BALTIMORE
Kirk, Mark and Lopez, the wacky morning jocks on 98 Rock, are riffing on crummy Christmas gifts they have known when newsman Bob Lopez abruptly stops talking. He jabs a white button on the console in front of him, taking himself off the air, and turns his head away from his colleagues.
An instant later, huge heaving hacks explode from Lopez's body. His ample frame recoils, then doubles over, as a great disturbance roars from him. And then the storm subsides. Lopez hoists himself back up and starts chatting again with Kirk McEwen and Mark Ondayko about crummy Christmas gifts.
Kirk McEwen, far left, Mark Ondayko and Bob Lopez have been doing 98 Rock's morning show together for seven years. The longtime Baltimore radio newsman has encouraged McEwen and Ondayko to share in his lighthearted on-air references to his cancer, which includes making cracks about his hairless head, the result of a recent round of radiation treatment.
(Photos Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
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The coughing is a residual effect of the treatments that Lopez, 51, underwent over the summer . Having your lungs seared with powerful blasts of cell-killing radiation is a bit of a liability for a guy doing drive-time radio, as Lopez has for 27 years on Baltimore's 98 Rock. But Lopez -- everyone calls him that, just Lopez -- is an old pro, and he has his button-jabbing routine down. Every time he feels another rumble coming on, which is often on KML's 5:30 to 10 a.m. shift, he hits the white "cough" button to spare listeners his coughing spasms.
Lopez has discussed almost everything else about his delicate health on the air. How, almost a year ago, his legs started to hurt. How the swelling got so bad he couldn't walk. Then the first diagnosis (blood clots) and the second, equally ominous one: cancer.
The clots, it turned out, were a side effect of a dime-size tumor growing in his lungs, and smaller cancers in his heart and spine. The radiation and chemotherapy seem to have arrested those tumors, but the news is actually worse. The morning that he broadcast the news of President Bush's reelection, Lopez went home, feeling poorly. He doesn't remember what happened for the next hour, or why he woke up with his tongue hurting and rug burns on his elbow and knee.
He'd had a seizure. Further tests revealed that the cancer had spread from his lungs to his brain.
Disease, particularly the potentially fatal kind, isn't typical fodder for people whose job is to smooth the morning commute with companionable chitchat. But Lopez is living on the air with cancer. It has become part of KML's everyday banter, just like the Ravens' playoff chances or Bush's Cabinet choices.
He not only speaks lightheartedly about it for thousands of people each weekday morning but, with his blessing, McEwen and Ondayko do, too.
When Lopez breaks into a coughing jag, for example, one of his co-hosts will respond by mock-scolding him, "Don't die right now, we have to finish the show!" Sometimes they will demand: "Lopez! Less cancer, more humor!"
A TV commercial promoting KML picked up this dark spirit earlier this fall. The ad, which ran on Baltimore stations, featured Lopez in a hospital bed, with Ondayko and McEwen standing by. "This past spring, Lopez was diagnosed with lung cancer. He's now in a battle for his life," read the words on-screen. Cut to Ondayko and McEwen shaking their heads gravely. Then the voice-over: "Listen to Kirk, Mark and Lopez or we'll pull the plug," with a shot of McEwen holding a cord, laughing. Lopez wears a frightened expression.
Some people were offended, acknowledges Dave Hill, the radio station's program manager. But he adds that the ad was in keeping with Lopez's wishes. "No one has been more forward about his life and condition than him," Hill says.
This sort of humor colors the off-air relationship of the three men, who have been doing the morning show together for seven years. When you meet McEwen in 98 Rock's studio, he glances across the console at Lopez and cracks within earshot, "I've got March in the pool."
This puts a momentary chill in the air, until Ondayko pushes the envelope a little further. "We've been enjoying the drugs he's on, vicariously."
