Jerry Blavat Still Rockin’

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT > CURTAIN CALL

Long-time DJ, entertainer, music guardian and historian Jerry Blavat — The Geator with the Heater, the Boss with the Hot Sauce — tells all in new autobiography, 'You Only Rock Once.'

By David J. Spatz

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Oct. 3, 2011

ATLANTIC CITY — For years, Jerry Blavat has stuck to the story that a snowstorm that marooned him in a Camden radio station was responsible for setting him on the path that eventually made him a Delaware Valley broadcasting icon.

He still won’t back away from that tale, because it happens to be true. But with the July release of his autobiography You Only Rock Once (Running Press), the 71-year-old disc jockey, entertainer and music guardian and historian, said the seeds of his career were actually sewn out of childhood loneliness.

Blavat was the product of a broken home — his Jewish father and Italian mother separated when he was very young — and his mother used to schlep him and his older sister Roberta off to a day nursery before she went to her job at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

“So while the other kids were outside playing, I was in bed listening to the radio because we had to get up so early,” Blavat recalled during an interview prior to a recent book signing party hosted by KOOL 98.3, Blavat’s radio home at the Jersey Shore.

He still hadn’t tuned in to music yet. Serials like The Lone Ranger and Straight Arrow filled the gaps in his life, he said. When he was 13 and an uncle began appearing on Bob Horn’s original Bandstand television show, Blavat discovered two things that forever shaped and changed his life: music and dancing.

“Music filled the loneliness in my life, and dancing made me happy,” Blavat said softly and seriously, seemingly uncharacteristic for the still-wiry and frenetic man known to two generations as “The Geator with the Heater.”

Blavat’s back story is almost as improbable as his career. A prize-winning jitterbugger on Bandstand, Blavat was just 15 when he quit the show after Horn was replaced with little-known DJ Dick Clark, but not before he was arrested for leading a picket line against Clark in front of the TV station.

By the time he was 19, married and with a family on the way, Blavat had already worked as a valet for an unknown comedian and actor named Don Rickles and served as road manager for Danny and the Juniors when their hit single “At the Hop” was at the top of the charts.

His entrée into radio was the result of a lucky roll of the dice during a street-corner craps game, he said.

He had left the road and returned to the South Philadelphia neighborhood where he’d grown up. He went to hang on his favorite street corner, and the owner of a nightclub called the Venus Lounge said he was looking for someone to host a radio show from the club.

“Ask Blavat,” one of the local wise guys (read: mob lackies) said sarcastically. “He knows everything about show business.”

The club owner looked quizzically at the skinny kid.

“I told him I could do it,” Blavat said, but the man had his doubts. With nothing to lose — and having already established six as his point in the craps game — Blavat had a proposition.

“I told him if I made my number, he’d have to let me do the [radio] show,” he remembered. Blavat rolled the dice two more times without crapping out — and then rolled a six.

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