I use the term “celebrities” loosely, which is why I put it in quotes. It could be radio or TV personalities, or it could be someone from local TV ads like car dealerships, etc. But I’m looking for stories of people you thought were local but turned out not to be.
I grew up in the St. Louis area, and in the early to mid 70’s the local CBS affiliate had a late night talk show on Saturday nights hosted by Regis Philbin. According to his wikipedia page, he flew in every weekend to do the show. I was a kid at the time, and I had no idea - I thought he was just some local guy with a show. When he started popping up on national TV a lot I thought it was a “local boy makes it big” kind of thing, only to find out later he had been famous nationally since the early 60’s.
By the late 80’s the Milwaukee metro area had several news-talk programs with local hosts. I thought he was one of them and was not aware that his show was nationally syndicated.
When I finally got on the show I was blathering away about a local issue and he had no idea WTF I was talking about,
Gayle King is now a CBS National News anchor and Friend of Oprah, but in the 1980s and 1990s, she was an anchor on the CBS affiliate in Hartford, Connecticut.
Radio is rife with hosts that pretend to be local, but are actually syndicated. They do this by vaguely referring to “the city” they are in, and making sure that callers don’t refer to anything that might identify where they are calling from. Entercom is infamous for firing local radio hosts and replacing them with pseudo-locals.
Though this isn’t an example of someone whom I personally thought was local, in the early 1980s, Jim Varney portrayed his Ernest P. Worrell character (years before he started doing movies as the character) in a variety of local and regional advertisements, including for dairies, restaurants, and natural gas utilities. I would imagine that, at that time, a lot of people thought it was a local character/actor.
Somewhat along those lines, I’d long thought John Boy and Billy were just local Charlotte area morning show hosts. And that was how they started out. But as it turns out even when I was in high school they were already syndicated.
Jim Varney is a great example. I’m pretty sure I remember him doing some “Hey Vern” commercials for Laclede Gas in St. Louis (the natural gas utility).
Jason Momoa. Admittedly he was born in Hawaii, but he grew up in Iowa. He likes to emphasize his Hawaii connection, but it would be like me saying I’m from that Western state I was born in but moved away from when I was two instead of the West Texas shithole I grew up in. Shithole it may be, but that’s still my hometown for all practical purposes.
Another Milwaukee one from the late 80s I remember was Dan Patrick. He used to do a sports segment on the local Bob & Brian show. When he showed up on ESPN I thought “Wow, local guy went big time” then found out he was from Dayton, OH and had already done sports for CNN.
Some disgraced Tour De France bike fucker. He was never really from here, just did some training in the area, and when his name meant something, everybody jumped on the band-wagon of ‘Local Boy’.
