cry from everybody of "Blooey, blooey!"
- Live segments included Ring-a-Ding, a sock puppet that he bought from the Nut Tree Toy Shop. He used the puppet to teach four foreign languages. His "Mayor Art's Almanac" was the first TV newscast for children in the U.S., and the State of California awarded him two successive gold medals for the feature.
- His standard greeting was, "A glass of milk and a how-do-you-do. His standard closing was, "We'll be seeing you...subsequently."
- The Mayor Art character was partly a way of introducing young people to civic matters, which, in retrospect, revealed Finley's true interests and foreshadowed his later career as a radio talk show host.
During the summer of 1966, Finley, no longer Mayor Art, as himself briefly hosted Pick a Show, a simple low-budget afternoon game show designed to promote KRON's NBC prime time lineup. He went into the station's news department as a reporter, and hosted a weekly political interview program called "Speak Out."
From 1962 to 1981, the San Francisco Chronicle and many other U.S. and Canadian newspapers published his daily panel titled "Art's Gallery," consisting of 19th. Century woodcuts, to which Finley had written humorous modern-day captions.'All 6200+ original panels are now in the San Francisco State University archives.
For the rest of his career, Finley hosted call-in shows on talk radio stations, including:
- KSFO, San Francisco
- CKNW, Vancouver (1968-1973)
- KGO (AM), San Francisco, 1973-1975 & 1977-1980
- CJOR, Vancouver (1981-1986)
- WNIS, Norfolk, Virginia (1987-1988)
- XTRA, San Diego (1989)
- KCBS (AM), San Francisco (1989-1994)
On February 12, 2002, Finley donated tapes of 100 interviews, culled from the above, to the Library of the University of British Columbia Rare Books and Special Collections.
