The Unofficial SDMB "Radio Days" Thread

Cafe Society
1

Hey Ladies and Gents

Rather than keeping on with the WKRP In Cincinatti on DVD hijack, I decided to just open up a whole new thread here.

With an international membership, I am certain there are stories about your broadcast days you’d like to share, so let’s do it here if we can.

I will begin by sharing how I began:

On Sundays, engineering the preachers on WLBB-AM. Easy money, except one also had to read the obituaries, and God forbid if you ever got a name wrong, or if one of the other DJ’s crept up behind you, simulating pissing into a cup as you were reading them.

You couldn’t really “kill” the mic, because playing behind your voice was “Amazing Grace” , and if you broke away to laugh, it spoiled the effect, so you did a lot of coughing and pinching your leg… :smiley:

Quasi

2

Speaking of obituaries…

My first station read obituaries during the 6 p.m. news every evening as a matter of course. Why? Because the local newspaper was a weekly, and it was entirely possible for someone to die and the funeral to be held between the weekly editions of the paper. If we didn’t broadcast the obituaries, there would be people who would miss funerals they would have attended had the town had a daily newspaper.

Fast forward 40 years, and the station no longer does obituaries because the local paper is now published twice a week…

3

Oh where do I begin? I started as the night guy on a small FM station in 1980. Just me in the studio–and a whole buncha cranks on the phone. No, we did not allow them on the air as a rule but they all thought they were on in real time. A typical conversation when the phone rang:

Me: Hi, CJS.
Them: You fucker! [pause] I guess that’s on the air, huh? Ha, ha!
Me: No, sorry.
Them: Fuck.

Or I’d get a threat of some kind:

Me: Hi, CJS.
Them: If you don’t put on Billy Squier’s “Stroke” right now, I’m gonna come down there and beat your fucking head in!
Me: Okay.

There was a security guard on the building door, a few floors, and (if I wished it) a few locked doors between me and the hallway. I wasn’t worried.

Interestingly, I did get some interest from a young lady. She would be there when I showed up–very quiet person–and after a little while, after I figured she was harmless (she must have weighed all of 98 pounds, so I figured I could handle her if she went nuts), I let her in. She curled up in the corner on one of the easy chairs we had in the studio while I did my show, never saying a word. This went on for a number of weeks.

I did get her to open up after a while. She was just lonely, really, a student who wanted to meet the voice on the radio. Yes, to anticipate your questions, we went out a few times. But that ended. As did her visits. I was kind of sad about that; I did enjoy her company, even if she mostly said nothing while I gabbed away into the mike.

4

I had a college internship at a radio station in Canton, Ohio in Jan. 1986. I covered some local news stories, did some interviews, and several times handled the top-of-the-hour newsreading. Pretty cool for a college kid. The Space Shuttle Challenger blew up that month, and I was working that morning; very exciting to be there as the AP wire was spitting out the latest news. A rival station’s DJ wasn’t thinking and played Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m Going Down” that day, then apologized profusely on-air.

Good times.

5

This happened at one station I worked at.

The weekend news guy was a journalism student at the local college – I think he was a sophomore at the time. Once the greedy station manager told him that since he was only on the air once an hour, he should clock in right before the newscast and clock out right afterwards.

The kid instantly figured out that he would be paid for approximately one hour for an entire day’s work and told the station manager he’d do it, but would only report news that actually happened while he was clocked in.

I had a listener call and threaten suicide. One of us tried to keep her on the studio line while we called the police on the office line.

Greedy (but inept) station managers and unstable listeners. As much a part of real broadcasting as bad cart machines.

6
  1. I’ve been out of radio for a few years while finishing college, getting married and working in a moderately well-paid (for the time) but dead-end job with a fence company in the college town. I decide I really want an indoors job again, and see if this radio thing will work, so I flood the state with tapes and apps, finally getting a wedge - a weekend job that promises to turn full time in a few months. The station is located 20 miles from my parent’s home in the next town over, so my wife and I can stay rent-free with the parents. (A bit awkward, but not bad for a couple of months.)

I have the sign-on shift Sunday morning, and one day the unforgivable happens. I wake up just as I’m supposed to be kicking the transmitter on - 20 miles away. Panic ensues. I throw on my clothes, run for the car, speed down the freeway and get to the station 25 minutes late. I just know I’ll be met at the door by the manager, who will fire my part-time ass and I’ll really be hurting. But just in case, I plan a strategy.

Arrive at neighboring town, roll through the city up the hill to the station, and - thank whomever - nobody’s there. I unlock, kick the transmitter on with criminally minimal warmup, and flip the switch above turntable one in the middle of a record I’ve started while getting the transmitter on.

When the record ends, I back-announce three songs. It’s like a cat making a clumsy leap. If you look a half-second too late, you see nothing wrong.

Bottom line: anyone who was trying to listen would assume there was a problem with their radio.

And in fact, I got away with it. No calls, no visits, and I faked the log entries to show a normal sign on time and readings. (This was back in the day when jocks had to take readings every hour and write them in a log. Later they went to every three hours, IIRC, and that, too, ended at some point.)

