Career Memories and Crazy Stories

[amfmradio1]

Hey "Radio Monkey"

Don't know why you think I'm "Jack Allen", but I'm not.

&, the station I work @is #1, too, so it's not too bad for me.

 

[amfmradio1]

"Radio Monkey"

Don't know why you keep referring to me as "Jack Allen".

Am not him, never heard of him.

There were times when WKCI was #1, too.

If you work @'PLR, them being #1 has nothing to do w/you working there.

They were #1 before you got there, & will continue to be #1 after you leave.

In New Haven, there's evidence that Rock is the format most listeners want to hear.

If they want to listen to AC, Country or Rap, they can tune to another outlet, but it's not in New Haven, because New Haven has nothing but KC101, 'YBC, 'PLR & the AM facilities.

Country, Rap, AC & the other Rockers are in Hartford.

13WAVZ was more popular than 'PLR before FM became popular!

'PLR is just lucky that it's COL is New Haven.

Otherwise, it just plays repetition.

If 'PLR had another format, I-95, 'HCN or 'CCC could moniker themselves "CTs' #1 Rock Station" - even though they already are.

[EDIT-inflammatory]

 

[ChrisCody]

Here's a quicky for you...I'm at I-95 my second go round there...I'd been there for a couple of months...One Saturday afternoon I'm just totally zoning out...I crack the mic, AT I-95 MIND YOU, and what comes out of my mouth? "Hartfords only classic rock station- 105... (the 5 was more like "fiiiiiiiiiiiiiive, fading out)....Wait a minute, I'm not at HCN anymore...How did that happen?..Didn't figure I could cover up that boner, so I just went into the next song without saying another word and waited for the hot line to ring...I'm not sure if anyone really heard it, or they were too confused thinking that they had changed the station on their radio, but no-one called me on it...No-one from the station, and no listeners called either...Sorry Tim.

Hey am/fm I gotta call you out here..You don't like PLR, I'm cool with that..Not everybody is gonna love the station. I get that...You may not like me & think I stink,( and some days, you're probably right) and that's cool too...Different strokes for different folks....But it's as if you have an agenda, or some kind of axe to grind with PLR....I don't know, and I really don't care, that's your business..But how 'bout putting yourself out there for others to critique. You say your station is #1...Care to tell us what that station is and who you are?
I think it's only fair, and it levels the playing field for all....

 

[amfmradio1]

Hey Mr. Cody,

You know I like you - you have a great voice, but I wish you would talk up & increase the volume. That's the constructive criticism I have for you, & you agreed to it when we posted about this awhile back. I remember when you were @'HCN, then came to 'PLR. That was in the late '90's - early 00's. You didn't stay there long - probably a couple of weekends. You must have had issues w/'PLR! That's when you went to I-95. Now, you're back @'PLR. Smith & Barber, Jack Allen, RonO, Large Dave, Bison - all great jocks - gone! Since Chaz & AJ, Landry, Lapitino & Prodoti will probably stay there until something happens, (any of the weekend jocks could have taken their place) the weekenders sound young & inexperienced (except you & Griffin, Wiggy Wigmaster). Ever since Cox made Sabatino PD, the weekends have real issues. Even ex-GM John Ryan said that the weekends have issues.

 

[fatman]

Here's something I just remembered...

Fresh out of high school and I had just been hired at my first radio job. I was sitting home one day watching television. During a commercial break I got up and walked into the kitchen and looked at the phone to see if it was ringing. DOH!

Ever answer your home phone with the call letters?

 

[That Anonymous Nerd]

Here's something I just remembered...

Fresh out of high school and I had just been hired at my first radio job. I was sitting home one day watching television. During a commercial break I got up and walked into the kitchen and looked at the phone to see if it was ringing. DOH!

Ever answer your home phone with the call letters?

that's the funniest sh** I've heard all week!

 

[KerryCollins]

If you've ever been to Radio Towers Park in Hamden, then you know it's not the biggest building in the world. Well, we used to have a janitor who would take ALL night to clean and for the longest time we couldn't figure out why...until the station was flagged by corporate for excessive porn site visits!

This guy, who I liked and still do like a lot, would take nice long breaks from emptying trash and cleaning and sit in production rooms & the news room and go to porn site after porn site after porn site.

 

[KerryCollins]

oh and what about the time Glenn Beck was doing an appearance at Tommy K's and he wraps up his call-in with "Come down to Tommy K's, 'cause BLOCKBUSTER BLOWS!" at 4:30pm on a Saturday afternoon! I almost drove off the road laughing my a$$ off!

 

[Bill-in-CT]

Kerry - The best line I ever heard on KC101 came from you about 7 years ago...

