It's what "YA KNOW" at this skool...

The first thing every morning I need to hear a network radio newscast. I don't want to hear some local newsie reading national news and making monkey bucks. (see peanuts)

I usually catch the CBS radio news on KNX out of Los Angeles. For some stupid reason, it seems that my local San Diego stations don't carry network feeds at the top of the hour; so I don't listen.

This morning I was taking a little longer to pull myself together and listened a few minutes beyond KNX's CBS news. The local anchor began talking about the tragedy at Virginia Tech and welcomed Dr. Paul Levinson, the chair of the communications department at Fordham University in New York, to the show. Dr. Levinson brought some, I thought, worthwhile insight to NBC's airing of the killer's insane narcissistic rant and rightly criticised the brass at the network for airing it. His take on the video was essentially that it did nothing more than fulfill this nutjob's most fervent wish for fame. I think that he is correct and would also add that no matter what the "suits" at NBC say, the network was only looking to score blockbuster ratings with their exclusive scoop. (It worked.)

What detracted from Dr. Levinson's comments was his nearly constant use of "ya know" to punctuate his remarks. Is it too much to expect the head of the communications department at a major university to be articulate enough to NEVER fall back on that verbal tic? It really detracted from what he had to say. THEN...just as I was about to turn off the radio and try to just relax and chalk this gaff up to modern lazy speech, he said: "Our son just graduated college..."

Am I wrong here? Isn't this inexcusable for a person with a doctorate in communications??!! Maybe, just maybe, you would cut some slack for the head of the math department. But, the head of the communications department says, "graduated college" instead of "graduated FROM college"?! Isn't that a lot like the math chair getting his long division wrong or forgetting to carry the six when he's adding some figures?

Ya know!
ARGHHH!!!!

BOFFO B.O....at the garbage dump

(l-r: Copper & Steckler)







Two radio reprobates reunited in Hollywood circa 2005
Both newly fired and anticipating spending more "time with the family".




The saga continues...


Steckler and I auditioned for any and every part in each play produced that year for the University theater department. We were so completely full of ourselves that we had no idea we were bringing little more than an inflated sense of our talent to each tryout, but by God we were having a wonderful time. By this time I had quit the fraternity. Who knew they had rules??! I was fine with being on the drinking team and attending the parties, but PULEEZE...no rules or meetings! The summer after my freshman year Steck and I were accepted as actors at the Black Hills Playhouse, a summer theater that employed both student and professional actors in a beautiful little compound located in Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Playhouse was the creation of a marvelous old character named Warren M. "Doc" Lee. Doc had started the Playhouse in the 1940s utilizing an old WPA camp as the initial facility. It was a labor of love that continues to this day, though Doc has long since moved on to that big stage in the sky. Through the work of many others who came to love the place, the Playhouse is still regarded as one of the finest summer theaters in the country.

Instead of starring in shows at the playhouse, Steckler and I spent the summer primarily parking cars for the evening performances and as garbage men during the morning hours. The "Chanel Boys" Doc dubbed us after the famous fragrance. We would rise at 5 in the morning and make the rounds of dumpsters collecting everything from tampons to lots of empties of Doc's beloved Pinch scotch. The hard part was dragging our sorry asses out of bed at that hour, but after we were up it was a pure joy to tool around in the playhouse dump truck grabbing rubber and doing doughnuts to our heart's content. The highlight of our morning garbage run came as we made our way through an honest to God herd of buffalo at the dump and deposited our smelling cargo amongst the other Black Hills effluvia. The dump was sort of a science project gone terribly wrong. One of the many interesting items deposited there that summer was an ENTIRE HORSE...hooves and all. We observed the decomposition with amazement and were actually so enthralled with the wonders of all that decay that we were often late for our traditional breakfast of strawberry shortcake and Carling Black Label beer which we enjoyed at nearby Legion Lake. The waitresses at the Legion Lake lodge marveled at our ability to eat this daring repast while still decked out in our crap covered putrefied coveralls. We also smoked enough Luckies and English Ovals to have done a passable impression of New Jersey. (Where were the talent scouts when you needed them??) As I think back on that summer, it amazes me that both of us are still on the right side of the sod at age 59.



to be continued...

Where are the parents?

Maybe I've missed it.
There is only so much of the coverage that you can watch.
But, where were the parents of this loon at Virginia Tech? It seems beyond the realm of possibility that they could have missed the fact that their kid was completely "off the rails". Even if he was only home for a brief vacation, how can you hide that kind of crazy?
Just wondering...

ESCAPE from high school!

My final year of high school was spent marking the days until I could spring free from the confines of my parent's home. I had been accepted at the University of South Dakota for the Fall term of 1966 and could hardly wait to let the debauch begin. USD had the well deserved reputation of being a party school of major proportions. South Dakota was a "19" state. The "19" being the age when anyone could legally buy BEER...Reason enough to inspire my "thirst" for knowledge.

