Radio Memories – Donut Run

I didn’t have many perks when I was News Director at WPGU, but I did have access to the station van.  It was used primarily for promotion events and remote broadcasts, but the news department got it on occasion to ferry people to Springfield to cover the workings of the state government or Chicago for election coverage.  I also used it for donut runs in the middle of the night.

My favorite time to work at WPGU was overnight.  I’m a night owl by nature and I did the midnight newscast.  Afterwards, I would hang out with one of the overnight jocks, Scott (better known as Weasel) and Mark the engineer (better known as Watchdog).  I didn’t have a nickname; sometimes I felt left out.  Nadya did one of the midnight specialty shows.  She played house music from 12 – 1 in the morning then played the normal fare until dawn.  She smoked cigarettes and would invariably forget them.

“Can you guys get me a pack?” she’d ask.  Weasel and I would generally look affronted at the mere thought (Watchdog smoked too).  We considered smoking a “dirty and foul habit”.  We could not – in good conscience – contribute to her eventual demise at the hands of them.  Besides, the station van was not supposed to be used for personal business.  This would mollify Nadya… for awhile.  As the night wore on, she’d get a little more jittery.

“How about you guys pick up some donuts?” she’s say finally.  “I’ll buy.”  Now, that was something we could get behind.  We applauded her altruistic nature… and if we happened to see a stray pack of cigarettes on our way – well, what were friends for?  I’d get the keys to the van.  “Station business” was a nebulous term; the way I saw it, WPGU ran on donuts, coffee and cigarettes just as much as electricity.

There was a Dunkin’ Donuts in Urbana.  It was the safest donut shop in America; stationed across the street from the Urbana Police Department, next door to the Champaign County Sheriff’s Department and kiddy-corner to the Courthouse.  We tended to be the only civilians in the place after two am.  Generally, we’d jump in the van, drive to get a dozen donuts, stop at Super Pantry for “mighty beverages, worthy of kings” and pick up Nadya’s cigarettes and then back to the studio where we’d partake of our snack in the programming office, sitting on the plaid couch that had once been made of fabric.

One night, one of the programming staff – Jason Croft – accompanied us in the back seat of the van.  Normally, overnight was his time to get some work done around the station without all the bothersome people.  Weasel was riding shotgun and I was driving.  We headed north on Fourth Street.  There were several old bars a couple of blocks off Green Street, the main drag in Campustown.

I know it’s hard to believe, but a lot of students at the University of Illinois would drink before they turned 21.  They skirted the law by using fake IDs.  Periodically the Champaign police department would run out of crime in the rest of the city and take that as an opportunity to raid the campus bars and make a bunch of arrests.  It was a slow night.  A dozen police cars lined the street; window mounted spot lights illuminating a hundred underage drinkers lined up unhappily on the sidewalk outside of the bars as twenty police officers roamed the crowd, writing them up.  Of course we thought this was funny.  We all had a good laugh and I returned my attention to driving… right as I cruised through a red light.

Now, you’d think that with twenty cops and a hundred witnesses, driving a black van with “107” printed on the side in bright yellow, someone would have noticed.  However, no one did.  Mercifully, no one had been going down the other street that had the right of way (this was two o’clock in the morning, after all).  The rest of the drive was uneventful except for my shaking hands and Jason who was laughing in the back.

“I hope you don’t need any more luck in your life,” he said.  “I think you just used it all up!”

Thoughts on the Passing of Johnny “Red” Kerr

I was working at a radio station in central Illinois, in 1992.  I was 22, an “old hand” on the radio by then; I didn’t get too worked up about talking to people by that point.  I had called up congressmen and senators in Washington.  I had asked questions of mayors and the governor.  I had talked to famous comedians as part of the “morning crew” and a playmate of the month.  I would have asked Dan Quayle a question the time I covered one of his press conferences, but – frankly – I couldn’t think of anything he’d know the answer to.

I wasn’t the only one who felt blasé, of course.  We were all pretty cool when dealing with people.  The sports reporters covered all aspects of the Fighting Illini and were used to quizzing the coaches and players.  The promo people had brought in bands like They Might Be Giants to play their latest in the studio.  I don’t think the term “fanboy” was in vogue at the time, but we all knew what it meant and we took great pains to avoid it.  None of us wanted to be caught gasping like a fish in the presence of someone famous.

