White River Junction
“I remember someone saying he was like the Dick Clark of the Upper Valley,” DiFrancesco’s son, Steve, recalled recently, referring to the famous radio and TV icon who hosted American Bandstand.
Whether spinning the latest bebop hit, interviewing Bobby Kennedy, or presiding over sock hops, DiFrancesco, as Andrews, relished entertaining and informing his audience.
DiFrancesco grew up in Lawrence, Mass., and spent a year at Boston’s now-defunct Burdett College before landing a full-time job in radio, at WMEI in Fitchburg, Mass.
Restlessness and a desire to tackle new challenges propelled subsequent moves to Bennington, Vt.; Portsmouth and Exeter, N.H.; Newburyport, Mass., and the Upper Valley. With him throughout were his wife, Marie, who died in 2008, and four children.
In 1962, when the family arrived in the Upper Valley, WTSL and WWRJ, two AM stations based in Hanover and White River Junction, respectively, dominated the airwaves.
“Those were the golden days of Upper Valley radio,” Meriden resident Steve Taylor recalled. “They both had serious news operations that had real newsmen and they covered the Hartford selectmen, and Hanover.”
Taylor remembers DiFrancesco, who died on Jan. 24, 2018, as part of a “cadre” of popular on-air personalities, along with Bill Dow, Ray Reed and Dave Rohde. At the time, radio hosts often pulled double or triple duty, selling ads or fulfilling other functions when not on-air.
According to his son Guy, DiFrancesco’s roles at WTSL, where he worked before joining WVTR (which had changed its name from WWRJ), included “program director, announcer, sales, copywriting, accounts payable, news, and sports.”
Most of DiFrancesco’s workweeks culminated in a Friday-night sock hop, to which area teenagers flocked.
“It was a big deal in our house, because we’d look at the 45s and see all these new songs from different people, like the Beatles,” recalled Guy DiFrancesco, who lives in Orange, N.H.
Della Berry helped DiFrancesco organize the sock hops, many of which were held at a venue near a former post office building in West Lebanon.
“I went to a lot of them,” Ken Parker, of Hartford, recalled. “There wasn’t a lot to do around here. Some of us were in our mid-teens and didn’t have cars or licenses, so we were dependent on things like that for entertainment.”
While Parker recalled Guy Andrews’ name, it’s the dances themselves he remembers best.
“They used to have some dance contests during them, and I hate to admit it,” he said, laughing, “but I participated and won a few.
“Chubby Checker and The Twist, ” he said, citing an example.
Once, WBZ host Dave Maynard, whose voice was a constant presence in the lives of generations of Bostonians, DJ’ed a sock hop at the Hartford High School gym. “It was a big deal,” Parker said.
Guy DiFrancesco, who shares a first name with his dad’s alter ego, remembers listening to his father on the way to school in the morning. “He was the happiest doing the radio, and he just seemed to shine when he was,” he said. “It made me proud to listen to him.”
Sam DiFrancesco and Parker are bound by the experience of having covered the 1964 Lebanon fire, a swift and devastating conflagration that made its way into the pages of the New York Times.
While one of DiFrancesco’s colleagues raced to the scene, he remained at the WTSL station in Hanover. Together, they produced a live show in which they related the worsening destruction. Parker, meanwhile, reported on the fire for WVTR. He was in high school at the time, dusting shelves and performing other “gruntwork” for the station.
“It was just incredible,” Parker said. “I remember parts of it pretty vividly. I just happened to be there when it was in the early stages, and spent several hours watching it consume a significant portion of the downtown business section.”
While at WVTR, Parker also watched national and international news arrive via teletype, from which it was spliced into radio bulletins.
“Oftentimes it was kind of the ‘rip and read’ process,” he said. “A story would come in and the newsman would cut that story out of the long chain of articles that came, and he would read it and embellish it with information he had gathered or knew about.”
DiFrancesco sought not only to share salient information with his audience; he also took pride in his delivery, enunciating his words in a clear baritone.
“He took an interest in saying things the right way,” Steve said. “If in the newspaper somebody spelled ‘its’ with an apostrophe when it was supposed to be possessive, he would always mention it.”
While radio was an enduring passion, to which he returned in retirement, DiFrancesco gave it up in 1966 to move his family to Georgia, where he had landed a job at a nightclub. He later worked for Eastern Airlines, where he applied his friendly demeanor to his job as a ticket agent.
“He finally settled down like everybody told him to, because he had four kids, including a pretty severely special-needs child,” his son, Steve, said.
Sam and Marie found themselves missing the Upper Valley, though, and eventually returned. But not before running it by their son, Guy.
“It was kind of funny: they asked me if it was OK if they moved back here so that when they got older it’d be easier to take care of them,” Guy said. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’ You know, it was an honor. Like I told him, ‘(You) took care of us when we were little, so I’ll take care of you when you get old.’ ”
For several years he worked as a driver and shuttle service for area rental companies and car dealers, giving him a chance to talk to passengers, where they could hear the smooth radio voice that was part of the heyday of Upper Valley radio, when DiFrancesco’s love for the medium stood out. “The radio was always on,” his son, Steve, said. “Either he was on and we were listening to it, or he wasn’t on and he was home listening to it and making sure everything was going OK.”
Gabe Brison-Trezise can be reached at g.brisontrezise@gmail.com.