Summertime is closing fast and the Indiana State Fair has come and gone for another year. So I figured I’d break out one last gasp of summertime from 38th and Fall Creek that might jog a memory or two for you. Back when Elvis was blonde, the Tee Pee stood tall and Ike was in charge there was a place called Merrill’s Hi-Decker restaurant located right across the street from the Fairgrounds (officially 1155 East 38th Street). The Hi-Decker took over a restaurant known as The Parkmoor in 1956 as a curbside drive-in hamburger stand restaurant whose most famous whose most famous “deckhand” never sold as much as one burger or milkshake.
His name was Dick Sumner and he manned the coolest DJ booth in Indianapolis in the late 1950s. His glass booth sat on the roof of Merrill’s Hi-Decker. The restaurant was shaped like a stack of records anyway, so the addition of the rectangular booth with the circular roof made the Hi-Decker one of the city’s hottest spots when Sumner was in session. The booth was brightly lit with neon lights featuring the “WIBC 1070 On Your Dial” marquee sign ablaze like a rock-n-roll sun. Indianapolis radio station WIBC was the No. 1 station among teens.
All the flattop cats and dungaree dolls spent their weekends buzzing Merrill’s and other drive-ins like Laughners at Irvington Plaza on Washington Street, Jack ‘n Jill’s on North Shadeland, Knobby’s at Shadeland and 38th Street and the Blue Ribbon on 10th Street. The Northside Teepee across the street from Merrill’s was Shortridge and Broad Ripple territory and the southside Teepee was for Sacred Heart and Southport. Spencer’s North Pole at Lafayette Road and 16th was for Washington and Ben Davis high schools. And who can forget Al Green’s at Washington and Shadeland and their freebie drive-in movies for restaurant patrons? (The joke was that the service was so slow, they had to do something to keep people from leaving.) But none of them had Dick Sumner.
Sumner, a wildly handsome young disc jockey from Brooklyn New York, had a perfectly quaffed pompadour and an act to matched. He had a show called “Summertime, live from the Skyline Studio.” Summer would play the newest rock-and-roll hits from his WIBC radio booth on high. His show included a nightly segment after the 10 p.m. News he called “Make It or Break It.” He would spin new hot wax 45 rpm releases, many from local bands, and ask the cheeseburger chompin’ patrons parked in their cars below to vote on them. Patrons would vote by sounding their car horns. The results would decide whether the record would be played on future shows or if he should break it. Car horns could be clearly heard over the air. If the no’s won, Sumner would break the record over his microphone. If more people honked for “Make It,” that record was played every hour for the next week.
Every Saturday night Sumner did a live broadcast featuring a different local band which set up right out on the parking lot. Any time recording artists and bands came to town, Sumner interviewed them out in the Merrill’s parking lot. Part of these interviews included an opportunity for the people eating at the restaurant to walk over and ask questions of their own. One of the things fans remember best was the midnight story feature. Every midnight Sumner read a short story, most often something by Edgar Allan Poe.
Sumner, now retired, recalled a funny story from those years. “The manager of the restaurant was a young guy who was very much into guns. One night as I was doing ‘Make It Or Break It’ he decided that he REALLY didn’t like the record I was playing, so he pulled out his hand gun and shot me. Seriously. I watched him, standing probably 20 feet away, reach into his belt, pull his gun, aim, and squeeze the trigger. The blast was huge, and I thought I was dead. It was a blank. He hit the ground laughing. So the next night I wedged a pound of Limburger cheese right on the engine block of his car. He got the first laugh, but mine lasted longer.”
Another Sumner gimmick was to slowly bite into a juicy hamburger before he kicked off every commercial during his show. Doesn’t sound like much now, but apparently back in the day it drove customers crazy. Not to mention it sold a lot of hamburgers. The only way into the glass booth studio was up a fire escape ladder leading up to the roof, and then into the tiny studio via a trap door in the floor. Legend claims that George Lucas used Sumner’s Skyline Studio as the inspiration for Wolfman Jack’s studio in his movie American Graffiti. You’d have to rent the movie and see for yourself because Merrill’s Hi-Decker and the radio booth are long gone now.
Sumner’s gig kept the Hi-Decker in the black in the Ike Era up into the John F. Kennedy Camelot Era. But Sumner eventually left WIBC and went to WIL-AM in St. Louis. WIBC kept rolling along nicely, but the Indy radio scene really took the blow hard. The British Invasion pretty much sealed the fate of local radio hijinks, and Merrills was in big trouble. Within a short time after Sumner’s departure, the Hi-Decker had to make a deal with an auto dealer up the street to park his used cars in the drive-in parking lot on the weekends to look like it was still doing a bang-up business. It was a far cry from the days of two-block-long traffic jams of tail-fin and fuzzy dice cars waiting to cruise the Hi-Decker.
Recently Sumner waxed poetic about his time in Indy and parts elsewhere as a young DJ: “It is truly hard being an aging young person. Hide and seek, ringalevio, kick the can, double dutch, punch ball, stick ball, box ball, stoop ball, doctor-lawyer-indian chief thoughts keep popping up in my head while I’m trying to be serious doing my day job. Pay checks are poor substitutes for wax lips, candy drops on rolls of paper and chocolate cigarettes. Kid-hood had stresses like ‘are you going to be the LAST guy picked to play on the stickball team?’ (Guys will understand.) Adult-hood has stresses that involve having to override your body’s basic desire to choke the living crap out of some idiot who desperately deserves it…and would probably never even be the last person ever picked for any stickball team. The most wonderful part of the kind of radio I did was as long as I was on the air, it was never too late to have a happy childhood. I don’t ever want to get too old or too angry to do goofy stuff. That’s why I always listen carefully to what my Rice Krispies tell me when I pour milk over them at breakfast…Radio seems awfully grown up now. Talk shows are angry, computers spit out carefully researched music lists, and there’s no time to broadcast local kid bands live from a drive-in while the guy on the air munches his juicy hamburger.”
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest book is “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