I can remember one time when fame overwhelmed us all.  Johnny “Red” Kerr was invited to be the Grand Marshall of the Illinois homecoming parade that year.  He had helped the Fighting Illini men’s basketball team to the Final Four in 1952 before going on to have an All-Star career in the NBA.  When Chicago got its own NBA franchise, Kerr was traded to the Bulls.  He retired, so he could be their first coach instead.  He had been covering the Bulls on television as their color commentator since the mid-seventies.  Before every game as Kerr broadcast live from the sidelines, Michael Jordan would walk past and slap some talcum powder on him before he hit the court for some final warm ups.

So, a group of us from the station drove out to where the parade was being organized.  In Chicago circles – where most of us were from – Johnny “Red” Kerr was larger than life.  That was saying something; he was 6’9″ in life.  We found him just hanging out at the parade grounds.  I think one of the promo people asked if we could ask him some questions and called him “Mr. Kerr”.  He smiled down at us and said sure.  And the fanboy barrage of softball questions began.

Someone asked if he remembered our station (which had started back in 1954).  “WPGU?  You guys were on AM then,” he said.  “They could here you in the dorms, but I was living in a fraternity then.”  One of the sports guys asked about Michael Jordan.  “He’s a great guy,” Kerr responded.  “He’s a real class act.”  The ultimate fanboy question came from me.  I’ll never forget the answer.

Sure,” he said.  I handed him my press pass and got it signed.  It’s the only autograph I ever asked for in five years on the air.  Johnny “Red” Kerr died this week at 76 after a long bout with cancer.

Apocalypse Again

The world is coming to an end.  The latest doomsayers seem to be latching on the end of the Mayan calendar, due to wrap things up world-wise right before Christmas, 2012.  I guess I’d be less lackadaisical about it if I hadn’t dealt with the end of the world already.  I remember watching The Late Great Planet Earth when I was a kid.  Prophesy foretold how the United States and the Soviet Union were going to nuke themselves out of existence.  It seems to me that was supposed to happen in the 1980’s.  That makes sense; the Soviet Union went the way of the Studebaker in 1989.

I was at George Williams College in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, on March 10, 1982.  You may remember that was the day almost all of the planets (including Pluto, which was a planet back then) were on the same side of the sun.  The massive gravitational tug was due to tear the world apart in vast tidal forces; set off gigantic earthquakes at the very least.  My sixth grade class was spending a few days up at the school studying nature and generally freezing in the waist deep snow.  Waking up that morning, I looked around at the cold, drab dorm room and down at my friend Greg who was sleeping on the bunk beneath me.

“Still here,” I said.

“Still here,” he replied.

The Church of the Livingstone and Mission for the Coming Days sent out a press release the world was due to end on October 28, 1992, at midnight, Korean time.  I was the anchor at a radio station at the time and figured impending doom was probably newsworthy.  We stayed on the air an extra five minutes or so and counted down the last few moments to… nothing.  The world was still around at 12:01, Korean time, but we played R.E.M. anyway.

I was a database administrator in 1999.  In the spring we discovered our old mainframe system from the 1970’s was not Y2K compliant.  My co-worker and I began the archaeological dig for ways to get the data out along with the programming.  The original writer of the system had died, but his widow still had boxes of code (on paper) out in their garage.  We slowly translated the VAX BASIC from crumbling yellowed sheets of fanfold paper through the summer and fall.  It was like reading something in Latin; close, but not quite what we were used to.  We rewrote the system in Access VBA and imported twenty years of data.  The project wrapped up around 2:00 in the afternoon on December 31, 1999.  I stopped at Sam’s Club on the way home.  Last minute survivalists were waiting in line with pallet jacks loaded with boxes of food and water.  One woman had a crate of AA batteries for some reason.  My favorite guy though was the one who just piled his cart high with beer.

Actually, our system did crash that night.  However, in the wake of Y2K, people seemed to forget that Windows would occasionally crash even when it wasn’t the end of the world.

I don’t doubt the world is going to end… eventually.  My belief is the sun is going to use up most of its hydrogen fuel and swell to enormous size.  As it does, the Earth will be swallowed up.  The sun will eventually die as well, growing dimmer and dimmer until all that’s left is a cosmic charcoal briquette.  As the universe continues to expand and cool, even the atoms that once made us up – that “star stuff” Carl Sagan always talked about – will fall apart into a thin soup of decaying particles.  The universe will be cold, dark and still.

