21 OCT 08: KNOW YOUR BLOGGER - RADIO DAYS

(BLOGGER'S NOTE: This blog is on vacation for several days. In the meantime, we offer this "Know Your Blogger" series -- excerpts from our autobiography, in the shadow of our 50th birthday in August.)

KJLA-AM was officially "The Rhythm of the City" when I was hired in May 1980, right out of college. I was supposed to work part-time -- but I kept finding news stories to cover. After all, the Kansas City area IS a little larger than Columbus....

Trouble was, sometimes I found news inside the radio station. I watched the morning host fix a contest seeking the 12th caller, by lying to a couple of callers who sounded African-American. The host explained he was following management instructions to make the station sound "less black." Removing George Benson records apparently wasn't enough.

I happened to work at KJLA with the former cheerleader who hugged me after the senior musical. She was married now, and worked in the sales department. I blabbed to her about what the morning host had done -- and the news got back to the boss. Especially when I wondered aloud about how to call the NAACP....

The owner/general manager of the radio station appreciated my work, and eventually put me on a minimal monthly salary. But he told co-workers that sometimes he wished he could pull a gun out of his desk drawer, and shoot me. Trying to be ethical can be -- well, trying.

I still lived at home with Mom for the first few months after graduating from college, but that soon changed. First she started charging me a small monthly rent. Then she sold the house, and moved to a duplex. Then the moved to a mobile home park, and left me in the duplex. Who really was breaking away from the nest here?

I had plenty of room in the duplex on 70th Terrace, and perhaps a bit too much time outside work. I started playing racquetball for exercise -- using the back wall of the duplex, and sometimes the second-story shingles above it. A few fallen shingles and one broken window later, it's no wonder the landlord didn't return the suits I forgot to take with me in a move.

It was at that duplex that I took a dramatic call from the station in March 1981 -- calling me in to work, because President Reagan had been shot. [31 Mar 06] Looking back, that shows what a serious person I was about news. After all, I didn't get called in when John Lennon was shot.

There were several big news stories to cover while I was in Kansas City radio. I won an Associated Press award for the week-long takeover of West High School by angry community residents -- when all I really did was stick around through a long gripe session. When the group decided to march to the School Board office for a late-night sit-in, I was the only reporter still around to hear it.

The biggest story I covered in Kansas City won a national Associated Press award -- the Friday night in 1981 when the skywalks collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The crash killed 111 people. It left a radio friend injured for months. And it frustrated a college friend who worked with hotel public relations, because the news simply wasn't positive enough.

Yet when the Kansas City Royals made the 1980 World Series, I did NOT go to any home games. For one thing, our station had a "Royals Reporter" (on the team's public relations staff) for handling that. For another thing, I was committed to attending a college roommate's wedding in Hays, Kansas. Perhaps overcommitted -- because I only realized when I reached Hays that I forgot to pack dress shoes.

My old Impala was used to get to many stories in Kansas City -- but eventually the radio station bought a "news car." To this day, I'm not sure why people mock the AMC Pacer. Yes, it was wide -- but didn't Pontiac teach us years later that wide is better?

Yet the Impala was becoming expensive to fix -- so in February 1981, I decided it was time to change cars. I went to a dealer in my neighborhood, and traded it in for a 1979 Karmann-Ghia. Then after two days of struggling with stick-shift transmission for the first time, I was ready to trade it back in.

The Karmann-Ghia offered great gas mileage, but it also offered plenty of headaches. Things kept breaking down and needing repair. In fact, I later told one import repair shop it was the car's "time of the month."

On top of that, the Karmann-Ghia had no working heat. The only warm air which came in winter resulted from a vent circulating the heat of the engine. I rejoiced for sunny January days, and trips where the wind was at my back.

The Kansas City radio era ended in September 1981. The two-person news staff was summoned to the boss's office one afternoon, and told we were being laid off. KJLA was changing its format to "The Music of Your Life" -- and the boss didn't care if I had a life anymore.

I told a media critic for the Kansas City Star after my layoff that it was a great opportunity to find out "what I was worth in this market." Three unemployed months later, I had my answer -- as I applied to deliver phone books in the middle of winter.

The search for work in radio or television turned into a four-month struggle, where I lost about half my savings to a major car repair job [6 Jan 07]. But then one afternoon, I happened to be home taking a break from phone book deliveries when the phone rang. A radio station in Enid, Oklahoma hired me -- and thankfully, my Mom didn't object to my moving away.

