“I have the pipes. The pipes were my livelihood,” said Arthur J. Curley Jr., better known as simply Art Curley to longtime radio listeners and fans of big band music.

Born in Brooklyn in 1923, Curley lived in Newark, N.J., with mother Sarah and father Arthur J. Curley Sr., a Wall Street stockbroker.

“My father got nailed in 1929 when the market went to pieces. He came out practically penniless. In the early ‘30s, we had to go live with relatives for a while,” Curley said.

It was during the Great Depression that Curley and his parents left Newark to live in Dover.

“We had a good life in Dover. It’s a great town – I love it,” he said. After his graduation from Dover High School, Curley said the family moved to Wilmington, his father’s hometown.

“That’s when the radio bug really bit hard, and I started sending out resumés and tapes,” he said.

The effort resulted in his first full-time radio job at a station in Fayetteville, N.C., where he worked for a year.

Then a station back home in Wilmington, WDEL-AM, called, offered him a job, and he moved back to Delaware, living here throughout the 1950s.

As geographically close as he was to Philly, Curley said during the ‘50s he couldn’t get a break into the City of Brotherly Love market. But eventually he would.

He was a radio newsman at two 50,000-watt powerhouse stations, WBAL-AM in Baltimore, and WTOP-AM in Washington, D.C.

He also worked for the Mutual Broadcasting Network, filling in for vacationing announcers.

“Working at a Washington radio station is hard work – it’s the nation’s capital,” Curley said.

“As an announcer I would say, ‘This is Mutual News. I’m Art Curley and here’s John Stanley.’ I would have loved to have had a full-time position there – the pay was wonderful, and the job was good.

“I look back with great satisfaction, knowing that I was being heard out in Boise, Idaho. It was a kick,” he said.

When Mutual’s regular staff returned from vacation, his airtime on network radio came to an end, but his career in radio got a boost.

Curley said he got a phone call – they called him – from Philadelphia’s WPEN-AM.

“They wanted a newsman because they’d lost a newsman who had become a PR guy for the president,” he said.

WPEN management had heard Curley on Mutual because the station carried the network’s news.

“They liked the way I sounded,” he said. It was the pipes.

Curley said WPEN had a strong news operation that was also deep with talented broadcasters.

“We had five news guys on staff and they all sounded good. Of course, in a major market, everybody sounds good,” he said.

Curley said WPEN’s news director would sit next to a studio speaker, listening to newscasts.

“When I’d get off the air and come out of the news booth, he’d say, ‘Art, why did you say that?’ And there you were, pinned against the wall,” he said.

Curley said the same news director would also call the station in the middle of the night to praise a newscaster.

“He knew what he was doing; he just wanted you to learn. I was in Philadelphia six or seven years. I had a good tour of duty there,” he said.

Today, Curley, and wife Nancy make their home in the Lewes area. “It’s peaceful living down here,” he said.

Curley said radio news today, like many aspects of modern life, is fast – maybe too fast.

“When I spin the dial today, radio news guys, generally, are talking so fast. When you talk fast you can’t make a certain sentence stand out. You can’t do a pregnant pause that enriches a story,” he said.

Music and the newsman

Curley said in the 1930s when his family lived in Newark, his cousin played saxophone.

“I thought that sounded pretty good, so I bought a five-dollar clarinet. It seemed like an easier instrument to play. As it turned out, it definitely is not,” he said.

But he liked the instrument and found that he could play syncopated swing – drawing out certain musical notes, playing a melody and throwing improvised riffs around it.

“When those gifts all came together, I became a fairly decent clarinet player,” he said. Curley said he also learned to play sax because knowing two instruments meant more jobs.

Mostly he taught himself to play. He has had only one instructor, his high school band teacher, who taught him to read music.

“I learned more about jazz in the high school band. I tried to play like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw,” Curley said.

Throughout the years Curley has shared his love of big band music, producing and hosting programs at local radio stations that would feature it.

He’s also well known locally as a live performer.

“I still have a group, the Art Curley Trio, but the work hasn’t come along lately. My kind of music has been drowned out by rock-and-roll, which I never played,” he said.

Curley’s kind of music also has a beat – and you can dance to it. But ‘Stardust,’ ‘I’m in the Mood for Love,’ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ and ‘Moon Glow’ belong mostly to listeners and dancers of another era.

“I’m still in business, when the business comes along,” Curley said, sounding like a lyricist working on a tune to which many are dancing today.

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