Arthur William Bell III was born on June 17, 1945, in Jacksonville, N.C., while his parents were stationed at Camp Lejeune there. His father, a Marine Corps captain, was descended from one of the original settlers of Stamford, Conn., in the 1640s. His mother, the former Jane Lee Gumaer, was a Marine sergeant.

At 13, Art became a licensed amateur radio operator. He was an Air Force medic during the Vietnam War and later a disc jockey for an English-language station in Okinawa.

There, he was said to have set a record for continuous broadcasting — 116 hours and 15 minutes — to raise money to ferry stranded Vietnamese orphans from Saigon to the United States for adoption by American families. (He also claimed a record of 57 hours of uninterrupted seesawing while broadcasting.)

Mr. Bell enrolled as an engineering major at the University of Maryland but dropped out to return to radio, first as a disc jockey in California and Nevada. Students of numerology were mindful that he began his political talk show in 1984 — and also that he died on a Friday the 13th.

Mr. Bell is survived by his fourth wife, Airyn Ruiz; their children, Asia and Alexander; and three children from his earlier marriages, Vincent Pontius, Lisa Pontius Minei and Arthur Bell IV.

His “Coast to Coast” show was syndicated and broadcast from 1989 to 2003, followed by episodic returns on satellite radio and online with a program called “Midnight in the Desert,” which he canceled in 2015 after he said shots had been fired at his home.

Mr. Bell said he kept a .40-caliber Glock 22 in a desk drawer of his isolated desert home.

“If I had a problem out here,” he told Time magazine in 2012, “well, the police would arrive just in time to draw the chalk outline on my floor.”