Just about anyone who lived in the Salt Lake Valley during the 1970s will remember the familiar words heard every Monday morning on the radio:
"And now - Lynn Lehmann - with the Lemon Award of the week."The popular disc jockey would then read the winning letter nominating a person or group that most worthily lived up to the award's title. Lehmann says not a week goes by now that someone doesn't ask him, "What was your favorite Lemon Award?"
And each time he retells his favorite story of the two women schoolteachers who went skiing. The women, according to Lehmann, were at the top of a mountain when one told the other she desperately and quickly needed to find a bathroom.
The woman skier was forced to go behind a thicket of scrub oak. But when the woman shifted her weight to the back of her skis, she began to slide down the mountain.
"She went zooming down the hill in that position with her pants down," explained Lehmann with a broad smile. The woman suffered a broken leg and while in the hospital met a man with a broken arm. When asked how he broke his arm, he told her he'd been skiing and had fallen while staring at a screaming woman sliding down the mountain with her pants around her ankles.
Lehmann's morning radio show on the old KCPX-AM (and KNAK for one year) was a daily staple for many thousands of Utahns from 1969 to 1980. People still tell him how they used to arrive late to class at the U. because they had to listen to his weekly awarding of the Lemon.
During his radio days, Lehmann began taking an interest in television. At KTVX he hosted "Dialing for Dollars" and a high school quiz show and anchored the weekend news. He also hosted "Prime Time Scramble" - a program he syndicated to TV stations in several other markets. "That was exciting for me. Here was Lynn Lehmann, a kid from Holladay with a syndicated TV show."
Today, Lehmann is still in the television business - writing, producing and directing. His company, Lehmann and Associates, is currently trying to market an independent program titled, "Counterfeit Reality."
The program consists of short stories about bizarre and intriguing events that have occurred during the past 100 years and stories that are fabricated. It's up to the viewers to determine which are true and which aren't.
Lehmann's anxious to see the program become a success, but he's not sure he wants to produce a weekly television series. That would mean a move to Hollywood, and Holladay is where he'd rather stay.
Since leaving KCPX in 1980, Lehmann also produced and sold a syndicated news program to 41 television stations. He's also produced several marketing videos for companies, voiced commercials and produced other shows at Osmond Studios. Lehmann admits he occasionally misses radio. Radio was a dream of his ever since he was in elementary school and talked into the handle of a Hoover vacuum. "In my mind, I was already on the air playing the hits."
Life at 41 outside of the control room also has its advantages, said the father of three. "One of the benefits of not doing radio is not having to be in the same place at the same time every day coming up with ideas."
But such ideas are now among Lehmann's favorite memories, such as the one time he jokingly told listeners there was a snow sculpturing contest at Liberty Park. "There was no snow on the ground but people still headed over there for the contest."
Lehmann doesn't rule out a return to the air waves.
Then perhaps Utahns will again hear of the twisted plights of their neighbors such as one past Lemon Award winner, a woman who dumped a scoop of ice cream into trick-or-treaters' bags as they came to her door on Halloween. "She was an 80-year-old just doing what she thought was nice."