Thursday, Dec. 01, 2005 9:44 am

Radio Stories Begin

December has arrived, and soon the Holidailies will begin again. I don't think I'll have a problem this year updating daily, I've made a pretty good habit of it in the last few months. I've done amazingly well on my handwritten diary this year. I don't think I've ever had to catch up more than one day. It's all about the habit.

Somewhere in the past I read a recommendation that you write "100 Stories of My Life" for your descendants and the world. I've always thought that sounded cool, but I have never done it. Of course, you could glean about 800 stories of my life from these journal entries, but most are not full stories. During December I am going to write AT LEAST twenty stories about my radio days. Most won't have a plot or a real story to them, but they will get down the "way it was" a little bit. This will be my start on my 100 stories.

I'm still going to do the Daily Diary thing, too, though. Gotta have my outlet.

And in an odd mix of old and new radio stories, I met the new night guy on one of my sister stations last night. One of the PAs had told me he was from Amarillo and then I heard from my old radio friend in A-town that this kid was the son of a guy we worked with back in the day. I remember when this kid was BORN. I embroidered a baby blanket thing for him. I went and met him and he was very nice. Very handsome. His dad was a total idiot and I may tell stories about him in the upcoming weeks, but I didn't say anything to this kid about his odd father.

Today is group and then a regular workday, I foresee. I hope so. I've gotten ahead on logs this week so I should be able to "get something done!" I'm always saying that, aren't I? Don't know if I will ever truly be caught up.

Okay, Radio Story Number One:

MY FIRST STATION

Well, it was my first commercial radio station. I was still in college and worked at the college station, but I'd only been on the air a couple of months when I got this job. In those days (1978) a radio station owner could only own one AM and one FM in a city. How quaint and old-fashioned. The station owner (I think the name was John Walton... wonder if his family still owns stations or if they sold out to CC) had stations in some other towns, I heard, but he had both an AM and an FM in Amarillo. Both were country stations, but no one listened to the FM station. Not because it was bad, mind you, it was just that few people had FM at the time. I had only bought my first FM stereo within the past year or two and I don't think my car had FM yet. It's hard to remember because it just wasn't that much a part of our life yet.

The station was a small building out on Route 66 in Amarillo. We called it Northeast 8th out there mostly and Amarillo Boulevard. To get to it, I had to drive from Canyon all the way through Amarillo, take a right on Amarillo Boulevard and drive to the outer edge of town. Amarillo Boulevard was the street in town with the hookers, the cheap motels, and lots of bars with neon. My parents about had a cow that I was going to be driving down that street every night at 11 p.m. Mom made it a habit to stay up until just after midnight to make sure she heard me on the radio and then she could go to sleep knowing that I was relatively safe.

I feel the urge to go off and talk about the folks that I worked with each night, but I want to save that and just describe the building today. It was small and all by itself. I have a picture somewhere of the abandoned building from a couple of years ago. Like I said, it had two radio stations and the AM was probably the number one station in town at the time. It was a very popular country station with great disc jockies (all men, of course) throughout the day and overnight. Their studio was big and roomy, for the time. It also had a window, which wasn't always a good thing. The disc jockey had his back to the window and it was pretty scary when a listener would find the station and knock on the window to ask for a request. Once there was even a shot fired at or through the window. Probably just a BB gun, I've forgotten the details, but I was always perfectly happy to work in studios that had no contact with the outside world. I've never had to work in one of those fishbowls where listeners can drive by or walk by and see you inside picking your nose or eating.

The AM disc jockey had to read the meters for both of th stations. That was a requirement in those days. I don't suppose any disc jockey anywhere has to do that anymore. And, yes, I was a licensed engineer in those days, too. We all had to be. But at that station I wasn't required to do anything so I guess I didn't have to have the license. In fact, now that I think about it (and ramble on) I guess I didn't get the license until a few months later.

The AM control room was big and roomy and to the right of the disc jockey were big windows that gave him visual access to all the equipment and the meters. I guess he was supposed to keep an eye on things that way, too, but mainly they had to go in there with a clipboard and write down numbers and settings every hour on the hour. That was probably the most efficiently run station, meter-reading-wise, that I ever worked for. I'm just glad I didn't have to do it because I was always bad about remembering those type of details.

There was also a production studio on the AM side of the building for the production director to record commercials. I'm sure everyone had their assigned production times so that they could record and produce the commercials that the Prod. Director assigned to them. These days every station seems to have a dozen production rooms, plus you can usually do production while you are on the air. That was just not done in those days. If fact, you would get in trouble for trying to do production while you were on the air. It took too much time away from your show, they felt then. No mulitasking!