College Memories – WDBS

I tried out for a DJ shift on WDBS in the fall of 1988. WBDS was the “training station”, available via a cable hookup in the University of Illinois dorms on FM 101. I remember you had to read an “Inside Word” PSA, the weather and read some copy. The copy included “YNGWIE MALMSTEIN”. I think if you could pronounce it, you were hired.

I had the coveted 4 – 6 am airshift on Sunday morning. Usually, I would get to bed around 1:30 or 2:00, grab a short nap and then do my show under Weston Hall. One night though I got back late and decided to skip the nap. We had a mix of music on cartridge and record albums then on WDBS. I had my stack of carts, a few records and all my copy arranged. I cued up a record and put it on and blinked —

— and it was 30 minutes later.

I remember waking up with my head on the console listening to “scratch… scratch… scratch…” I looked over and realized the entire album side had played and I was broadcasting the inner groove. I sat up and salvaged the break as best as I could and finished my show.

Sadly, very few people listened to WDBS. Most students didn’t want to bother with the cable hookup and WDBS essentially played similar music as WPGU (just in lower quality). However, that night, the WDBS program director happened to be playing cards in his dorm room, heard my show and – needless to say – I was not asked back as an on-air personality the next semester.

The nice thing about WDBS was that the staff completely changed from year to year. So, no one remembered my snafu from the previous year when I tried out in 1989. I was a lot more relaxed and got a pretty decent air shift on Friday afternoons. I even got to be a music director in charge of the “MASSIVES” list. All songs on WBDS were categorized into lists: currents, recurrents, local, etc. The Massives category consisted of songs from the 60’s and 70’s that were still relevant in the late 1980’s. One of the problems I ran into though was we had updated the sound of WDBS and we were now “progressive 100.7 FM”. It’s hard to come up with “progressive” songs that are 10 – 20 years old! My first list caused a big controversy. It was the WPGU-wanna-be jocks versus the jocks who were all for college music. I was pulled into the PD office to come up with an “approved” list of artists. That took a few hours, as I recall. My definition of “progressive” was music that changed as the artist progressed. The PD’s definition was something that sounded like Robyn Hitchcock. Again, that was a little difficult to come up with music that sounded like that from a couple of decades previously. However, we did agree on a few artists and I ended up putting on a lot of David Bowie, Bob Marley and Neil Young.

My favorite part of the job was being able to go into the WPGU music library. It was two rooms lined ten feet tall with record albums and reel to reel tapes. The shelves in the back room were arranged in a spiral, so you walked in and then circled around and found yourself surrounded by music. WPGU had been around since 1953 and had been under Weston Hall since they built it in the early 1960’s. It was really neat to pull out some dusty old album – say, Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix – and see the notes typed on it from some MD back when it came out. I think I had to have 20 songs recorded onto carts; that would take me a couple of hours. However, I would plan to be in there all afternoon so I could grab interesting looking albums and just play them to see what they were.

I also enjoyed learning production and playing with all the toys: the mixing board, the reel-to-reel recorders, the cart recorders, the satellite feeds. Instead of writing letters letters to my friends, I would record tapes to send out. Some of them were even “sponsored” with authentic drops from Good Vibes and other area advertisers. I also started playing around with my own stuff to make customized liners for my airshift.

At the same time, I had auditioned for WDBS News and ended up with two evening shifts: one on Monday nights and one on Wednesday nights. Each shift included two newscasts: one each hour at the :50. WDBS “newsies” shared the WPGU newsroom, but weren’t allowed to rip the wire, touch the police scanner, answer the phone; we weren’t even allowed to use the electric typewriters! The WDBS news booth was about five feet long and two feet wide with a tall metal stool that you had to climb over to sit on. The booth was too narrow to scoot around the stool. The end had a small piece of countertop, an old microphone and a pair of headphones apparently made of duct tape.