Like all jocks, I used to dream about waking up too late; after than happened to me in real life, I never did.

7

My hours at the last station I worked at were so crazy, that once I forgot I was off, woke up “late”, raced to the station and realized it was Sunday, the one day I had off.

I was late night DJ, talk-show host, news-director and anytime there was a benefit telethon, guess who hosted it?

Fuckin’ job almost killed me, but I loved it. :dubious:

Quasi

8

This is absolutely brilliant! Amazimgly, I’ve never heard any jock ever claim to have done this, even though we all have our oversleeping stories.

Hometownboy if it actually happened, it’s one of the great DJ stories of all time. If you made it up, it’s so good that it deserves to be true, and that’s enough for me!

Just one question. If this really happened in on a Sunday morning in 1974, how come you were supposed to be playing music instead of 5 straight hours of religious programming or a solid block of boring public affairs shows? :dubious:

9

ah the memories… :smiley:

back when the earth was still cooling, i worked at a tiny little 1500 watt a.m. station on the north side of indianapolis waaay out in the cornfields of hamilton county, indiana. the place was a zoo and i don’t mean just the station cat wandering across one of my hot records from time to time. she loved to sleep in the air chair whenever possible - which was every time you got up to do something.

we had to have a cat, otherwise the friggin’ mice would eat all the wiring or get zapped by one of the transmitter tube connections, which would knock us off the air - in addition to spreading’ eau du fried mouse’ throughout the building.

lovely smell, that.

to keep us all entertained, there was the joy of setting the intern’s copy on fire at least once a week, the mouse or three that would run across my desk while i was on the air doing my rip and read (if they’d gotten into the decon they’d usually die right there in front of me), cows busily mooing in the background when i’d forget to close the outside door before going on the air, plumbing that would freeze in the winter, forcing us to go into town to use a bathroom… the list is endless.

hometown boy, yours may be the best radio story i think i’ve ever heard. very creative thinking on your part!

my best was … wait for it … the night of the twisters!!!** (cue echo effect). actually it was only one twister, but i couldn’t help myself.

indiana is part of tornado alley and from time to time the spring storms around here can be scary-nuts. on this particular occasion, i was manning the station by myself until sign-off at 7:15 p.m. i was due at the local community theater for play rehearsal at 7:30, so the gang had my station on to listen to while they were set building.

it was somewhere around 6:30 pm-ish when my weather alert radio began having a meltdown at the same time my upi machine was also going berserk with weather stuff. nasty storms all over the place.

so, picture me bouncing off the walls between cueing and starting records, running commercials on two of the most cantankerous cart machines in existance, running back and forth across the building to the teletype room to retrieve copy, AND keep listeners apprised of what was going on.

i was so busy being busy, i failed to pay attention to WHERE the bad weather was going. imagine my surprise when i suddenly heard the sound of a freight train, followed by the sound of the window glass panes behind me starting to vibrate in their frames and the *building * suddenly breathing in a way i’d never heard before.

all this while i was on the air.

to this day, people who were at the theater listening still tease me about it although there was nothing the least bit funny about it at the time. i guess my voice climbed three octaves in a half-second as i realized there was a tornado in the field right beside the radio station.

i babbled something about a tornado, killed the talk switch, believe it or not - can’t believe i thought to do that - and dived under the console. in retrospect, that might not have been my smartest move, because the board was an old and very heavy one. had it collapsed on me it probably would have ruined my day.

it sounded like the end of the world, but i emerged a moment or two later unscathed. of course, the entire time i was under the console, there was nothing going out over the air. dead air. the fcc frowns on that although i never got any grief from the station management…

i did scare the hell out of at least a few people, because my phone lines were lit up like christmas lights by the time i crawled back into the air chair. after shooing the cat out of it of course.

turns out, the tornado took out two large trees in the field outside the window, which i guess prevented it from also taking the station out. it’s trajectory changed, it continued on it’s merry way north by northeast to hammer the heck out of two towns north of me.

in fact, it didn’t bring down any of our six towers either, which amazed everybody. if they do fall, those towers are designed to collapse in sections to minimize damage to other structures.

and that was my SECOND close encounter with a tornado. i hope it’s the last!

10

There’s something about tornadoes…

With me, the tornado hit after sunset, so we really had no idea what was happening outside. As near as the chief engineer was able to figure out the next day, the twister managed to go between the studio and the tower.

How about when lightning hits the tower and dances down the guy wires – especially the one that runs right by the window in the control room!

I don’t know why DJ’s ever felt the need to use drugs. That kind of stuff was trippy enough!

11

Not related specifically to tornadoes, but snow-closings.

This one still makes me smile and may even still be going on in the smaller communitries across this great country.

Whenever snow or ice was in the forecast, it fell to me to get to the station before it fell and set up the “inclement weather” station and man the phones.

(Sound familiar, fellow-jocks?)

The easiest way to put out the word which schools and businesses would be closed on the day in question would be to roll a tape and let people make their own announcements.

