This is how people listen to the radio...Isn't it?
It began as all radio careers pretty much begin. Dumb kid saves money; buys EIGHT transistor radio instead of the measly six transistor job like every other kid; spends endless hours listening to guys his Dad's age, (only COOL), play Hound Dog and Wake Up Little Susie on the radio. In southern Michigan I could listen to WILS in Lansing, WKHM in Jackson, and Radio 80 CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario (Detroit) during the day. But...at night...whole new vistas opened up to this Midwest knucklehead. When the sun went down, it was MAGIC time. Radio's sky wave brought in 50kw blowtorches like: WLS, WBZ, WABC, KDKA and others into my world from exotic locales like Chicago, Boston, New York and Pittsburgh. My small town yokel imagination was in overdrive! While listening I was no longer some dork living in a town of 1800 "right smack dab in the middle of the mitten" of Michigan. No, I was a sophisticated urbanite who was headed for big things via my soon to be launched career in broadcasting. In fact, by the time I turned 13 I was already subscribing to Broadcasting Magazine and telling anyone who asked that I was going to be on the radio one day. Me and Marconi!
I turned 13 in March of 1961. It would be an interesting year for my family as Dad had been transferred by his company and in August Mom, Dad, my brother Steve and I moved to Spencer, Iowa. This was a big step as far as I was concerned. Spencer, after all, had a population of 10,000 and...a RADIO station. I was convinced that I had made the Bigtime. A census in five figures and a full blown radio station!
It wasn't until we actually arrived in Spencer that I realized that my characterization of the station, KICD, being "full blown" was more apt than I could have possibly imagined. The station BLEW monkey chunks!! It was the typical small town rural American poorly produced no talent horrible waste of kilowatts that most of them still are today. Not only didn't they have decent announcers, they had no jingles; no national or regional spots; no network news...no ANYTHING I wanted to hear. What they did have plenty of were reject jocks from other podunks, a bunch of horribly written live commercials, crappy music that only a parent could handle, and a major doofus farm director who called himself, "The Farmer's Friend". Geezus, he was awful!! Every morning he could be heard droning interminably about how many happy heifers and slap happy hogs had marched off to Omaha or Sioux City to become steaks and sausage. God, I hated that station! Later, when I was in high school, I worked at KICD. (Hey, it was my first real RADIO job.)
Sometime during my brief employment at "The Mighty 1240", ( I begged them to call themselves that.), the ever faithful "Farmer's Friend" got himself caught in "the tractor's nuts" as we like to say in the Midwest. He was fired for puttin' his "prize hog" to a hooker in the general manager's office. This is what apparently had been "getting him up" every morning at 5 for the past several years and went a long way toward explaining those long interludes of Hawaiian music during the farm market reports. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
to be continued....
1 comment:
I actually made a transistor radio; but, it only had a single transistor and I grew up in a little town so far away from anyplace that all I ever got was static. Not much has changed in several decades.
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