Zings and Arrows : An Australian native has entertained Midwest radio listeners for 20 years from a cubbyhole studio in Glendale.

“A bird owner who claims that his parrot, named Sgt. Pepper, helped the late John Lennon write ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and other Beatle hits has decided he’ll sell the bird for $500,000.

“Now the bird is living in Hong Kong--that is, unless he ended up in a pot of won-ton parrot soup--and the owner said, ‘If a crow like Madonna can make money out of records, my parrot will make the Beatles popular again.’ ”

The radio voice is unmistakably Aus- try -lian. The panache is part Walter Winchell, part P. T. Barnum. The script oozes with enough wit, sarcasm and corn to fill a Midwest grain elevator.

Gordon Currie, 76 going on 36, is on the air again--to St. Louis, to Decatur, Ill., and to a lot of other notches in America’s Farm Belt--with news flashes and dashes called “Live From Hollywood.”

But wait!

Like so much else about Hollywood, it’s partly smoke and mirrors. Currie, a humorist, caricaturist and erstwhile Australian World War II correspondent who says “like” for “lake” and “mite” for “mate,” broadcasts not from Hollywood but from his house in Glendale, a few miles away, as the kangaroo hops.

But if the truth be known, Currie’s makeshift studio--a cramped, 8-by-8-foot converted upstairs bedroom with an acoustical ceiling--went Hollywood decades ago.

Here, for 20 years, Currie has entertained listeners over CBS-owned KMOX in St. Louis (and over WSOY in Decatur for a dozen years) with daily or weekly snippets of news and commentary on entertainment, politics or whatever else springs to his quick, facile mind.

Stretched across a bulletin board in front of him is a horizontal photo of those familiar hillside letters that spell out “HOLLYWOOD.” Nearby are memorabilia, including a congratulatory photograph signed by Walt Disney in 1934, when Currie won a contest for drawing Mickey Mouse, as well as caricatures he’s scrawled of Disney, Bob Hope, Queen Elizabeth II, Albert Einstein, the Beatles and the Duke of Windsor, among many others, including Currie as he sees himself, his trademark droopy mustache upstaged by wings and a halo.

Amid the clutter of yellowed clippings, old photos, audiotapes and caricatures that bore his signature as a regular feature in the old Los Angeles Mirror 40 years ago, Currie reads into a microphone, his script typewritten in capital letters and crackling with wisecracks to listeners half a continent away:

“Roger Clinton is singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ tonight at the cycle-jumping contest in Bay St. Louis, Miss. Isn’t it bad enough for the people to put up with the floods and the lousy weather without suffering cruel and unusual punishment such as this?

“Why didn’t they get a class act like Roseanne Arnold?”

Now and then too, Currie imparts a vocal “thumbs up.” Example: The new film biography of Tina Turner--”What’s Love Got to Do With It”--is a “terrific movie,” he tells listeners in St. Louis.

But he warns: “You won’t believe it when you see St. Louis in 1958. I think they did it all on the set. It’s the only weak part of the movie. I was in St. Louis in 1958, and it was a very nice, modern city. But, boy, you wouldn’t believe it from this. It looks like Columbus had just arrived.”

Later, on WSOY, Currie plugs his longtime Decatur sponsor--the Hickory Point Bank--by announcing his “Hickory Point Hero,” a biweekly feature in which he salutes someone from southern Illinois who has, in Currie’s words, “done something remarkable.”

Scanning the Decatur Herald-Review (which he receives by mail), Currie recently read of a man who had lost his dog, only for someone to retrieve the dog and place it in a local shelter.

“The owner didn’t have the $5 to pay for the registration, so an employee at the shelter paid the $5,” Currie says. “I made him my Hickory Point Hero.”

What Currie doesn’t tell his audience (but tells an interviewer) is that he sent $20 to the man who worked at the shelter. “That’s $5 to reimburse him,” he says, “$5 for next year’s registration and a $10 donation to the shelter.”

Not surprisingly, Currie has attracted a following in Midwestern states that pick up KMOX’s powerful 50,000-watt signal. Many hang on his Crocodile Dundee accent (not knowing that he looks like the late Col. Harland Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame), his gossipy tidbits about the rich and famous, or even a heart-tugging yarn about the obscure and not-so-privileged.

For largely “buttoned-down, conservative” listeners, as KMOX program director Tom Langmyer describes them, they don’t seem to mind whenever “Gordon throws out those zingers. Let’s face it,” Langmyer adds: “He’s been with us for 20 years. He’s earned the right to be irreverent.”

The only problem, Langmyer says, occurs whenever a breaking news or weather story, or a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game, delays Currie’s drive-time chat beyond its customary 4:20 p.m. (CDT) broadcast. “Our switchboard goes crazy,” he says. “People ask, ‘Where’s Gordon?’ ”

“Jane Fonda and Ted Turner will be keynote speakers at the International Bison Conference in La Crosse, Wis., on July 30.

“Ted and Jane would like you to eat more buffalo meat. It’s all in the cause of a fat-free, healthy America. The fact that they own a bison ranch, with nearly 5,000 head of the hairy beasts, in Montana is just coincidental.

