Nipper...considering a radio career
"How does that work?" It was my guttersnipe pal, Bob Chamberlain. "I mean...the guy just sits on his ass and plays records and they pay him and everything." Bob had a way of cutting through all the crap and getting to the meat of the matter even though he was only eleven years old. I looked up to him. I was nine and was looking to move into the media business just like Bob. He already had a paper route which took him to the far reaches of the hamlet of Leslie, Michigan delivering truth in the guise of the Detroit Free Press. Bob was making his pithy observation as we listened to the radio and shot pool in the basement of the home of Van and Scottie Aldrich. We were at the Aldrich manse because our parents, Bud and Cece Chamberlain and Cop and Eleanor Copper had dragged themselves and a combined seven kids to the Aldrich's for what was called in those days, a...vacation. It made all the sense in the world to families like ours in 1957 to wend our way from southern Michigan to beautiful Findley, Ohio to really live large. After all, for our parents it was a free place to hang out and, at least for me, it was the chance to live the Ohio dream of legal fireworks and the possibility of illegal firewater at an early age. But I digress...
RADIO. Yep, Bob was right. He was always right! I knew it for a fact when he very painstakingly and graphically explained to me what our parents were actually up to just a few months before another obnoxious brother or sister showed up. I know for a fact that I never looked at mom with quite the same respect as I once had. "You let Dad DO THAT??!!" Oh well, at least Santa was still "the goods", even if mom had fallen from her pedestal.
Radio, in those days, was reinventing itself after having its ass handed to it by television. Gone were the big band remotes, the soap operas, and the likes of Jack Benny, George and Gracie, Fibber McGee and the Shadow. They weren't idiots. They were on TV! The real money was all going to TV. See ya later radio.
After a few years of radio sliding into entertainment oblivion, innovators like Todd Storz and Gordon McClendon concluded that people would actually listen to the radio if you played the same moronic tunes over and over again. Storz was the first to discover this as he and his program director, Bill Stewart, observed customers and waitresses at an Omaha watering hole pumping nickels into a jukebox to hear the same few songs nonstop. They may have been drinking while engaged in this important research; so perhaps their conclusion is suspect. But, damn... it worked! And the whiskey was good.
Well, it was on the aforementioned sojourn to Ohio that started me thinking about this radio scam that Bob had so succinctly summed up as "getting paid to sit on your ass and play records". I pretty much concluded right then and there I would set my sights on the lofty career goal of...disc jockey! A career path that would lead me to fame, good times, major babes, and I was sure...FORTUNE!
Did I mention that I was nine...and an idiot?
to be continued...
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