The moving van arrived at my new apartment complex in Oklahoma on Super Bowl Sunday, 1982. The bill was expensive, and left me with about $900 in savings. I'm doing a lot better than that these days -- but then, this was written before Congress voted on that big economic rescue plan.

My Program Director in Oklahoma cared a lot about me -- helping me find an apartment, briefing me on the staff members' quirks before I began, and suggesting I find friends outside the radio station. Those friends didn't develop until months later. And it only happened when a church Pastor granted me permission to start attending services -- so maybe the friends didn't need me that badly.

Much like the Kansas City station, my station in Enid didn't have much of a reputation for radio news. In Kansas City, I'd stunned my News Director by turning on some mysterious items on shelves along one wall of the newsroom. Amazingly, several of the police scanners actually still worked....

The Enid station had no police scanner at all. In fact, the staff there was surprised when I lugged in my old non-electric Royal typewriter and started writing news copy. An Associated Press teletype was good enough for everybody else.

But people across Enid soon started paying attention, when I went out and actually covered news stories. When an Oklahoma City TV station accused a state-run training school near Enid of abuse, I interviewed the school's Headmaster about it. To this day, I'm not sure that TV station has....

The Enid newspaper and two competing radio stations ignored us for awhile, but that soon changed. One Monday night at a school board meeting, a newspaper reporter turned to me and said her bosses had told her to "do what you do." Now that's what I call an affirming compliment.

But that change could have a backlash as well. I never heard it, but I was told another radio station rushed out an editorial condemning me for mentioning on the air that an arrest was close in a murder case. If the police chief was upset, I gave him a chance to get even -- by showing up at police headquarters on a Saturday night and offering to be arrested. He didn't....

Sometimes news stories developed from unlikely places. Our station had a summer weekend promotion called "Zumma Beach" where we set up a hot tub in the parking lot, and scattered around some sand. I mentioned it in passing to a wire service, and before we knew it the event was mentioned by Paul Harvey -- and our station didn't even carry his newscast.

In another case, the Enid City Commission overhauled the city charter -- and decided to keep a city ban on water pistols. The City Attorney eventually named the law after ME, because he took calls about it from as far away as Philadelphia.

Toward the end of my second year in Enid, stunning news came from Kansas City. My mother had a brain aneurysm, and was in the hospital. While I drove north to see her, I had a mysterious chest pain while behind the wheel. A stop at a Kansas hospital discovered nothing unusual -- so maybe my heart simply was going out to her.

My mother was in reasonably good shape when I reached the hospital. She said a few words to me, while smoking her familiar cigarette. Thankfully, she didn't angrily chastise me for showing up late -- like she did when I left those suits behind years before.

After several days with no change of condition, I went back to work in Oklahoma. But a few days later, another call came -- and this time it was the worst. My Mom died on 24 December 1983. And to make matters worse, it was another ice-cold Kansas City day -- bad enough that my brother's house key broke in the lock after I attended church. A friendly neighbor prevented an unusual "double down."

It didn't feel right collecting Mom's items from her mobile home. But I wound up with plenty of dishes and towels -- and a merciful older brother decided I could have Mom's nearly-new Chevrolet Celebrity. It actually had air conditioning, not to mention fully working heat.

KXLS "Class FM" was easily the hottest radio station in Enid -- but after the station sale, things began to erode. You know the situation is serious when the General Manager has sit-down sessions with psychics -- and the morning news anchor (me) was assigned bathroom-cleaning duty one day a week.

Stories began surfacing that the new General Manager was secretly pocketing station money -- and after 2 ½ years in Enid, I decided it was time to move on. A salesperson came to my apartment one evening and tried to talk me out of it. But the resumes were heading out, and in August 1984 I flew to Atlanta for a job interview. Except the job forgot to pay for my plane ticket back to Oklahoma City.

That flight to Atlanta marked my first time in an airplane. The flight was aboard Delta, and as I recall it was on time. But for awhile, I was lost inside then-Hartsfield Airport. How was I to know the main terminal was the same thing as the exit?

I went to a church convention in Texas in October 1984 -- and only days after I returned, an executive at CNN Headline News hired me as a news writer. Within two weeks, my radio years in Enid were over. It was time to move again. And oh yes -- my Karmann-Ghia which had sat unused for months was sold to a junkyard for 25 dollars.

(We're only halfway through the autobiography. Would you like this series to continue? Please let us know, one way or the other.)

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