Jerry Cesak, who was a fixture on San Diego radio for 27 years as co-host of the “Jeff Jer Showgram” morning show, passed away on Sunday at the age of 74. The longtime San Diego resident retired from broadcasting in 2015, and in 2016, the radio show he co-hosted for 33 years with on-air partner and close friend Jeff Detrow was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame. After retiring, Cesak — a vegetarian for 53 years and a practicing Buddhist — devoted much of his time to his lifelong passion for raising money and awareness for animal welfare causes. His wife of 34 years, Pam Cesak, said he died in her arms and left in her care their beloved dogs Winston and Gigi and cats Savanah and Isabella. “Long before he ever met Jeff (Detrow), he was using his mike and platform for animals,” she said on Thursday. “His voice had a lot of power and he was really genuinely passionate about his advocacy for animals.” Jerry Cesak, third from left, with his KyXy “Jeff and Jer Showgram” morning team in 2015, from left, Emily Griffith, Laura Cain, Randy Hoag, Jeff Detrow and “Little Tommy” Sablan.(Alejandro Tamayo / UT file) Detrow — who moved away from San Diego in late 2017 and now works for a radio company in Chicago — said Thursday that he and Cesak once calculated that they did more than 10,000 live radio shows together. Fortunately, Detrow said, it never felt like work. He said the 3 1/2 to 4 hours they spent on-air each morning was frequently “the best part of my day.” “We couldn’t have been more different in our lives, lifestyles, beliefs and practices, but we were raised with the same love and decency,” Detrow said. “That is what we started from the very first second we met. We both could just tell we had a common thread.” Cesak was born on May 11, 1951, in Maryland, where his childhood idol was the famed DJ/sports announcer Johnny Holliday. Holliday frequently sprinkled stories about his family, pets and personal life into his shows, so he came across more as a real person than an on-air personality. That became the model Cesak used in his radio career, which began shortly after he graduated from the University of Maryland with a theater degree. He first worked at a radio station in Washington, D.C., and later Baltimore, Minneapolis and Detroit, where in 1982, his national search for a new show partner came to an end when he met face-to-face with Detrow, who at the time was a morning radio host in Phoenix. “I fell in love with my wife (Pam) the second I saw her, and when Jeff and I looked at each other, it was over,” Cesak told the U-T in 2015. “He has a great smile and a great warmth about him, and both of us knew that we would become brothers.” Detrow, who got his first radio job at 14, said his chemistry “clicked” with Cesak because he’s a natural introvert and Cesak was more of a trained extrovert. “When we’d enter a room for an appearance, he was kind enough to go first and he carried that through his life,” Detrow said. “I’ve not met someone who was such an interesting synthesis of larger than life and extremely personable. Everywhere he went, he woke up every day to make people’s lives better.” Their morning show partnership began in Detroit, then they moved to Chicago before arriving in San Diego in 1988 at the newly re-branded station Y-95. Cesak’s future wife, Pam, was serving as the station’s program manager at the time. It was love at first sight for her, as well. With the support of their show team — “Little Tommy” Sablan, Laura Cain, Randy Hoag and Emily Griffith — the duo quickly built one of the city’s most popular morning-drive radio shows. Although they shared an on-air joke that they had just “11 listeners,” the Showgram frequently ranked No. 1 in the ratings, and both men won “Personality of the Year” awards from the magazines Billboard and Radio and Records. Some of their most famous promotions were creating the annual Jingle Ball holiday concerts that raise money for domestic abuse survivors and organizing a post-9/11 “Human American Flag” that drew more than 110,000 people. Bob Bolinger served as the show’s general manager beginning in 1993, when the show moved to Q106 and later Star 107.3, Star 94.1 and KyXy. He said Cesak was always authentic with his listeners. “His personality was like he was on-air, but with greater depth and a bigger heart,” Bolinger said. “There was not a kinder, more giving and funnier person than Jerry.” Pam Cesak said her husband decided to retire in 2015 so he could explore new opportunities. “He wanted to go out on top,” she said. “The (radio) industry was going through significant change and he wanted to do different things. He wanted to sleep in in the mornings, he went on to have a TV show and he wanted to do more philanthropy.” Cesak and Detrow parted friends, and Pam Cesak said the men continued talking “constantly,” right up until last week. “The relationship between those two guys were real. That was not an act. They never had a fight and they also had enormous respect for each other’s talent.” Over the years, Cesak served on the boards of the Humane Society of the United States and the Rancho Coastal Humane Society in Encinitas. He and his wife also founded the Unicorn Foundation, which produced the multimedia show “Bless the Beasts” to raise awareness about animal cruelty. Cesak was also instrumental in the passage of California Proposition 2, a 2008 law that prohibited the cruel confinement of farm animals. The Cesaks co-chaired a campaign that raised $16 million for the rebuilding of Rancho Coastal Humane Society. That project included the construction of the 5,000-square-foot Charlotte’s Medical Center, named after one of the Cesaks’ cats. In lieu of flowers, Pam Cesak requested donations to the Rancho Coastal Humane Society. Cesak also wrote a children’s book, “My Personal Panther,” and a play, “Nickels Dimes,” that he directed in a San Diego production that raised money for animal causes. In his pre-retirement interview with the U-T in 2015, Cesak said the thing he would miss most about leaving radio was the opportunity to say something to the audience that “will make them laugh or make them think or make them cry.” “What I would really hope is that when people think about me, they will say, ‘Oh, he’s the guy on the radio who always talked about kindness to animals,’” he said. “If that could happen, I could think, ‘You know what? I’ve had a pretty good life.’” ...read more read less