Ray D. Glasser

Ray Glasser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1947, and has had a life full of media interests. Ray was first on the radio in the summer of 1960 on WMFH, a small student-run station in his hometown of Mayfield Heights, Ohio. Even though the "gig" lasted only 5 months, the love of radio crept into Ray's blood and never left. In the summer of 1963 Ray got his first tape recorder, a Webcor reel-to-reel, and began recording disc jockeys and music off AM radio....something he continued doing until the late 70s. In 1970, while attending Ohio State University, Ray had 3 part-time oldies shows on various campus stations, taking the name "Ray King", and has kept that stage name throughout his life. Ray also worked at the long-gone Derby Hall Radio Lab, engineering and producing radio shows for students' assignments from their broadcasting classes. Through the 60s and 70s, Ray kept on recording music from Top 40 radio stations in Cleveland, parts of Texas, and Baltimore, MD., on reel-to-reel tapes. Ray has also amassed a huge collection of radio air checks and jingles throughout the years. In 1976 Ray discovered the Sony Betamax, and began a 40-year obsession with home video, building one of the largest Betamax video libraries in Ohio (over 2500 tapes), and was active in trading videos with friends, organizing video conventions, videotaping weddings and other social events, and sharing a lot of these on YouTube and social media in the 2000s. In 1980 Ray married a lovely Japanese woman, Michiko, who was the love of his life and enjoyed his video hobby with him. For a while, Ray was trading tapes with a gentleman in Japan, and was receiving tapes off Japanese TV for his wife to enjoy. Unfortunately, Michiko passed away in 2012 from cancer, after a long, full life. During the 1980s and 90s, Ray attended many of the Consumer Electronic shows in both Chicago and Las Vegas, enjoying the new video equipment releases that were displayed there. Ray has also published an extensive website devoted to the Betamax video format, at Betainofguide.net. Ray's interests have been mentioned in a number of publications, notably "Cleveland Radio Tales" (2017; ISBN 978-1-938441-90-5), and "From Betamax to Blockbuster" (2008; ISBN-13: 978-0262072908), as well as various video documentaries, including "Magnetic Highway" (parts 1 [ASIN: B07NN2TY4G] and 2). Although Ray studied TV and radio in college, and dreamed of being in broadcasting, he never seriously pursued it (due to the volatile and unstable nature of the business), so he worked in restaurants most of his working life, finally retiring in 2016. Ray continues to collect movies on DVD and BluRay and still does two radio shows: on an internet stream (WIXY1260Online.com, an online re-creation of Cleveland Top 40 powerhouse WIXY 1260), as well as a weekly show on John Carroll University's WJCU, playing oldies on Saturday afternoons on Rockin' Ray's Record Recall. Ray refuses to be bored!