Caller: "My computer crashed because of a Trojan virus."

Kerry Collins: "I thought a Trojan is suppose to prevent a virus."

 

[radiopromoguy]

If you've ever been to Radio Towers Park in Hamden, then you know it's not the biggest building in the world. Well, we used to have a janitor who would take ALL night to clean and for the longest time we couldn't figure out why...until the station was flagged by corporate for excessive porn site visits!

This guy, who I liked and still do like a lot, would take nice long breaks from emptying trash and cleaning and sit in production rooms & the news room and go to porn site after porn site after porn site.

Hey Kerry... Were you there yet when we had Bob Paglia the movie critic who used to sleep at the station and carried around around the puppet of The Count from Sesame Street? (I am not making this up)

 

[MarcB]

I used to be responsible for cleaning up the gym before the school dances when I was in high school. I believe it was my senior year around 5PM. That would've been in 1999-2000. I had KC-101 on my walkman and the DJ said "I'm going to play the first rap song ever recorded". And he played "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel. My first reaction was "That's not the first rap song ever recorded." My second reaction was "Why the hell is KC-101 playing "We Didn't Start the Fire"?

 

[KerryCollins]

Hey Kerry... Were you there yet when we had Bob Paglia the movie critic who used to sleep at the station and carried around around the puppet of The Count from Sesame Street? (I am not making this up)

When I started at KCI as a weekender, I would be working all hours of the night & weekend and OUT OF NO WHERE I would see Bob just APPEAR! He'd be wearing that hat that made him look like The Undertaker and he'd be carrying around that COUNT puppet. At 2:30 in the morning, that would really freak me out! However, if you talked to him, he's a really nice and intelligent guy. People said he didn't have a car and he would ride a bike everywhere. At first I didn't believe it...until I saw him riding his bike down the post road in Orange with THE COUNT in the bike basket! ;D

As a matter of fact, before I left, he was STILL getting Hollywood Press Packages sent to him at the station, with everything from script summaries to official glossies. I'm sure Barb at the front desk still gets packages for him from time-to-time and he hasn't been at the station IN YEARS!

 

[bub]

That would've been in 1999-2000. I had KC-101 on my walkman and the DJ said "I'm going to play the first rap song ever recorded". And he played "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel. My first reaction was "That's not the first rap song ever recorded." My second reaction was "Why the hell is KC-101 playing "We Didn't Start the Fire"?

"We Didn't Start the Fire" is believed to be the very first digitally-produced Number One Top-40 hit when it was released in 1989.

 

[bub]

Hey Kerry... Were you there yet when we had Bob Paglia the movie critic who used to sleep at the station and carried around the puppet of The Count from Sesame Street? (I am not making this up)

Legend has it that the late WELI Morning Man, Ron Rohmer, used to have a mobile home parked in the lot with all the station vehicles at Radio Towers Park. He would be out and about on speaking engagements and appearances, and afterwards would crash in the mobile home to ensure he would be at the station on time for his show, which started after the 5AM news.
Warmin' up the filaments, eh? ;D

Sleeping at the station is nothing new for a lot of us in the business. I'm sure we've had to do it because of snowstorms.

 

[bub]

Hey Kerry... Were you there yet when we had Bob Paglia the movie critic who used to sleep at the station and carried around around the puppet of The Count from Sesame Street? (I am not making this up)

When I started at KCI as a weekender, I would be working all hours of the night & weekend and OUT OF NO WHERE I would see Bob just APPEAR! He'd be wearing that hat that made him look like The Undertaker and he'd be carrying around that COUNT puppet. At 2:30 in the morning, that would really freak me out! However, if you talked to him, he's a really nice and intelligent guy. People said he didn't have a car and he would ride a bike everywhere. At first I didn't believe it...until I saw him riding his bike down the post road in Orange with THE COUNT in the bike basket! ;D

I've known Bob Paglia off and on over the years and I know all too well the black hat and the puppet and the bike. He did confide to me the method to his madness or the madness to his method and once he explained his why, I completely understood. Once you get by all the idiosyncracies and eccentrics of the man, he is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet on the face of this earth, as well as one of the most well-read, deep-thinking individuals I've ever met. In his defense, I had him as a college instructor and he was one of the major reasons why I have 2 college degrees, after being told over and over I wouldn't succeed in college.

At last check, he has a car once again, but during the warmer weather months, he won't hesitate to bring the bike back out. For a guy in his early-60's, that bike must keep him in shape.

 

[Info-warrior]

If you've ever been to Radio Towers Park in Hamden, then you know it's not the biggest building in the world. Well, we used to have a janitor who would take ALL night to clean and for the longest time we couldn't figure out why...

And now, the trash gets emptied out once, maybe twice a week.

