Mary Turner, the pioneering female voice of KMET-FM rock radio in Los Angeles, has passed away. She was aged 76. After a long battle with c@ncer, Turner passed away on Tuesday at her Beverly Hills home, as confirmed by her executor, Jarrett Bostwick.
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Turner was widely considered to be the most popular female radio host. In Los Angeles, she is best remembered among baby boomers for her time on KMET, the legendary FM station that was a must-listen for rock enthusiasts in the 1970s and 1980s, and where she earned the nickname “The Burner” from Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band.
Long controlled by men, the radio industry finally gave women like Turner a chance behind the mic in the early 1970s. She got her break when radio stations began playing rock music on FM instead of the top 40 hits that had been the norm on AM.
The Armed Forces Radio and Television Service carried two of Turner’s nationally syndicated programs, both of which had been produced by her late husband, media executive Norman Pattiz. She also presided over a music program for TWA passengers. According to a Gallup poll conducted in 1981, 23.4 million people regularly heard her words.
Mary Turner Pattiz, The First DJ At KMET And The Queen Of L.A. Rock Radio, Has Died
Mary Turner Pattiz, a rock DJ from FM’s heyday, has passed away at the age of 76, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. Turner was born in Maryland on February 4, 1947. After earning her degree from Indiana University in the late ’60s, Turner planned to work in television production or direction.
She relocated to San Francisco and worked as a receptionist at Autumn Records, the record label where Sly Stone toiled as a producer, before landing a position in the promotion department of KNOW TV. After a while, she switched to KSAN-FM, which is programmed by Tom Donahue, well recognized as the inventor of the progressive radio style that favors album tracks over the more commercially successful singles heard on AM radio.
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Turner was an engineer and sometimes host at KSAN-FM. In 1972, she relocated to Los Angeles to join KMET, where she witnessed the station’s transformation from an experimental “underground” approach to a more mainstream album-oriented rock style. KMET, which branded itself as “The Mighty Met,” rose to become the second most popular radio station in the Los Angeles area by the decade’s end.
Along with B. Mitchell Reed, Jim Ladd, and Jeff Gonzer, Turner became one of the station’s most recognizable voices. Friend and former KMET coworker Ace Young says that her silky voice was especially popular among young men, and that one even tried to sneak into the station late at night to meet her.
After that, she always took along her two huge German dogs as a form of personal security. Even in a cramped studio, they cuddled up with her.
According to an interview she gave in 1981, Turner’s motto when broadcasting was “let’s live it up, have a good time, let the music do the talking.”
“I’m partying every single night from 6 to 10,” she said. “What could be finer?”
Turner’s coworker and editor of Talkers, the trade magazine for the radio business, Michael Harrison, stated she had the genuineness the rock audience sought at the time. You can see the official tweet posted by Randy Thomas below.
https://twitter.com/randythomasvo/status/1656326998288109568
“She knew the music,” Harrison said. “She knew the lifestyle. She knew the artists and she spoke their language, which made her a very effective interviewer.”
Turner stopped working in radio in the early ’90s. She overcame her addiction and went on to become a licensed dr*g and alcohol counselor after earning a doctorate in clinical psychology. The Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage later appointed her as its chair.
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