San Francisco-born Ira Blue was a College of San Mateo and Stanford University graduate whose flamboyant on-air persona once led him to boast, “a half-million people either adore me or can’t stand me.”
Blue’s career led him to Hollywood, where he was a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures, and to Mexico, where he was managing Agua Caliente station XEBC when its parent company was shut down by government authorities in a crackdown on casino gambling. The Agua Caliente resort was expropriated by the federal government to be turned into a state school and the radio station went dark.
Returning to his native San Francisco in the late 1930s, Blue found work at NBC. After a stint as a USO entertainer during World War II, Blue would work as a sports director for all three major networks over the next 27 years.
In 1959, he joined KGO. His First Call program made him one of the pioneers of the call-in talk show format, with Blue willing to tackle nearly any subject his callers raised. He was known for a series of live broadcasts from the Hungry i nightspot between 1962 and 1967.
Ira Blue died in 1974 at age 65.