My Wednesday evening shift was more interesting from a news perspective: this was the during the fall of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe and it seemed like every country that decided to switch to democracy did so on a Wednesday afternoon. My Monday night shift was more interesting from a broadcasting perspective because I worked with Nick Kanel and Al Muniz; two guys who really put the “personality” into on-air personality. On one of my first newscasts, they decided to score a theme for me using an album of national anthems from around the world. I wasn’t exactly expecting to start my story on Lithuania and suddenly hear a blast of martial music in my headphones. I somehow managed not to stumble during my cast and apparently survived the “hazing”. After that, I’d do the news and then we’d stretch the break out to 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour, whatever, and talk about whatever was going on. It was my first “zoo” experience on the air.

The Perils and Pitfalls of Pretty People

Not me, Rudolph Valentino

It seems to me that things are generally easier for pretty people. I’m not a pretty person. I think that – with some help – I might hit cute on occasion. However, cute is cold comfort when compared to pretty. I like to think I have a sparkling personality and a scintillating sense of humor (or is it a scintillating personality and a sparkling… never mind). However, when even my wife puts in her blog survey that she prefers “hot” to “cute”, I know this is a serious issue.

I understand that pretty is not a substitute for a brain or a strong work ethic. Maybe there are still a few “secretaries” out there like in the old movies, but in the current dollar driven capitalist system we find ourselves in, I have to think they are probably a dying breed. Still, while pretty may not guarantee long term success, it does open doors. In fact doors are held open for pretty people. Think of the money you would save if you never had to buy your own drinks or always got off with a warning rather than a traffic ticket.

Even pretty people can have a bad day, of course, but it seems like the skies are not so cloudy when you’re pretty. I was a news director for a radio station in central Illinois when a Clinton was running for president (Bill, in this case). Hillary Clinton was coming to the University of Illinois to speak to the crowd at noon in mid August, the hottest and most humid time of the year. I had two reporters covering the event: my assistant news director who was standing farther away so she could do a live report while Clinton was speaking and my field reporter – a pretty young woman who was studying dance as well as journalism – covering the actual speech so she could write a report for the afternoon newscast.

I was surprised when noon came and went with no word from anyone at the Quad. We ran with a pre-scripted story that Hillary Clinton was speaking, but we didn’t have any other coverage. About 12:30, I got a call from my assistant news director.

“Do you know what just happened?” she asked. While I didn’t know specifically, I knew the answer probably was “nothing good”. As Mrs. Clinton was walking out of the Illini Union building, my field reporter had lurched forward past the police tape and fallen right in front of the future first lady. Members of the Secret Service had dragged her off somewhere. I spent an anxious half hour calling anyone I could think of, trying to find out what had happened. At 1:15 or so, I got a call from her directly.

Cary Grant (aka "Not me")

It turned out that dancers are a lot like wrestlers. They have to maintain a specific weight. She needed to lose a pound or two and so had consumed nothing but water for the last couple of days. In the heat and humidity of the August afternoon, she had felt herself get dizzy and finally as Hillary Clinton came out to greet the crowd, she had passed out. But she added the Secret Service people had brought her indoors where it was air conditioned, gave her a big glass of water and a cold rag to put on her neck.

“They were all just so nice!” she said pleasantly.

It occurred to me that – most likely – Hillary Clinton was unguarded at that moment; her Secret Service detail attending to the needs of my reporter. It further occurred to me that if I had been the one to pass out, the news would have stated “deranged maniac shot and killed while trying to attack Mrs. Clinton”. My body would have been buried in an unmarked grave somewhere south of Guantanamo Bay.

The one place where pretty people may be at a disadvantage is the Internet. Originally designed by I.T. people (not the prettiest bunch), the Internet is primarily text driven. Even on MySpace or other social networking sites, pretty people find it a challenge to post a good picture taken from a camera phone. On the other hand, those who are “pretty challenged” can scan in a picture from Glamour Shots at the local mall. If you are more technically astute, a $100 copy of Photoshop can reduce, cover and remove a multitude of genetic sins.

Me? No. Paul Newman

In the worst case scenario, you can just use the Internet to find pictures of pretty people and post them on your site. Who’s going to know? And if anyone has a problem with it, take comfort in the fact they won’t be looking for you, but some pretty person instead.

My Blog Spot

I’ve read many authors have a special place they go to get their inspiration.  In his later years, Mark Twain had a small garden cottage on his property that he would use for his writing.  Stephen King has an upstairs office in his house where he whips up best selling novels handwritten on yellow legal pads.  I think every writer has a place they call their own, a place they can go to unleash their creativity to its fullest.

