Tony Oren was the host of an overnight talk show on KMOX. He had an interesting life, living in Australia as a young man where he appeared as an actor in motion pictures. He traveled in Europe and moved to St. Louis in 1957.

“Tony would bring a suitcase in with him,” said Rene Sevier, one of his producers. “He had his stuff in his suitcase. Tony had a miniature paper cutter and would slice up the wire copy and put it in a binder. He’d write in the columns what is was. ‘Man bites dog story’ or ‘wedding’ or whatever. Say he played a song called “Eternal Love,” he would real quick turn to the section on weddings and read an article about something that pertained to the song.”

“Tony would come in and empty this little coin purse on the desk,” said newswriter John Amann. “We would use that money all night for snacks. I’d go to the second floor – the TV station snack room – because it was better than KMOX’s. Tony would give me his key and I’d keep making trips; we lived on coffee and Oreos all night.”

“For years, Tony hosted the overnight on the weekends while I was with the station in the 1970s,” said Barb Felt. “Program Director Bob Osborne told me this story and I have no reason to question it. There was a middle-aged woman living on the east side (Illinois) who became addicted to Tony Oren’s voice on the weekends, but it was a love/hate relationship on her part. She would call him on the off-air line during the breaks and accuse him of reading her mind. She claimed she would be thinking a thought and then Tony would instantly bring that subject matter up in the on-air dialogue.”

According to Osborne, Oren begane to question her sanity and also his safety as she called him so often at the station.

“One night after his show, Tony went to his car, (which was parked on the street in front of the station) and while he was unlocking the car door, a frenzied woman jumped from behind the car and sprayed Tony with mace,” Felt said. “She screamed obscenities while threatening him that if he ever ‘read her mind’ again, she would take more drastic actions. She then disappeared into the shadows.”

Oren worked in St. Louis radio for 22 years before retiring in 1994. He died in 1998 at the age of 75.