The AM had, at one time, been the whole station, so that is why they had a nice, custom-built studio and all the facilities close by (the bathrooms were on their side of the building. When, at some point, the owners got the FM license and decided to put an FM on the air, they had no studio, so they just built a closet into a corner and threw in a couple of turntables and a chair and said, "Okay, turn it on!" It really wasn't built INTO a room, but I'm sure it wasn't a room of its own before it was a studio. I don't quite know how the building was laid out, but I think they could have found a better place. It was teeny-tiny. If you stood in the studio, you could hold your arms out straight and touch each wall side-to-side. You could only do that one way, though, the other way was TOO SMALL to do that, you would have to bend an arm a little. And, while standing up, you could touch the ceiling without extending your arm up, it was just above the top of your head. Since we mostly sat throughout our entire show, that didn't seem to be a big deal.

The walls and floor and ceiling of our little cave were covered in multi-colored yellow/gold shag carpet. This was 1978, so I guess it was partially cool. Smoking was allowed, encouraged!, in those days so the walls and floor and room probably reeked of smoke. In those days we weren't as aware of it, though, so I don't recall. I even tried smoking in there many times, but gave it up because the cigarettes were too damn expensive! I made $500 a month there, IF I worked a full 40 hours in the six days of the week I worked. I usually didn't make it all the way to 40 so it was less.

Walking into the studio (and ducking your head a little) you saw the board directly in front of you. It was a production studio board, not a "real" radio board and had had switches installed on it, little toggle switches, to do functions that would normally be built into a real board. It also had slide pots, the first I had ever seen or used.

To each side of the board was a turntable and they were mismatched, which is funny to me looking back. Radio stations typically had two turntables, but they were always identical. Not here, everything was second hand and cast off. One was much older and you had to start it a lot earlier than the other because its motor took more time to grab hold and get the record up to speed. Non-radio people (or anyone that has entered radio in the last 20 years, I suppose) doesn't realize that you had to cue up the records. You woud put the needle on the record, turn it until you heard the scratch of the beginning of the music and then you would reverse and turn the record back a bit. On a good turntable you could turn it back just about an inch and when you hit the "on" switch, the turntable would grab and get up to speed in that one inch and the first notes of the record were at the right speed. On the old turntables, you might turn it back a full half of the record and you had to start that turntable a full second or maybe two before you wanted that record to actually begin so it would be up to speed when it started. If it wasn't, you "wowed" the record. Not a big deal on records with an intro, but on songs that started cold, it was an issue and a good disc jockey would make it all work and you wouldn't hear him talk over the cold intro at all, yet you wouldn't hear any dead air between his rap and the opening either.

Behind us as we sat in the studio chair was a small table with little records stacked up. There was a small stack with red dots on them, the most popular currents. There were probably 10 or 12. The second stack was songs on their way up or their way down and they were marked with a yellow dot. Maybe 15 or so of them. Seems like there was a third stack that I can't remember what its purpose was and then there was a stack of brown-dotted records with probably 30 or 40 songs that was the recurrent category, songs that had been popular over the last year, but were mostly over.

We had the book of hotclocks up above the mic, just slightly above our eye level. The hot clocks had the red and yellow and brown dots to show us what to play next. These days it is all built into the computer and disc jockies aren't as conscious of which song is which category. There was also an A category and that was the album cuts. Beside us to our left was a big bookcase full of albums. Each had a library card sort of list on it. The albums had the songs that were allowable to play marked clearly and the others marked out. Yes, we did play the other songs and got in trouble if we did. But, when you played the allowed songs, you wrote down on the list attached to the album jacket which song you played and the date. Then the rule was that you had to wait a day and a shift before it could be played again. So if I played a song during my midnight to six shift, no one else could play that song that day and I couldn't play it the next night, but then anyone else could play it after that. Kept a nice separation on the songs.

I learned a TON about Texas music at that station and now I wish I had played MORE songs from those albums. I tended to play the ones I knew and liked and not venture out, which is probably why those kinds of systems are dead and gone today. You really don't want a disc jockey choosing their own music, trust me.

We also had a big reel-to-reel recorder in the studio. I was supposed to record a newscast that came down the line every night at :50 after the hour and run it at the top of the hour, or vice-versa. I just know I was supposed to record it each hour and I was terrible at remembering to get it. Funny now to remember how bad I was at that job.

I worked three or four months on the all-night shift at that station in 1978 and 1979, through Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have many happy memories of those long lonely nights. I learned a lot there and it is a shame that there are no all-night disc jockies anymore. That's a great place to make lots of mistakes.

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Book Club - Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2014
A Good Saturday Ahead - Saturday, Jan. 18, 2014
Back to Work - Monday, Jan. 06, 2014
The New Year Arrives - Wednesday, Jan. 01, 2014
Engaged - Monday, Dec. 30, 2013
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