It was the guys I hung out with that led me down the road to radio and ruin.
Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
When my family moved to Iowa I began the eighth grade at Spencer High School. Why they made eighth graders part of the high school experience eludes me, but it did give all of us 13 year-olds exposure to the more mature kids who already were shaving, smoking and sporting very believable fake IDs. In other words, we had role models. You know, thugs you could look up to.
My first day at Spencer High I took my usual spot in the back row of every class I attended. The back row is always fleshed out with trouble makers: guys getting ready to run off to sea and...radio kids...all the know-it-alls who just wanted to get the usual school bullshit out of the way so that they could get on with their lives. The back row was where I met two guys who would become my best friends and life long pals: David Erickson, ("The Skipper") and John Hall. Erickson I have written of before in this blog. He DID run off to sea where he had a long career as a merchant marine ship captain. He skippered big oil tankers and other large ships for over thirty years and for the last couple of years has been running his own company, New England Harbor Services, out of Boston. Hall ran his own advertising agency, owned a newspaper and these days is the marketing director for a major manufacturing firm. We all had big plans and places we wanted to go. Mostly, we did it all. I know I have no regrets and I'm fairly certain they don't either.
Erickson, like me, was a radio nut and a big fan of the Storz stations. Todd Storz was one of the pioneers of Top Forty radio and owned stations in Kansas City, Minneapolis, St. Louis, New Orleans and Miami. We were both enamoured of WHB, ("World's Happiest Broadcasters), out of Kansas City. It came into Spencer like a local signal and Erickson and I would spend hours listening. Several times we sent telegrams urging Bob Elliott, the afternoon drive guy, to play or break certain records. He was amused at first, but later told us to save our money and stop bothering him. Jerk! Didn't he know we were up and coming radio talent??? Well, maybe not. Maybe it was time to do something about that.
By the summer I was 15 I had begun hanging out at KICD. I was willing to fake liking the station in order to ingratiate myself to anyone who could possibly hasten my journey to be on the air. I knew if the bozos would just give me a chance to crack a mic I would be on my way to the pinnacle of the radio biz. Perhaps, if I was lucky, a gig in Des Moines! I busied myself ripping wire copy for the news department, running errands for the always lazy disc jockeys and ripping off trade magazines that were in abundance around the "old radio ranch". In those days, if you ever wanted to be on the air, you had to have a third class radio/telephone permit with a broadcast endorsement. This required passing a test administered by the FCC, (those were the days when they gave a rat's ass about radio stuff), that consisted of stupid questions that had nothing to do with modern radio. "If a Japanese Zero is approaching at 10 O'clock...is it proper to radio your position to the radio room on the aircraft carrier?" Unbelievably stupid questions that were left over from World War II made up the bulk of the test, but YOU HAD TO PASS IT to be on the air.
I took the test in St. Paul, Minnesota that summer and only missed one question. Anything you need to know about wartime aviation radio procedure,...I'm still your man.
to be continued....
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