"Swing Shift" labor of love.

Byline: PEOPLE By Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

Mild-mannered postal clerk by day, earnest and erudite DJ of early 20th century jazz, swing and pop by night.

A new superhero of some sort? No - well, to loyal listeners maybe, because it's Lloyd Zimmer and Melissa, his wife and loyal sidekick, swooping into area living rooms every Sunday evening on the airwaves of public radio station KRVM-FM.

Actually, Lloyd dropped the postal clerk part of his double life a year ago, retiring after 33 years with the U.S. Postal Service, first in Southern California and then for a decade in Eugene. For the past seven years, Melissa has been taking minutes at meetings of Lane County's board of commissioners.

That might sound a bit humdrum to some, but it's a matter of personal satisfaction - both say if they had it to do all over again, they wouldn't trade their careers in public service. Be that as it may, every Sunday night, the Zimmers change their tune.

For 10 years - the actual anniversary falls on Sunday - the couple has hosted a show called "Swing Shift," playing "the best in popular music from the nearly forgotten '20s, '30s and '40s," according to KRVM's programming chart.

The lineup includes many of the big bands and the big names of the era, but Lloyd Zimmer also likes to dip beneath the surface and pull up lesser-known musicians and lyricists - the likes of Adelaide Hall, Dorothy Fields or King Oliver - whose work his audience otherwise might never hear.

However, he doesn't play random selections just for the heck of it. Lloyd spends as much as a day or two every week figuring out a theme for the next show - songs about summer, maybe, or songs by people with the last name of Johnson - and then choosing the music to match.

He scrawls out the theme and the "sets" - groups of three or four songs that illustrate the theme he's chosen - on sheets of ruled notebook paper until he has 27 or 28 pieces. Then he jots down cursory notes about the songs, the performers and the era that he thinks the audience will enjoy.

"Sometimes I have too much information - I have to balance how much talk there is and how much music," he said. "It's like putting together a puzzle. I try to come up with a show that I would like to listen to."

Sometimes that happens in unexpected and touching ways.

"Once we got a phone call from a woman who's mother has Alzheimer's disease," Melissa recalled. "She said her mother heard the music on our show and just lit up and started recalling things from her childhood."

The show stems from a passion for music that has gripped 56-year-old Lloyd Zimmer most of his life, although the genre has changed a time or two.

"I grew up listening to the music of the '30s and '40s, because that's what my parents listened to,' he said. "When I was about 12, I discovered artists like Jimmy Darren and Bobby Vee, and from there I developed an insatiable appetite for rock 'n' roll."

He started collecting 45 rpm singles as a teenager and amassed about 12,000 of them before he stopped adding to his collection. They are still in the couple's garage.

"I pretty much had everything, because rock 'n' roll was only five or six years old when I started," he said. "I used to spend all my spare time searching for them. But I stopped when Melissa and I got married in 1975 - I guess I figured I should spend more time with my wife than my records."

He'd gotten disillusioned with rock music in the early '70s anyway, about the time the Beatles split up, so the timing was OK, he said.

Appropriately enough, the couple met at a dance.

"I was a member of a singles group, and we were raising money for the City of Hope Hospital for cancer research," Melissa Zimmer said. "I was in charge of the dance, and I saw that he was new there, so I asked him to dance."

Soon after, he asked her out again, and that was that.

"Our first date was at Sea World," she said. "He spent $100 on me - that was a lot in 1975. That was on Sept. 20. We got married Dec. 28 the same year."

A Southern Californian through and through - at least back then - Melissa gravitated more toward television, especially game shows, than she did the old musical standards she enjoys now as part of the Swing Shift team.

"I was on Wheel of Fortune twice - the first time I won a trip to New Orleans, and the second time a trip to San Diego," she said. "Not too long after we were married, Lloyd and I were the grand prize winners on The Newlywed Game."

They took home two recliners and a very large TV set as their payoff. They gave one of the recliners to his parents, the other to a friend.

"We kept the TV set, though - we still had it when we moved to Oregon in 1993."

By then, Lloyd's passion for music had reverted to the songs of his youth - "My appetite re-emerged," he says - and he started collecting again. Now, of course, he stores his acquisitions on CDs, of which he has well over a thousand and which take up most of the living room and part of the dining room of the family's north Eugene home.

In a few weeks, when they move to a new, larger house a couple of miles away, he'll have "a large room upstairs just for my music," he said.

Although she grew up listening to her father sing music from the '30s and '40s, Melissa, now 51, never developed the same knowledge about music or the radio experience that Lloyd did - he's been on the air one place or another almost continuously since his college years at the University of California at Davis - and that's reflected in the way they run the show.

"Lloyd won't tell me what he's playing before the show starts," she said. "He uses me as an audience when he explains the music, and I respond with comments to what he's saying. He thinks it's more spontaneous that way - he wants me to be surprised, just like the listeners."

Nonetheless, she plays an important role on Swing Shift, Lloyd insists.

"It works as well as it does because we're a couple who get along well, and we laugh a lot together," he said. "The handful of shows I've ever done without Melissa have been difficult. But we never get in the way of the music - on the show, the music's No. 1, we're not."

They've been approached once or twice about syndicating the Swing Shift, but they've always demurred.

"It wouldn't be the same. It would have to be polished and professional, and I don't want that kind of pressure," Lloyd said. "I've been on the radio for more than 30 years, and I've never made a dime from it, and that's fine. I just do it because I love it. And I'm happy that Melissa has never once said, `Why?' '

TUNING IN "SWING SHIFT"

Eugene residents Lloyd and Melissa Zimmer volunteer their time each week on public radio station KRVM, hosting a program that features popular music from the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

Time: Sundays from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.

On the dial: 91.9 FM

Information: 687-3370

CAPTION(S):

Spike Jones and Artie Shaw are familiar artists to fans of the music played on the "Swing Shift" show. The Zimmers add a good deal more obscure music to the mix.