They’d sound something like this: “George Washington elementary school will be closed all day Tuesday, January the second, but teachers are requested to attend if able.”

Okay, these were known as PSA’s (“public service announcements” to those not in the biz) and they were free, no problem.

But then our sales department thought they’d get in the act and offer this same service to legitimate businesses which would actually be open on the day in question, hoping to get them to advertise later when they ordinarily might not.

This resulted in the following 10-second “PSA”:

“Polly’s lingerie shop will be open today for all your lingerie needs.”

Some of those folks could get very creative in that ten second time span! :smiley:

And didthey advertise later, when one of our crack sales team would call on them to sell them some “spots”?

What do you think? :wink:

But next snowfall here they’d come again.

Wonder how many husbands/wives braved the snow and ice to make it to Polly’s?

Quasi

12

Right around the time of the tune Pilot of The Aiwarves, and Carrollton, Georgia being a college town, I had several of the same pleasant encounters, Spoons.

Those would be the times to play the Creedence version of Heard It Through the Grapevine and/or In A Gadda Da Vida, and put all request lines on hold. Thank God for cart machines that tripped into each other, because back then we were also still using turntables and they were notorious for getting stuck :wink:

I had to be very judicious in the use of the longer songs, because the station owner had us on at home and he had a private line which had to be answered.

I did have some enounters with voices that didn’t look the way they sounded on the phone, and during those, I did my best to be gracious, give 'em a tour of the station and fix 'em up with some “freebees”. Sometimes I would get a pizza sent to me, and you know, loneliness can work both ways in the middle of the night.

Q

13

Well, not the turntables, but the needle in the groove which sometimes made for hilarious phrases such as Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot:

“Hit me with your best sh…it me with your best sh…”

This never actually happened to me, but to one of the other jocks who had an emergency call of nature, and was able to rectify the problem because we had speakers in the restrooms, but not before the phones began lighting up. :smiley: .

The worst thing which ever happened to me was on one of my periodic Mc Donald’s runs when one of my “illegally” pre-recorded shows suddenly stopped because the tape snapped. That caused about 15 minutes of “dead air” which I had to answer for. Luckily I knew all the night-time cops in Carrollton.

Speaking of “dead air”, we had a sensor which caused a loud “school-bell” to ring continuously when it sensed more than 5 seconds of it. Interesting times…

Hey, can we write a book here, or what? :wink:

Q

14

Gah, haven’t thought about that song in years! Charlie Dore, wasn’t it? (If so, my memory is scaring me.)

No, nothing ever happened with the young lady in the station. Notice how I qualified that. :smiley:

I remembered a couple of more cranks on the late-night phone line:

For a while, I had some albums to give away to the Xth caller. This did not often happen on the night shift, but it was fairly common for the day folks. Anyway, the albums were current and popular, and I had a little fun with the giveaways. No practical jokes or anything, but it honestly was fun to tell the audience that “the fifth caller gets a copy of the Stones’ Emotional Rescue.” And to tell the fifth caller when the call came through–sure, it was only an album, but people were usually pretty pleased.

Well, like I said above, you do get some real interesting callers late at night. So one time, the Xth call came through, I picked up the phone, and told the caller what he had won. Stunned silence on the other end of the line for a moment, then a drunken voice saying, “What? I don’t want a @#% album! I wanna make a @#% request!”

Another time, the phone rang. I answered it as usual. The female voice on the other end said only four words: “Play Misty for me.” Knowing about the Clint Eastwood movie, and not feeling like joking around, I hung up.

Couple of minutes later, the phone rings again. I answer. “Spoons, don’t hang up this time!” It turned out to be my mother, who had been watching Play Misty for Me on the late TV movie and thought requesting “Misty” would be a fun joke to play on her son, the late night DJ.

We did laugh about it later, but…yeesh, Mom! :rolleyes:

15

Thanks for the compliments, scuba and kuni. And, yes, the story is dead on, absolutely true. And, yes, there were many hours of religious shows, including live broadcasts from local churches, which rotated on a monthly schedule. it was always a question of whether, when you jacked in the audio pair from the church of the month, there would be any signal, and whether their clocks were roughly in synch with your station clock. But the first hour of Sunday morning was soft music at that time.
I am still proud of my solution. It is my one clear minute of inspired genius in radio — well, that and the Monday Morning Soap, a 13-week series of one-minute miniature soap operas that I sold to a local grocery store (remember them?). There were two twists. One was that by the time we described what was going in the story the previous week, the episode was over (just one minute, remember). Second, a number of local place names were incorporated as the characters: Brewery Grade, Rowena Loops, etc. Well, it was fun for me, and the store owner went along. I think it cost him 8 or 9 bucks an episode for a 10 second sponsored intro, a 30-second spot (which always ended with “where they feature more than 50 kinds of soap”), the 60-second episode, and a 10 second sponsor extro. Basically, he got all the surrounding stuff for the cost of a drive-time 30 and I did all the work. I had fun, but he didn’t renew after 13 weeks, which was lucky, as I was running out of plot twists.