My student deferment secured, I enrolled in the University as a broadcasting major. This was meant to be as it was a well known fact that I was destined for radio greatness and just coincidentally that curriculum required not a single course in math OR a foreign language. It was as if Homer Simpson had designed the program just for guys like me. DOH! My freshman year was spinning in greased grooves. I pledged a fraternity and immediately proved to be a phenomenal addition to the TKE drinking team. We took many beer drinking trophies that year with me being one of the stalwarts of the "starting five". Our team anchor, a Minneapolis guy named Tom Pokala, was my hero. I will never forget watching him get up off the puke covered basement floor of the Varsity Tap after we had won yet another chug-a-lug contest against all the other fraternities. He hauled his flabby ass up the stairs to the main bar and ordered himself a celebratory martini before he reeled out the door. He was the Leonardo DaVinci of booze. A man who had mastered his medium. I worshiped the ground he crawled home on.

About this same time I was getting involved in theater at USD. It appealed to the egotist in me and since there was nothing going on in local radio it was...something to do. In the theater department I met one of the craziest, funniest, and most remarkable bastards I have ever known: Douglas Marsden Steckler. "Dougie" or "Steck", depending on whether or not you lifted the lid before "taking a drain", was and is one of the true wild unfettered minds of entertainment. After a long and successful run with Second City, SCTV, and Emmy winning writing credits for some of the biggest comedies on television, Steck wound up in radio teamed with Tim Conway Jr. on KLSX in Los Angeles. After years of giving me grief about radio, he snuggled up to the teat that nourished me for almost forty years. But, that came later; in 1966 we were just a couple of kids with more nerve than brains...And we were going to be STARS.

a RADIO TYCOON is born...

"The music goes 'round and 'round and it comes out here!"




Let's see...Where was I?

It took me about a year to convince the powers at KICD that I was ready to take whatever broadcast challenge they were willing to hand me. The challenge turned out to be KICD-FM.
"Eff Emm?? What the hell was that? At this juncture, FM was strictly something that was experimental and unprofitable. (The latter being a cardinal sin in radio.) In any case, KICD had been granted a license for an FM station by the FCC and they, by God, were going to put it on the air. I was hired to make tapes for the automation system that was being installed to play the music to be broadcast on KICD-FM. What a thrill to spend hours on end in a studio recording Lawrence Welk's band doing their version of "Wooly Bully".And who could forget "Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay" by 101 Strings? All of this musical hell was going to be heard by NOBODY but the general manager's wife's bridge club, but they were paying me $1.75 an hour to get these heavy hits on tape. So, who's complaining?

Life was good. In my mind I was a big deal in radio. I was 17, having fun, getting paid AND there was no heavy lifting like there had been at my old job as a carry out boy for Oscar Swanson, "The Watermelon King", at Swanson' Super Store on Spencer's Miricle Mile. (More like a "Miracle Two Blocks", but I think that comes under consideration as legitimate puffery.) I know that the girls in my class seemed impressed. At least I convinced myself that they were. This was, after all, the mid sixties when disc jockeys probably had the market in teen-age girls cornered. Well, maybe OLDER disc jockeys did. Little did I know that radio...and teenage girls were both WAY over rated.

I had been toiling at KICD for about six months when I discovered the bar in the basement. It was actually a party room used for client functions and as a place for on-air personnel to crash when the roads became impassable because of snow. Or, maybe it was a place for on-air types to sleep one off when they were ploughed. This station was seriously equipped! KICD was the second most profitable station in Iowa largely due to the rich agribusiness in the area. Thus, it had radar weather gear, automatic transmitter logging, several thousand square feet of studio and office space and...this FULLY STOCKED BAR.

It was a Friday night in the fall of 1965. I was getting paid extra for working that evening helping whoever was on the air by manning the phone and gathering high school football scores. High school ball scores were, and probably still are, a very big deal in that corner of the prairie. As the night wound down and the calls had dwindled, my pal David Erickson came by the station. I showed him around and he too was greatly impressed by the full bar in the basement.
"Look at all that booze," I said. "They'll never miss it if we help ourselves to a blast or two."

I do remember throwing empty bottles into the air in the parking lot and laughing like a moron as they crashed to the pavement, but the rest is lost in the ether.

The next day I was asked to turn in my keys and pick up my final check. A radio has-been at 17. I was never able to tell my parents what happened, though they continued to ask. I was back at Swanson's within the week; bagging groceries instead of chicks.




to be continued...

A$ I WA$ $AYING...

I recently learned that Google constantly crawls blogs looking for mentions of various products that they might tie into sales of display advertising on individual blogs.

Hmmm.

Of course it would be wrong to drop in product "mentions" just to enhance the sale of advertising aimed at readers of this "King of Beers" very fine "Spic N' Span" blog where I modestly contend the "rubber meets the road". No, this blog always "thinks outside the bun"! It will always be "finger lickin' good" and "committed to excellence".

Rest assured that you will always get "40% of your daily value of fiber AND 100% great taste" every day; not to mention a major helping of "zoom zoom zoom".

So, check right here again tomorrow for another blog installment that not only "tastes great" but will also be "less filling".

And now, a word from our sponsor...

I'm Pretty Sure It was bad companions.....

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....