Right now, my place is Burger King.

It wasn’t always that way.  I remember being very prolific in study hall.  I wrote scripts and stories, jotted down poems and drew pages of cartoons.  My senior year in high school, I even took an extra study hall.  My counselor thought I was insane, but I cranked out material by the notebook-ful.  In college I went underground – literally.  The radio station I worked at was in the basement of Weston Hall at the University of Illinois.  I believe I spent whole weeks, possibly months entombed in the windowless studios of news and production.  When I got a “real” job at the phone company, I just wrote while sitting in my cubicle (it wasn’t like I had anything else better to do).  Since then it’s been harder to find a place of my own.  And time is a big challenge.  Believe it or not, my family takes an awful lot of my time!  My output around the year 2000 dwindled down to journal entries and even they ceased to be a daily activity when I stopped having any kind of routine in my day when I became a consultant.

A few months ago, I made the decision to try and write regularly again.  This was easier said than done.  I have my own office, but I spend too much time in there as it is with work.  I tried sitting at the kitchen table.  I liked the light, but couldn’t escape the siren-song of HDTV tempting me from the family room.

Daniel started Cub Scouts and has sports practice of various flavors during the week.  I started carrying a notebook with me; on the outside chance I had an inspiration on the sidelines.  One night we stopped at our Burger King to pick up dinner.  I eat fast.  Daniel eats slowly.  That gave me time to sit and jot down a blog entry.  Now, it’s turned into a regular ritual.  Daniel gets his toy and I get my muse along with a side order of fries and a bottomless Diet Coke.

The Weeks that Were – WPGU Revisited

Going back to the University of Illinois was an out of body experience, sort of like visiting a parallel universe. Some of the stuff was the same: my dorm looked the same; the Quad was pretty much the same. But so much else was changed.

When I worked at WPGU, we were crammed into the basement of Weston Hall, one of the dorms down by the football stadium. After the game, we wandered over there. I knew – of course – that there would be little trace of WPGU there. They had moved out of The Basement in the 1995. But still, I didn’t expect that it was all gone. They had even bricked over the door!

The new building was in the heart of Campus Town: most of which I didn’t recognize. It’s a nice building. The main studio is on the first floor with a big window looking out on the street. There were a ton of people there, but – sadly – no one I knew personally from the “old days”. In fact, there were very few radio people there at all.

I know from working there, that WPGU relished its heritage as being one of the oldest FM stations in the country, but we didn’t have the time or the resources to really hold on to that heritage. Sunday nights, I produced a show called The Week that Was. It was on during the oldies show – Past Tense – so we did “oldies news”: clips from events between 1960 and 1980 (more or less). I remember going through most of the morgue tapes we had and only coming up with a smattering of stuff: a commercial reel from 1963 promoting “the best 15 cent hamburger in Champaign!” and part of the live coverage of the Kennedy Assassination. Fifteen minutes after he was shot (and still alive, mind you), they had already mentioned possible assassins on a grassy knoll. Being a history buff, it was a tantalizing taste, but just a taste. So much was lost. Even the names of old reporters were gone. In 1973, WPGU read the names of the dead soldiers from central Illinois to commemorate the end of the Vietnam War. Twenty years later, when we rebroadcast it as part of our “Week that Was” look at that conflict; we knew the soldiers’ names, but none of the names of the reporters reading them.

So, while I could wander around the new building, marveling at the computers and digital production equipment (and the fact that it was all above ground), I felt rather detached. This was a radio station called WPGU, but it wasn’t my WPGU.

Then I met the current News Director. Actually, she is more than that: she has to manage both the news on WPGU and the news for the Daily Illini newspaper. We had an interesting conversation about her challenges with “convergence” and trying to get people to write for air, print and internet. While we were talking, I mentioned some of the stuff I had worked on: The Week that Was, for example. She brought me over to a young man who was now running the Week that Was. So, while the names and the faces had changed over the years, the day to day problems and the concerns had an eerie familiarity to them. In the end, I did feel a kinship with this new version of WPGU. I was glad to have gone back to see everything.

And – by the way – when you participate in a ribbon cutting ceremony, they let you keep the scissors!