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Radio of the Past: Revenge of the fired jock.

B

b-turner

This was told to me from the traffic person at a station I managed 44 years ago (and honestly never should have been GM).

She was working for a small town AM & FM in 1979. The AM was live while the FM was automated.

A change in management meant cleaning house at the station, opting for an all new on air staff. When the announcement was made in late afternoon, everyone seemed to take it well, almost expecting to get the boot. It seems the morning guy had an extra key made to the station and his apartment just in case he lost his keys.

The station signed off at 10pm and the morning guy drives up, parks in the back. He goes in and randomly through the automated reels of music records a loud 'F U" but the whole word. Over on the AM side, everything was on cart and back in the day you could pull the cue jack and record over what was on the cart. About the middle of each spot he repeated his "F U" and he did the same on the carted music. There were no turntables in the studio at that time, just two triple decker cart machines. She seemed to think he was gone before 4am.

The poor new guy comes in and starts his first shift. He quickly discovers every cart he fires off has "F U" somewhere on the cart. A quick call to the new management and the GM says, just simulcast the FM but alas, the carts in the carousels had been adorned with the same "F U". And even the automation reels had the same although I was told he only got the first four or five songs an each reel.

The funny thing was he altered his voice just enough that the new management wasn't sure who said it. My traffic director said the local police department, who the GM called, offered to try to help but actually though it was quite funny. Many advertisers and locals were not amused in the least.

What they ended up doing was getting the engineer in to wire up the production studio to run on AM and FM. The lady said she was told to get there as soon as possible to help find the written copy of all the spots. By mid-afternoon the engineer had the AM studio for recording all the commercials again and then they started re-carting all the music after the 10pm sign off. Within a week the music service the FM used sent a replacement library at quite a large expense. I understand nobody slept much for a couple of days.

She knew who did it but he remained 'never heard from again' in that little town. This happened in 1979.

I worked at a station in that town about 1992/93 and asked about the incident. Some people remembered it.

That's the best one I know of. How about you?
 
At my first DJ job the engineering crew showed up and realigned all the cart machines one night after sign off. Everything sounded muffled so the boss said recut everything. Another jock and I spent all night recutting the carts. One of the jocks who was on vacation at the time always inserted his name into PSAs even if it was not relevant. I was pretty tired by 4am but figured I'd play a trick. We had a psa for Smoky Bear in which Smoky said , " hi this is your fire prevention bear Smokey" I dubbed the Vacationing jock's voice in instead of " Smoky " saying his name. You can imagine his surprise when we he played it. I won't mention his name as you would all recognize it as he is a national talk show host now.
 
My "worst" was told to me by another station manager... the production guy was fired late Friday afternoon and told to get his stuff out and leave. He went into the production studio and grabbed his stuff... or so the manager thought.

Actually, he went in, opened the board, pissed in it, grabbed his stuff and left.

On Monday, the staff came in. Spots to produce. The studio stank like a latrine, and the board was so damaged that it could not operate. They had to order a new one, and used some Radio Shack PA mixers in the interim.
 
b-turner said:
She was working for a small town AM & FM in 1979. The AM was live while the FM was automated.
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I won't ask the call letters, but was that radio station in Massachusetts? This sounds like a story I heard when I worked at a similar AM/FM in the very early 1980's.
 
Actually, the incident I posted happened in Texas. I'd suspect it had to have been repeated at a few spots around the country. What would be amusing is if any two are the same guy! I sure wouldn't know because I never got the name of the guy that did this in Texas. That really narrows it down because very few small town stations about 1979 could afford a couple of triple decker cart machines and removed turntables from their studio. Likely even fewer were fulltime versus daytimers and ran separate programming on their FM.
 
A friend who has sadly passed away told me of a station he once worked at where every once in a while a bogus nonsensical weather report would come on at a station in northwest Indiana, which was automated. It went on for awhile. After going through the entire cart library and checking every cut on every cart, the culprit was found after many man-hours.

