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Radio Stories

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NightCourtFan

Guest
I've always been fascinated by Dj stories or stationfolklores.....and I was just curious if anyone had any from the area that they would care to share? In one instance back early in my career I was workinig overnights..and I kept hearing this noise coming from the lobby area at around 230 3am. I wnet , god knows why, to see what was going on.....the typewriter and printed out the word "Hi" down the page. Another time I was witness to the same typewriter typing the number "7" over and overagain....when i questioned these behaviors going on..the PD told me the place is haunted and hasn't been able to keep an overnighter very long b/c of that!.....well wasn't I the lucky one.
 
omigosh ... any one of us could write a book. I'll just give one example, when I was doing nights at this dump in the basement where there was a taxi stand upstairs on the street. The cabbies would use our bathroom and when we saw them in the studio window, we'd let them in.

One late night, I had just come off the net and was starting the local news when a driver came down; I signaled "wait a minute" and kept reading. After a minute, he indicated he wanted to get in. I gave the "wait a minute" again and after another minute he turned around and left.

Suspecting the worst, I finally went into music and went outside to see that he has pissed all over the studio wall. It seemed so fitting at this place and, as it was my last night before moving on to another station, such a fitting end to my job there.
 
When Joe Montione programmed 13Q, (I walked in the door as he was walking out), Jim Ward was doing Coping Connection and Montione called in saying he was Stashy and that his wife and kids had left him, he was out of work, and couldn't take it anymore and he played the sound effect of a . :45 going off..Jim spent the rest of the day having the police look for Stashy..
 
A couple of spooky stories come to mind...

-- When I was at WNAK in 1990-91 doing nights, I always heard strange noises coming from the third floor of the building (Bob Nielson had an apartment up there, but he supposedly didn't stay there often) and had weird things happen in the control room (e.g., piles of records falling, pots on the board turned up without explanation, strange humming in the mic and headphones). Just before I left, I was let in on the "secret" that the building was a former funeral home, and the studio was the former embalming room. I always wondered if that place was haunted.

-- Working at the old WILK building on Franklin Street doing overnights in 1989, I was told to stay out of the basement because homeless people would climb in there through a window and sleep there on cold nights. One night I heard some strange noises coming from the basement, so I called the engineer, who told me to go down and look around. As I got to the bottom of the steps, a cat (which had come in through the broken window) jumped out and ran past me. Somewhere on the wall is the imprint of my heart, which had leaped out of my chest.

A couple of quick funnies (though I cannot verify all of them actually happening)...

-- The story of Jim Ward taking a call live on his call-in "swap show" and having the caller yell the "F-word" repeatedly.

-- The automation at 104.9 in the late 1980s needed a babysitter to change the reels and spin if the system went down. If the system failed, a cart machine triggered and played "I think I'm in trouble" by Lindsey Buckingham. However, one day that song was mistakenly added to the rotation on one of the reels, causing major confusion when the babysitter went into the automation room to find the problem.

-- WNAK, when it first switched to a computer automation system a few years ago, played the exact same playlist week in and week out. Every song and commercial was the same each corresponding day for several months.

I'm sure I could go on and on...
 
If anybody wants to have the biggest best selling book about radio, just cut and paste some of these stories into a manuscript and send them to Simon and Shuster...Another WARM story I forgot about. The old WARM MRS. was a humongus self contained mobile studio for those of you too young to remember..It was built on a big Ford chassis and had a smoke belching 350 V-8..Outside the building about a foot from the wall was a piece of aluminum venting that nobody knew what it was..until me..I had to do a remote in the middle of the winter and the MRS. was parked in front of that aluminum venting and it was cold so I let it idle for about a half an hour to get the interior warm...Turns out I damned near killed everybody in the basement offices as that aluminum vent was really the fresh air intake for those offices.
 
The WARM MRS also had a problem when you tried to play any carts (there's an old term) while the AC was on... this was a hotbox in the Summer and whenever you had all the gadgets on at the same time the speed of the carts (jingles, music, etc) would be affected... suddenly "Stay" by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs would run as long as "American Pie"!
 
remember the thrill when it was parked on an incline..Bob Lenio did that at one of the St. Josephs fundraisers and first time I stood up, I damned near went thru the side window. Another end of the heyday story..I got stuck being the escort for the Phillie Phanatic in the lare 80's..It was bad enough when I took him to a client and he would start rifling thru things, but when he was turned loose at the Fine Arts Fiesta and started throwing around 500-1,000 dollar paintings..well, you can imagine what an impression he made..also threw he "belly" out and sent a 4-5 year old kid flying thru the air..I don't think we ever brought him back.
 
I was telling someone the other day of my first job in radio...was on an Oldies AM station in the coal region of PA. The owner was a total jacka$$ and would pay us every 90days plus sometimes....other times he would give me a months worth of checks for the entire staff and then I would distribute them accordingly....He had me and the engineer go to a washed up station in Jersey and pick up there studio equipment to transport it to our studio's. We got back and hooked it up, only to get a call the next day saying that we had to bring it back to his office in Quakertown so it can be accounted for. Of course, my question was how can I keep the station on air if we take away the board and all the other equipment. Needless to say, we trucked all the equipment back to Quakertown and put it in the back room of his warehouse, where it sat until I left that station. Periodically he would call me and ask when I was coming to pick it up...but we had no station vehicles and he wouldn't rent us a van to make the trip so we were at a stale mate.