At night, the K.C. stands for Kerry Collins. There's a classic liner for ya.

 

[Info-warrior]

All right, here's one for you. Not the most exciting, but...

We had Prophet installed and running for about a month at WELI when we started running into major crash issues when playing back DRRed shows in automation. Back then, most of us didn't know anything about the emergency control room, the cart deck or the edit page functions. Instead we played everything from the button bar, including the DRR show.

One afternoon during such a crash, I was running the Kim Komando Computer show off the button bar when the IT/Engineer restarted the AServ following our bottom of the hour news. This caused a shift change on the log at the precise moment I was pressing the button that had the next segment of Kim Komando. The shift change changed the button bar to one containing music beds and instead of Kim, I hear the opening bars of 'Another One Bites the Dust.' After spending hours fussing with this thing trying to make our technical difficulties sound as unobtrusive to the listeners as possible, I nearly fell over in laughter. That just summed up the day right there.

 

[radiopromoguy]

Hey Kerry... Were you there yet when we had Bob Paglia the movie critic who used to sleep at the station and carried around the puppet of The Count from Sesame Street? (I am not making this up)

Legend has it that the late WELI Morning Man, Ron Rohmer, used to have a mobile home parked in the lot with all the station vehicles at Radio Towers Park. He would be out and about on speaking engagements and appearances, and afterwards would crash in the mobile home to ensure he would be at the station on time for his show, which started after the 5AM news.
Warmin' up the filaments, eh? ;D

Sleeping at the station is nothing new for a lot of us in the business. I'm sure we've had to do it because of snowstorms.

Actually... It's not legend. It's fact. But Ron didn't just use it after the occasional speaking engagement. He actually lived in it. I remember when before we (KC 101) moved from North Haven to Radio Towers Park... Glenn Beck & Pat Grey made a trip over to RTP to say hi. Well, the WELI people weren't crazy about us moving in, and Ron actually called Glenn a punk. After the dust settled and they got used to us being there, Ron turned out to be a very nice guy.

 

[Glenn With 2 Ns]

Wow! Some really great stories here. Thanks for keeping them coming. It's great reading!

Not sure how the war of words got started with amfmradio1. I would like to thank him/her for lumping me in to the "young and inexperienced" statement (yes, I am PT and only do one day a week on PLR now). Oh what I would give to turn back the clock to the day's when I was indeed young and inexperienced. Unfortunately, I am neither. So either...after starting in the business 17 years ago I have gotten progressively worse or I have simply not aged. Now...if I could just bottle that potion! ;D

Back to the stories:
I think everyone who has pulled a double shift that included an overnight has one of these. I came on the air at 10:00 PM on a Saturday and had to work until 9:00 AM. The last 3 hours of the shift were public service and syndicated programming before the next jock came in. This was before we had computers do everything for us and we literally had to flip over an album (gulp) and cue up the next segment. Well, I had been up for well over 24 hours and come about 7:30 in the morning I was crashing hard. I started the album segment and put my head on the control board for what was supposed to be a 5 min nap. Well, you can probably guess what happend. As I dreamed about being on a tropical beach with a topless super model, the segment faded out and the needle on the album began to make that hissssss hisssss hisss sound as the label played over and over....FOR 30 MINUTES! I snapped out of sleep...shook out the cobwebs and cracked the mic as I dropped the next album on and said "Ok, thank you for your patience. We have finished our transmitter repairs. Back to Flashback!"

I told me PD about the incident 10 years later.

 

[bub]

One station I worked at, it was in the days of the old EBS - Emergency Broadcast System - long before the present day EAS. In those days, it was customary to get a EBS message over a teletype machine. In the main studio, the way the studio was set up, there was a large red light bulb affixed to the wall over the Arrakis board that lit up whenever an EBS message was coming over the system. When the bulb lit up, you listened to the station sending out the EBS in cue, then you got up and went to the teletype machine to get the EBS that was printing over the teletype. You then ripped the info off the teletype, attached it to the transmitter log and recorded the time on the log as having received an EBS, date and time noted. Then you went to the transmitter rack and pushed the button that turned off the light bulb. Then you proceeded with your shift.

By the time I got there, the teletype machine was pulled out of the building but the red light bulb remained. We relied on that for EBS info. One day, the owner's grand-daughter was running the board at the station and during her shift, the red bulb lit up. Problem was, she didn't know what that meant, didn't ask for help and didn't know how to turn the bulb off. So she took it upon herself to reach up to the bulb and turn it counter-clockwise just enough to turn the bulb off, and she never bothered to tell anybody what she had done. As a result, the owner and CE were wondering why we weren't receiving EBS test messages for 6 months. ;D