J. R. Gach

Who is J. R. Gach?

Jay Robert "J.R." Gach is a controversial talk radio host and shock jock from Schenectady, New York.

Gach was born in 1952 to Joseph Harry Gach, a retired army colonel, and Dorothy Louise Shive. He got his start at a couple of stations in Chester, Pennsylvania as "Jay Roberts" in the late 1960s.

In 1989 through 1992, Gach worked for "Kajun 103" in Baton Rouge Louisiana, as a morning show host. In a dramatic foreshadowing of his radio career to follow, Gach spectacularly flamed out in Baton Rouge. In this early era of talk radio, Gach also attempted a midday show on 1300 WIBR in Port Allen, Louisiana. Apparently due to his excessive weight, Gach was often at a loss trying to talk for extended periods on WIBR without use of his cart-based sound effects. Gach would later state his poor performance in Louisiana was an act of deliberate self-sabotage brought on by depressive episodes.

From the summer of 1992 through 1995, Gach worked as a talk radio host on WGR and later WWKB in Buffalo, New York, where a doctor secretly treated Gach's depression with the antidepressant Prozac. He famously quipped on the air that he liked the Buffalo area and wanted to stay there so much that, if necessary, he would "drive a bus" in order to earn enough money to stay in the area. However, this promise would be broken as he then returned to Louisiana. After WWL he hosted a show from 1998 to 2002 on WGY in Schenectady, NY, the region that he would call home for the next several years. During this time, he briefly held the late-night host's position at one of America's top news/talk stations, WLW in Cincinnati, Ohio, from which he was fired for referring to Japanese people as "yellow monkeys." As his behavior became increasingly erratic starting in 2001, Gach mysteriously disappeared from the airwaves in August 2002; two months later, his then-wife announced that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had attempted suicide.