San Francisco-born Ira Blue was a 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 Calient station XEBC when it was shut down by government authorities.
Returning to his native San Francisco, Blue found work at KGO. His “First Call” program made him one of the pioneers of the call-in talk show format, with Blue Bering to nearly any subject his callers raised.
Ira Blue died in 1974 at age 65.