Blanchard also added his voice to novelty songs written and performed by recording personality Nervous Norvus, and to radio commercials.
(GE) Three years later, in 1943, he volunteered for the United States Army Air Forces and was sent to the Greensboro, North Carolina, Basic Training Camp.
According to his Website, "Red went into the army at age 23, when everybody else in basic training was about 18, so they made him a drill instructor (probably due to his loud voice).
"[1] After a few months the Army decided it had enough cadets at Greensboro and transferred Blanchard to March Field in Riverside, California.
[citation needed] While at March Field, Blanchard met his future wife, Phyllis East from Colton, California, and at about the same time the Army Air Corps transferred him again, this time to engineering school at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he remained for the rest of his military service and was discharged early in 1945.
"[3] Over the years, Blanchard had collected a record library of around 3500 disks of bebop, jive/swing and unusual novelty numbers, plus a hundred or so disks of film stars in one-way interviews that were made for syndication so that the DJ or announcer had only to ask the written questions and let the disc give the impression that the stars were being interviewed live.
[3] On air, he would mix and match songs, interrupt to add the voice of a celebrity, put in recorded sound effects, and otherwise enhance the experience for his listeners.
they storm into a radio studio in the Palace Hotel five nights a week to pay homage to a bop-talking disk jockey named Richard Bogardus Blanchard... His press agents describe [him] as [the] 'uncrowned king of juvenile Northern California.'"
Twenty-five bottle caps earned a listener an 'I Dread Red' card [to play off the 'I Like Ike' campaign], and a usable joke is repaid with an 'I Write for CBS' certificate.
In Blanchard's Zorch-speak, nervous meant 'cool' and its more conventional meaning, which aptly conveyed Drake's morbid bashfulness, made the word doubly suitable.
[5] Blanchard himself made a couple novelty records: "Pagan Love Song," on which he did all the parts, and the more famous "Captain Hideous (King of Outer Space)."
He continued to operate his personal "redblanchard.com" website and General Broadcasting System, occasionally still playing the trombone, drums, piano, or guitar for his own amusement until his death from surgery complications.