Joe Lee

Before the Beatles, before the Beach Boys, even before Elvis, there was Joe Lee.

Lee was not a rocker, of course. He was the rip-and-read radio news voice of Salt Lake's earliest AM rock music stations, KNAK and KCPX (K-nak and K-pix). During the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Lee's was the first voice that most teenagers came to identify with the news. What they knew about the world they gleaned from Joe Lee's punchy, five-minute newscasts that ran at the top and bottom of the hour.

The kids listened for the music, not the news. But Lee's distinctive, staccato delivery made his one of the signature broadcast voices in Utah, and certainly one of the best known. When he died last week at 88, one of the most recognized voices in '60s pop culture in Utah was silenced.

Joe Lee's broadcast career spanned an incredible 46 years. He retired from news broadcasting in 1987, but he continued to make radio commercials. He was the voice of United Fence ads for 32 years, and he cut commercials for countless other clients, sometimes in a hyperbolic style that playfully mocked his own delivery.

As a Tribune profile of Lee put it in 1984, nearly everyone with a clock radio has awakened in the morning to Joe Lee reading the on-the-hour news or flogging a going-out-of-business sale by shouting, "We quit! We quit! We quit!"

Or how about this: "From Paris, London, Antwerp and Johannesburg. From the diamond capitals of the world come the fine diamonds

at ..." You had to savor the way Joe crisply enunciated all three syllables in "diamonds." It was this old-time radio announcer's shtick, oddly coupled to a Top-40 music format, that made Joe Lee memorable.

Lee started in the radio news business early in life and, thank goodness, he never quit. He was a Utah original, a native of Tooele. He announced his biggest story at age 19 when he was a neophyte news pronouncer at KOVO in Provo. The story? The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. When the studio's AP wire machine burst into incessant ringing, he ripped the bulletin off and read, "Pearl Harbor attacked by Japanese." Unfortunately, that was it, all the information he had. Not knowing what else to do, he just kept repeating that same line.

After serving in World War II, Lee went to work at KDYL in the old Tribune Building on Main Street, where he and the DJs amused themselves by shooting ornaments off the Tribune's community Christmas tree with a BB gun. The rest, as they say, is Utah radio history.