A guy I knew at a former station decided to walk out with no notice in the middle of a shift. Gave his "Major address to the nation", started an out-of-format song and left. It took the GM a few minutes to realize nothing was on the air and take over.
 
gr8oldies said:
A friend who has sadly passed away told me of a station he once worked at where every once in a while a bogus nonsensical weather report would come on at a station in northwest Indiana, which was automated. It went on for awhile. After going through the entire cart library and checking every cut on every cart, the culprit was found after many man-hours.

A guy I knew at a former station decided to walk out with no notice in the middle of a shift. Gave his "Major address to the nation", started an out-of-format song and left. It took the GM a few minutes to realize nothing was on the air and take over.
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I was let go at a station in Florida and my hourly newscast repeated every hour for a whole year
 
One place I was let go from. I was told I was the only one who knew how to split the AM and FM for high school baseball. I guess they weren't going to call me,
 
I have wondered why stations don't let the fired announcer a chance to tape a good bye to be played the the beginning of their shift next day. Of course it would be voluntary but there would be no chance of something off color or profane. Esspecially if it was a long running show.
 
I do remember a couple of instances where outgoing DJs were allowed to say goodbye to their audience. The instances I personally remember involved stations that were changing format, so I suspect that the risk of the DJs doing something to get revenge was considered relatively low.

Both of the stations that let their DJs say goodbye to listeners are from North Texas in 1986. The first was when 1310 KAAM in Dallas/Fort Worth dropped its oldies format, and the second was when 910 KIKM in Sherman/Denison dropped its Top 40 format. As a listener, I did appreciate it.

But today, who would say goodbye? And who in the audience would care? With syndicated morning shows and other dayparts often voicetracked, there's really no one to say goodbye when a format changes today.
 
TexasTom said:
With syndicated morning shows and other dayparts often voicetracked, there's really no one to say goodbye when a format changes today.
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There's usually at least one local show to handle all of the local sponsorship mentions and obligations, as well as contesting and any of the music scheduling that happens.
 
A contest went wrong thanks to our engineer at the studio. Ours was a 100,000 FM and we billed ourselves as Power 96. The contest centered around the power company cutting the power at about 8:30am for 'up to 8 hours' to put in lines with more capacity. In the promo we joked we were taking all the power so they needed to fortify the electrical grid for us. In the contest rules, the first 96 people won cash once we went back on the air. Jocks were ready at desks to answer phones. In fact there were to be 4 of us to answer all 4 lines.

The engineer sent two of us out to the tower site to turn off everything as they used this time to put in a new remote control. On our 30 mile drive back, the electricity came back on and the engineer in the studio sees the cart in the cart machine (the one thanking everybody for listening all day and to call in to win) and hits play. The engineer wanted to test the system. After about 30 seconds, the transmitter goes back off as the DJs scramble to get something else in the cart machine as the 4 phone lines all blink instantly. It was about 10 minutes after we returned, we were ready to go back on the air permanently.

We had some real issues because the first caller got $960. The next 9 got $96 and the last 86 got $9.60. You have two people trying to take the calls. We weren't entirely sure who the first caller really was. We had to award the first on each sheet. If only the engineer hadn't fired off that cart.

The engineer shrugged it off saying he didn't know.

It did make for some fun promos afterwards with the winners and setting South Texas radio records of 96 winners in only minutes and handing out $2,650 cash (this was a town of 30,000 in 1987, so at least 2 days worth of weekday billing). The had winners saying they listened to nothing all day so they could win some money. We were heavy on 'proof listeners agree it's Power 96 or nothing at all'. We talked we were stronger and louder because the electric company upped the power for us.

We did some things we couldn't do 30 years later. We had the power patrol, or take the van out to find our bumper sticker on a car and get them to pull over for some goodies, doing a break with out remote equipment. Our promo started with "You've heard of the Rat Patrol (gunfire sfx) and the Border Patrol: 'no speak English mister' but have you heard about the Power 96 Power Patrol. Yes we were on the border and we used to get requests to play the promo almost daily even though it aired about every 5 hours.

