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16 DECEMBER 19, 2019
THE GOOD LIFE
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



Photo by Dennis Wilen
J on T akiff swears this story about Dennis Wilen is true.

Takiff had just started as a writer for the Daily News in 1972,
but Wilen, his friend since they met at the 1964 Democratic
National Convention in Atlantic City, was still at 93.3 WMMR,
where the two had briefly worked together. Wilen had been
arranging radio concerts as a freelancer, $300 a pop.

Wilen was in New York and found himself sitting in a con-
ference room at the Gulf and Western Building, smoking a joint
with record company executives and listening to an album,
released the year before, that hadn’t gotten a lot of play. Wilen
still isn’t entirely sure whether it was the weed, the speakers or
the music itself, but something about the album really landed for
him. He decided then that he would just go ahead and invite the
guy, Billy Joel, to perform a radio concert for WMMR.

Much has changed since then.

The Gulf and Western Building is now the Trump International
Hotel and Tower on Columbus Circle, named after Wilen’s
famous one-time classmate at the University of Pennsylvania.

And the radio concert that Wilen produced with Joel is often
credited as one of the key moments in the singer’s propulsion to
superstardom. But for Wilen, much has still stayed the same. He still loves
music, and he still finds himself crossing paths with famously
interesting people.

Wilen, 72, was born at Temple University Hospital and
attended Haverford High School before he went off to Penn. His
mother’s family owned a grocery store in West Philadelphia, and
his father’s family still owns Wilensky Locks & Hardware on
Passyunk Avenue.

Amy Buckman Wilen, his sister, was a reporter for 6abc for
decades, and their mother was a frequent public speaker; clearly,
she believes, he had a “performance gene in his DNA.” Though
he’d end up behind the boards instead of onstage, he performed
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JEWISHEXPONENT.COM THE GOOD LIFE
DECEMBER 19, 2019
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