At Syracuse’s Jazz Fest on Saturday, the music will stop briefly to celebrate beloved broadcaster Mike Price, who died in May at the age of 87. When Price died, an era of local broadcasting died with him.
He was one of the very first employees of what was then WNYS-TV, Channel 9, hired a few days before it went on the air in 1962 as a staff announcer. On the station’s very first broadcast, he served as the weatherman. Price stood behind a curtain to be introduced, said Tim Fox of NewsChannel 9. And when he was introduced, “all you could see is Mike batting at the curtain. He couldn’t find the break in the curtain,” Fox said.
Price gained lasting fame as a character – the comic vampire Baron Daemon, host of a late-night Saturday show of B-grade horror movies. The show proved popular enough with young viewers that their parents complained to the station that they couldn’t get their kids to bed on time. So the station created a weekday show – The Baron and his Buddies – that mixed slapstick and corny jokes with cartoons and short features…