Craig Wittler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 30, 1955, a few hours before James Dean died. (When Jimmy Dean recently died, he went ‘uh oh’ and checked his vital signs 37 times over the next 36 hours)
Dragged to Los Angeles at the age of 5 (via the Historic Route 66 when you could still drive it), he did most of his growing up in the San Fernando Valley.
In college, he endeavored to break into the Radio Biz by calling in to every non-political non-sports talk show in L.A., using the name Wendell (because Craig wasn’t whimsical enough). At one point, relatively obscure L.A. radio legend “Sweet” Dick Whittington made a running joke of “keeping Wendell on hold”, which Wendell/Craig slyly went along with and was ultimately rewarded with a real job as Whittington’s on-air Assistant Producer. It was the highlight of his ultimately brief radio career, unbeknown to him (otherwise he wouldn’t have ‘moved on’ after a year). While writing jokes for disc jockeys, Wendell/Craig was also strongly endorsed by better-known L.A. radio legend Gary Owens who called him “funnier than Jack Lord and Lorne Greene combined”.
In the ’80s, Craig (not Wendell) wrote and researched for the Wallace/Wallechinsky “People’s Almanac/Book of Lists” series, getting a published credit for the semi-embarrassing “Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People”. He also wrote for KROQ’s “Newsrag”, a satitical news comedy show designed to fulfill FCC requirements for ‘news-like’ content, and wrote fake commercials and song parodies for a radio syndication service heard on a bunch of local radio stations that never admitted they didn’t make their own ‘bits’.
After several years trying to make an honest living in Accounting and what they used to call Data Processing, Craig got onto the Internet, using the alias Wendell because AOL forums reminded him of calling into talk radio in the ’70s (and not in a good way). In 1999, he started blogging, earning the 87th listing on the first “blogroll” only to get kicked off due to negative reaction to a web-based prank. He also made a poorly-designed site that collected over 2000 oxymorons for the year 2000, called “The OXY2K” (a collection that he is currently turning into a real database for a site expected to debut in 2011).
As Wendell, he was the 206th member of the now-over-100K-member community site MetaFilter where he contributed heavily and was frequently chided for lapses in judgment. And he has written numerous articles and commentaries for the Entertainment Section of MSNBC.com, including interviews with fictitious characters and a list of show biz’s Top 10 Overrated Stars.
Since deciding to ‘retire’ Wendell in late 2009, he has been holed up in a small apartment in a sparsely populated area between San Luis Obispo and Pismo Beach, California, while deciding what to do next. This is apparently it.