Getting a hold of him was another challenge..if he wanted to talk to you he would answer, but most times you would have to leave a msg and hope he would get back to you....I put up with that for a while..then I started to just leave threats to quit on his voice mail..next thing you know I would would get an instant call back.

He also had a brilliant idea to move the station to the tower site..which lied on a small piece of land surrounded by strip mines and coal banks...and roads you could barely get a car down..if you've ever been in the mountains around Shamokin, Mt Carmel or the like you know what I mean. I told him that wouldn't work and that no one will want to work there if you move to the bldg..he disagreed with me and told me that he thought there was alot of business opportunity to be built out there. So he went to the Township meeting and made his proposal and they laughed him out of the building...He called me right after and all he said was You were right! and hung up.

The best story so far with this station is the time he made me fight a cable bill for 44 dollars b/c he didn't authorize that purchase( the general manager at the time did). The owner had me go from one lawyer to another..trying to fight for 44 bucks. Every lawyer told me the same thing.."just pay the bill"!! I would tell the owner what they said and he would have me go talk to another lawyer....so I did...but instead of trying to plead my case I just told him to call my owner and tell him that he needs to just pay the bill....well we ended up ion court and he (the owner) paid 44 dollars plus court costs.

I could write a book on everthing that happen to me at that station..and I was only there a little over a year!!!!
 
I was hanging out with Joey Shaver one night around 1970 or 71 when WARM was still a powerhouse. I went out to get him coffee...which he spilled on the board. Then, using a knife to push a napkin under the board, he blew out the studio..forcing him to finish his show in the mobile unit outside. It was raining hard and the sound of the rain hitting the metal roof provided an interesting background to the show. ;D
 
The old WARM MRS. was a humongus self contained mobile studio for those of you too young to remember
Click to expand...

Are we talking about the WARM Flagship here? If so, that's the name most would know it by. In fact, I never heard it referred to as a MRS. As to using it for any live broadcasts, about all it was good for were cutaways involving voice-only; I can't recall it ever being used as a "studio" as such. Even in the late 70s/early 80s it was hurtin'. Also by that time, it had lost its head-turning charm, meaning no one gave it a second look when it rolled through their neighborhood. Brand new, it was one heck of a promotional tool, but it quickly(and sadly)morphed into a white elephant. Come to think of it, the flagship was kind of a metaphor for WARM.
 
The MRS (Mobile Remote Studio) was tagged that after an in-house promotion which Norm Hill won... it was delivered to WARM in the late 80's and came up from the southern US, I thought it was Texas, but I've been corrected on that point... obviously, there was another earlier version of this veichle that had as many issues as the newer one.

Speaking of Norn Hill... Norm, if you're out there, do you remember the day you took off on the Club in Scranton that had a NO FEMALE policy? You were filling in for Terry McNulty that day and really took off on that organization... I believe the tirade included "Stuffed Shirt Know-it-alls!" ... shortly after that tirade, the studio door opened rather violently and Phil Condron stepped inside and tersely stated that he was nominated for a seat on that Organizations board or already was a high ranking member of that organization.. Norm, the look on Phil's face alone and his tone... I think you swallowed the smoke from the cigarette you were smoking in the studio!
 
Forgot about that one. Speaking of Condron, anybody know what happened to him. The story behind the Scranton Club was they held the News conferance on the Scranton Mall actually being built and they wouldn't let Liz Warner and a couple of others in because they were women. Several of the men tv folks refused to go in as a protest..As I also recall, I said that I'd belonged to a men only club once and we really had problems at our annual dance because we couldn't figure out who would lead. Condron was not amused.
 
Norm.... Who Won?

Speaking of fun things and getting into hot water... anyone remember when Terry McNulty did this live read for some Bromo Seltzer (or similar) sponsor about the same time that there was a recall on a certain bacon product... we had just recieved a new sound effects library and one particular track labled "Projectile Vomiting" was really quite realistic and for the staff very funny.. Terry heard it and asked for a copy on cart.. I remember the last thing Terry was told was not to mess with or change the live reads we were doing at the time... But this was Terry McNulty, and nothing was taboo.. so right in the middle of the Bromo spot.. SPLAT!
I almost lost consiousness I was laughing so hard... Terry was a treasure.
 
NightCourtFan said:
I've always been fascinated by Dj stories or stationfolklores.....and I was just curious if anyone had any from the area that they would care to share? In one instance back early in my career I was workinig overnights..and I kept hearing this noise coming from the lobby area at around 230 3am. I wnet , god knows why, to see what was going on.....the typewriter and printed out the word "Hi" down the page. Another time I was witness to the same typewriter typing the number "7" over and overagain....when i questioned these behaviors going on..the PD told me the place is haunted and hasn't been able to keep an overnighter very long b/c of that!.....well wasn't I the lucky one.
Click to expand...
This didn't happen to be WFMV in Blairstown-the old train station? Now that was a scary f-in place.
 
I worked at WFMV a while.... scary is right. Outside of weird stuff... the place was a health inspector's nightmare. The toilets flushed right onto the road.... the owner didn't pay the electric bill and the power was shut down (hard to produce a signal then).... and since the A/C rarely worked... in summer, we'd prop open the front (read that "facing the tracks") door... and shut off the mikes when a train went by. Still... it DID have orange carpeting up the walls:)
 
No it wasn't in Blairstown, this was at a station in the coal region.....but I'd likew to hear more from that station it sounded almost as bad as WISL
 
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