The Station Master

A generation of listeners awoke to the quick but cheerful wit of Merv Smith

- Russell Baillie

From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, Merv Smith ruled Auckland’s airwaves as king of the corn flakes. Smith, who has died, aged 85, spent 25 years as the breakfast host on 1ZB. He sent generations of the city’s kids to school with a ring of his bell, having helped ease their parents into the working day with his banter, family-friendly humour and a Scottish spider named McHairy. The imaginary arachnid was inspired by the tale of Robert the Bruce and the persistent spider.

Try, try again became a theme of Smith’s career in broadcasting. His life beneath the “on-air” light began while he was still a boy. He sang in a children’s choir, which featured in 1ZB Sunday programming, and he acted in radio plays as a teenager. Leaving school in 1949, he became an advertising copy cadet at 1ZB, a job he never quite mastered, but one that got his foot in the studio door. His first announcing shift proved testing. He had to read a commercial with the line, “Don’t sit and shiver all through the winter.” It came out amusingly