Doc Searls Weblog

My given name is David. Family members still call me that. Or Dave. Everybody else calls me Doc. Since people often ask me where that nickname came from, and since apparently I haven’t answered it anywhere I can now find online*, here’s the story.

Thousands of years ago, in the mid-1970s, I worked at a little radio station owned by Duke University called WDBS. A nice history of the station survives, in instant-loading 1st generation html, here. WDBS veterans, who are many, owe a giant hat tip to Bob Chapman for talking Duke into buying the station in 1971, when he was still a student there. (Try doing that, average undergrad.)

As signals went, WDBS was a shrub among redwoods: strong in Duke’s corner of Durham, a bit weak in Chapel Hill, and barely audible in Raleigh—the three corners of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. (One of those redwoods, WRAL, was audible, its slogan bragged, “from Hatteras to Hickory,” a circle 350 miles wide.)

As a commercial station, WDBS had to sell advertising. This proved so difficult that we made up ads for stuff that didn’t exist. That, in addition to selling ads, was my job. The announcer’s name I used for many of our fake ads, plus other humorous features, was Doctor Dave. It wasn’t a name I chose. Bob Conroy did that. I also had a humorous column under the same name for the station’s monthly arts guide, with the image above at the top of the page. That image was created by Ray Simone, who later became a business partner.

After leaving the station (but while still writing and performing as Doctor Dave) I was hired by Ray and David Hodskins (both devoted WDBS listeners) to write advertising copy for their small “multiple media studio,” which morphed into Hodskins Simone & Searls (aka HS&S), an advertising agency. Since two of us were named David, and Hodskins was especially insistent on using that name (even though his actual forename, I learned years later, was Paul), everybody at the agency called me Doctor Dave, which wore down to Doc. Since my social network in business was larger than all my other circles, the name stuck.

I did see a chance to go back to David when I moved west to prospect for business in Silicon Valley. Early in that work, I market-tested David vs. Doc when I attended my first COMDEX in Las Vegas. I had two badges made, one with Doc Searls and the other with David Searls, and wore each on two of my four days there. Afterward, nobody remembered David, and everybody remembered Doc. So the nickname stuck, especially since my prospecting for business worked out. Within a year, we became one of Silicon Valley’s hottest ad agencies and closed our North Carolina office.

The nickname survives. Alas, HS&S was sold to Publicis in 1999, Ray died in 2011, and David in 2022. I don’t miss the ad biz, but I do miss Ray and David, both gone way too soon.

For an example of Doctor Dave’s output, see the TV Guide listings parody here.

*[Later…] Or couldn’t at the time. Hanan Cohen, below, finds a post from 2009 that visits the nickname’s origin story.