I had a brief shining moment (that's called sarcasm) as the PD of Y-16, quite by accident.
I had just been canned at WMPS in Memphis when they switched from top 40 to country, and was looking for something to pay the bills. Mickey Coulter and the WQID bunch were leaving Y-16 to go back to the coast as Holliday sold the station to Fogelman-Thomas broadcasting. I came down to fill in doing afternoons for a couple of weeks, and the new management confused me with someone who had something to offer as a budding young program director. I set about attempting to make Y-16 a clone of WHBQ, music and formatics-wise, and did the best I could with what we had to work with.
Walt was doing mornings then, so I became my brother's boss, which was way backwards to say the least. Walt left for WSLI somewhere along the way, which eventually led to his TV thing. John Bell (Williams, Jr.) came in as morning man, and on down the road wound up with Walt over at WSLI. At some point, Gerry Cagle came back to Mississippi to run for office, and with time to kill, became our consultant. My recollection was that he took out my elaborate show prep system, and reduced the music to two stacks of records... play one from this stack, then play one from that stack.
The net result was that ratings doubled during my tenure, going from a 2 to a 4. By comparison, WJDX was in the upper teens and twenties at that time, I am sure. Besides Walt, among the cast were Steve Jeffries in middays, I did afternoons, first up in evenings was Craig Dale, then Graham Jasper (worked for me one day and saw how frustrating that could be and walked), replaced by a very young Lee Adams (he must have been at least two or three years younger than me). JJ Johnson (I think it's Doug now... he was doing sales for Clear Channel in Memphis last time I ran into him) did overnights. On the weekends I recall a guy named Rocky and Don Brady. We had news people... Ken Cook and a girl named Connie. Terry Stenzel was the Chief Engineer, and did airshifts as well.
The studios were in the basement of the Beautiful Jackson Hilton, and IIRC we paid some of the rent by including that fact in our top of the hour id's, eventually moving that into a :10 spot every hour. The back door to the PD's office opened into the bottom of the swimming pool. The pool equipment would occasionally back up and flood said office. The news booth was a converted rest room, and the teletype was an omnipresent sound any time one would talk over dead air (or open the mike over the bass solo at the end of Boogie Oogie Oogie).
I gave my old Starkville roommate Mike Patton one of his first consulting engineer gigs doing some sort of tweaking there. The old Jim Walter home at the transmitter site was dubbed Jonestown for mice, as they seemed to come there to die in mass quantities with their arms around each other.
This was a Jackson where the only store out on County Line road east of I-55 was a Tote-Sum store and Metrocenter was the new rage.
I stayed there about 9 months and left in early 1979 for Rock 103. TYX was just coming on back then, and I guess WCCL was on the way soon thereafter.
So Don Brady's still around, eh? God bless him!
Was this post about 1590 at one point? If not, nevermind. Sorry for wasting your time.