We had a couple of fake commercials: one for a high end restaurant "The Javelina and Jalepeno" with sfx of the waiter saying "Tonight's special is Armadillo Medallions. A Texas Armadillo terrorized with a pitchfork then tenderized with a baseball bat before being sauted in a creme and butter sauce... We had a good number of talent with at least a few years of experience working the station (thanks to the Air Force Base). We played high energy top 40 and loaded in lots of fun and 'at least a winner every hour'.
 
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TexasTom said:
I do remember a couple of instances where outgoing DJs were allowed to say goodbye to their audience. The instances I personally remember involved stations that were changing format, so I suspect that the risk of the DJs doing something to get revenge was considered relatively low.

Both of the stations that let their DJs say goodbye to listeners are from North Texas in 1986. The first was when 1310 KAAM in Dallas/Fort Worth dropped its oldies format, and the second was when 910 KIKM in Sherman/Denison dropped its Top 40 format. As a listener, I did appreciate it.

But today, who would say goodbye? And who in the audience would care? With syndicated morning shows and other dayparts often voicetracked, there's really no one to say goodbye when a format changes today.
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WCCC Hartford let its whole air staff put its classic rock format to bed the night the station was to be turned over to EMF and become K-Love. Bad decision. The jocks played songs like "Highway to Hell" and others meant to mock the new ownership and its planned format. I'm sure the listeners loved it, though. As for the advertisers, I'm not sure there were any for that final hour.
 
CTListener said:
WCCC Hartford let its whole air staff put its classic rock format to bed the night the station was to be turned over to EMF and become K-Love. Bad decision. The jocks played songs like "Highway to Hell" and others meant to mock the new ownership and its planned format. I'm sure the listeners loved it, though. As for the advertisers, I'm not sure there were any for that final hour.
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I remember a jock playing Highway to Hell right after a local church service one Sunday morning on my station.
 
Radio Bob said:
I remember a jock playing Highway to Hell right after a local church service one Sunday morning on my station.
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And I remember a little AM country station in Arkansas that would broadcast the week's obituaries on Sunday mornings and the DJ would always come out of the last obit with the Statler Brothers' "I'll Go to My Grave (Loving You)"! That was actually pretty cool, IMO. I hope the bereaved families who might have been listening liked it, too. (KXJK, Forrest City, for anyone who wants specifics.)
 
Don't know if this count, but I remember sitting with my uncle on his shift one night on a station he worked at. My family was visiting his family one week and my uncle asked if I'd like to go to the station with him.

I was like 6 or so and there was this one pretty unmarked button at the end of the desk that held the console. While my unc was cueing a record I pushed that purdy button! Found out that night it was the emergency kill switch for the transmitter. Ooops!

It was a year before he allowed me back. The station was owned by another family member and only got a slap on the hand!
 
CTListener said:
WCCC Hartford let its whole air staff put its classic rock format to bed the night the station was to be turned over to EMF and become K-Love. Bad decision. The jocks played songs like "Highway to Hell" and others meant to mock the new ownership and its planned format. I'm sure the listeners loved it, though. As for the advertisers, I'm not sure there were any for that final hour.
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I don't see how that did any harm, and it let the soon to be former staff and whatever listeners remained let off some steam.

Going in the other direction, a friend of mine was listening when the Christian AC format on 94.9 in Dallas/Fort Worth was changed to a high energy Top 40 format at KHYI, Y95. After the last Christian pop song was played, he told me that a voice came on and said "That's enough of that crap", after which the Top 40 music started.

Needless to say, Y95 has been gone for decades, the KHYI call letters are now on an Americana/country rimshot in the market, and Christian AC has been back on 94.9 for quite a few years.
 


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