“There’s little chance of them exporting bison meat to Australia because, Down Under, a bison is something you wash your ‘fice’ in.”

To Gordon Victor Currie, the world isn’t so much a stage as a caricature.

“I can look at almost anything in the newspaper,” he says, “and I can find something funny in it.”

By their words and deeds, many of Currie’s subjects--from those on silver screens to smoke-filled rooms--unwittingly provide grist for his broadcasts and drawing board. And Currie gobbles it all up like someone whose worldliness mixes well with the instincts of a small-town crier--even in his radio spots for Decatur’s Hickory Point Bank.

“He has a knack of telling the story of our bank in a down-home way,” Dale Arnold, the bank’s president, says, “so that our listeners can listen to a commercial before they realize they’re hearing a commercial. They won’t tune it out before they hear the message.”

Bald, bespectacled and bewhiskered, Currie exudes the irrepressible charm of his own caricatures, his gift of gab and infectious laughter running nonstop as he draws faces--often in only 15 seconds.

“Gordon interviewed and sketched many of our stars,” says Chuck Panama of Brentwood, a retired longtime publicist at 20th Century-Fox Television. “He was so fast that he handed them their caricatures before the interview was over.”

It’s a skill Currie parlayed into a personal appearance tour from 1954 to 1963, when he persuaded banks in 90 U. S. cities to commission him to sketch thousands of customers (and would-be customers) as a way of drumming up business.

As he toured with his wife, Eve, in their trailer, Currie visited 43 states, making speeches, going on TV, spreading goodwill and cultivating an affection for America, his adopted country, which he says remains unappreciated by too many Americans.

A non-U. S. citizen by choice, Currie insists that he can “look at both sides. I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m an independent thinker, a very free soul and sometimes rude,” even occasionally jabbing at himself as he throws haymakers at others.

“I would have worn my toupee,” he quips, posing for a photographer, “but Burt Reynolds is wearing it.”

Born on July 26, 1917, in Sydney, Currie attended both private and public schools, his own world a stage-to-be. At 13, he sang and danced on a children’s radio program. In high school, he wrote a Hollywood column, culling items from local film distributors. At 18, he served as marketing director for 25 movie houses and, at 20, published a twice-weekly community newspaper.

He married Eve in 1941, then managed two theaters in Adelaide and joined the Melbourne Herald when war clouds gathered over the Pacific. During World War II, he worked a variety of assignments for the Australian Army, the British Navy and the U. S. Army.

“They wanted an Australian on the U. S. Army staff to be the one who would decide where the black soldiers would be allocated,” Currie recalls of America’s then-segregated military. “They could blame an Australian for it.”

The war over in 1945, Currie traveled to Tokyo as a special radio correspondent, interviewing hundreds of just-released Australian prisoners of war and shipping the transcriptions home for Christmas broadcasts. It was, Currie says, “probably the biggest achievement in my life. The parents of those boys had no idea they were even alive!”

In 1948, Currie traveled with Eve to the United States to start a yearlong lecture tour. Arriving in New York, the Curries saw a newspaper headline: “CURRIE IS A SPY,” a reference to a former U. S. government figure implicated in an espionage case.

“My God, Gordon!” Eve teased. “They know!”

In 1951, after the Curries returned to stay, Gordon drew notables he interviewed for a Los Angeles Mirror feature called “Caricature Quiz.” Soon he and Eve toured the nation, including Dallas on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

There, Currie broadcast reports to Australia and New Zealand--an activity he would pursue for many years from Southern California. He and Eve settled in Glendale, where they would rear their son, Victor (now a Universal Studios tour official)--and Gordon would start up the U. S. chapter of the Australian-American Assn., edit publications for the Los Angeles World Trade Center and, more recently, lampoon hometown politicians with caricatures in the Glendale News-Press.

“Everybody’s retired but me,” Currie wisecracks again, his life still a whirlwind.

Of his irreverence, Currie traces it to believing that “you’ve got to be a little different to be noticed,” a trait stemming from a childhood incident that, he says, could inspire the title of his autobiography, if he ever writes one: “Don’t Piddle on My Cabbage Patch.”

“Next door, a woman had a lot of cabbages growing in the back yard,” he recalls. “I couldn’t have been much older than 3. Just when the local mayor showed up, I was there, too, and our neighbor shouted out, ‘Mrs. Currie, Gordon is piddling on my cabbages again!’ ”

Currie grins, almost defiantly.

“I got noticed,” he says. “And I’ve been piddling on other people’s cabbages ever since.”

“Looking at the Connie Chung-Dan Rather news team didn’t exactly set me on fire. I like Connie. She’s a nice lady. I don’t dislike Rather. I find him just about as boring as George Stephanopoulos.

“Maybe it goes back to when I first met Rather. He was a local reporter in Dallas during the JFK tragedy. He complained to the sheriff about all the foreign press getting favorable treatment. I was the only foreign press there at the time. And the sheriff told Rather to grow up, saying, ‘He’ll make it big one day if he stops griping.’

“I guess Rather did something right.”