• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Radio War Stories

B

bturner1

If this should be under a different thread, please move.

Anyone in radio for a good while has some war stories to share. Here's one of mine.

I went to work for a small market FM that had been on the air about a year. For me to come to the station, I agreed to some trades in lieu of salary. One was to live in a camper trailer at a KOA campground with the cost traded for commercials. In addition I could trade $150 a month at a restaurant for ads and there was a trade at a gas station where I could get $5 in gas a day as I was in sales. I was recently divorced and took half the bills so a camper was perfect. In fact, the camper had been bought cheap by a friend who no longer used it.

It was days before things went south. Once they found out I could jock, write and produce commercials, my sales job included being half of the morning show and the sole guy to write and produce not just the commercials I sold but whatever the telemarketers sold. Then I had to arrange a 40 minute cart with the breaks for the hours we were on satellite. The most frustrating was when an outcue on a cart was wrong at about the tenth break and I had to bulk erase and start again. It became a 15 hour day without a pay increase. I would bail out of town by noon Saturday so they couldn't find me otherwise I'd be at the station 7 days.

After I was there about a month, a guy pulled out in front of me on the highway and I hit him. He was drunk but sobered up as it took an hour for the state trooper to arrive. My car was totaled. My insurance company was not helping. My agent was in one district, I lived in another district and the accident was in the third district of this insurance company so no district would resolve things. I had to call in the state. As I was doing outside sales, sales dropped. I'd borrow a car when I could. But I was 'carless' for a month. I was being told to get sales up if I wanted my job.

I went to the car dealer on my account list and explained I still over about $3,000 on my car so I wanted a good used car. They refused to sell me one saying I shouldn't pay the $3,000 I owe and just get into a new car. I found another dealer that had a perfect deal for me. I had arranged with the receptionist to take me over to get the car.

I'm about to leave with the receptionist to get my car and my owner orders me into his office. He tells me I can go get that car but if I did I didn't have a job, no place to live, no place to get lunch and no place to put gas in the car. If I want to go with him to my account and buy whatever they want to sell me, I have my job, place to live, eat and get gas. I had to go with him but I explained exactly why I was there to my client as my owner gave me a dirty look.

Luckily for me, my client, tells me that morning a guy they knew brought in a one year old Ford Tempo that his mother had before she passed. The car only had a few thousand miles and the client argued down my interest in front of me and saved me a bundle. I hated the car because of how I came about getting it but I really appreciate my client having pity on me.

I don't need to name the owner of the station because he is long gone from radio. He was unsuccessful with every station he ran or owned. He was well hated too. Even in the community he was disliked.

The good out of all of this: I actually know how to run a radio station by myself.
 
My first station (1971-1974) KIBS, Bishop, California:

The owner was absentee...Frank Oxarart, father of Frank Oxarart, Junior, who would become General Manager of KFWB in Los Angeles. He was running the station as a tax write-off and it was allowed to fall into deplorable shape compared to how it had been under the original (1953-1969) ownership of Elwayne Clement, Bud Deming and Roy Downey, and the owner who followed, former KWOW, Pomona and KPOL, Los Angeles engineer John Young, who bought it in 1976 and brought it back from the brink.

How bad was it? One night in '72, the FCC made a surprise inspection while the GM was ill and I was alone in the building. 106 written violations...miraculously, none affecting my license. When the inspector asked me to take the station down to night power, his mouth dropped open as I walked out of the studio to the lobby where the transmitter was the showpiece, went around it, took the back off it and jiggled the broom handle sticking out of the middle of the old RCA BTA1-R. The relay switch on the front of the transmitter had failed eight months before and Oxarart wouldn't approve the purchase of a replacement. There are 105 other stories, but you get the basic idea.
 
Once a guy came in and was waiting around for a meeting. We got to talking and he told me he was black. He looked white to me, so I thought he was kidding around and chuckled. Then he said, “Do you know who I am?” I said I had no idea, and that’s when he told me he was the station owner’s son.
 
I was on the phone with one of my KSKO contract engineers yesterday while we grumbled through an issue with my AK Public Media trying to get the IP only mode to work, even after I disconnected the coax it would switch to look for the RF feed that was disabled after a piece of uplink gear failed at Anchorage HQ.

Anyways, as we were talking I said "Steve, as I've told other people, most days this job is fun....most of the others it's a learning experience and the remaining few.. I either laugh my ass off at the 'only in my life" days or I'd go crazy and get pissed"

There was that very cold sub zero winter day where I had a Toyo furnace in the basement stop working, and it's used to keep our pipes form freezing... I was dealing with that while on the phone with a contact in one village as I tried to remotely troubleshoot one of our FM stations that was off the air.

As I'm dealing with those two, I hear a loud screeching beep and I know what that is upstairs "holy crap, the UPS is about to die". I tell the person I've gotta go, I'll deal with the off air station and heater in a bit....



The UPS won't go into bypass mode, so I have to reroute things to other plugs elsewhere to get our transmitter, computer and satellite recievers back up.. phew I did.

Turns out the problem with our off air FM station in another village was SWR's because of snow and ice, so we limped along all winter and replaced things in the summer.

 
In about mid-1965 I was at home in Quito, Ecuador, eating lunch and listening to the station. We were Top 40 but since everyone went home for lunch between 12 Noon and 2:30 PM, we did a softer version of ballads and instrumentals in that period.

So, to my sudden surprise, the needle skims over the album that was playing and an unknown voice issues a call to revolution and the grant of property to the downtrodden.

This goes on for several minutes. Buy that time I had grabbed a fireplace poker and gotten on my Vespa and went to the station, less than 20 blocks away. When I got there, the revolutionary gang had left via the trash chute in the building. They had beaten up my midday jock and tied him up in the studio.

I'm not sure I would have done anything useful with the poker had they still been there, but I was an angry kid who just had his radio station taken over!

Before I could call the police, there were patrol cars outside. I untied the jock, and he explained to the cops what had happened. I was 19 and the cops did not believe I was the station manager and owner, so I called my lawyer who also came over and explained that I was indeed the owner. By that time, several other employees were back from lunch and verified that it was my station, indeed.

They never caught the rebels. They had been masked and had no identifying clothing.
 
One summer I was working as a contractor in Kuwait hired to reestablish various microwave communication links to radio and TV operations that had been knocked out during the first Gulf War with Iraq. Great pay, but really dangerous. Several of us were staying in a building of small apartments being rented by the U.S. Army. One day I was headed out to meet a driver who was going to drive me to a toppled microwave tower about 50km East of Al Jahra. There was a small box truck parked out front that I just walked past when I heard this explosion and was showered with pieces of aluminum shards. A mortar had hit the truck on the opposite side from where I was, and I could see daylight through the holes blown in the truck box from mortar shrapnel.
Oil wells that Saddam had blown up just before he split town, so the sky was constantly a brown color and smelled really bad. The decision to finally give up the high pay and head home to the States came about two days later while taking a shower. There was literally an oily film all over me, literally coming out of my pores. Figured my health and safety plus being around for my kids was worth more than money.
 
While this is off topic and not related to radio, both my prior post and Kelly's story made me think of how few people today appreciate what we do have in the USA.
 
Robert Douglas said:
More off topic...David, do you think Cuenca Ecuador is safe enough for expat retirement right now?
Click to expand...
A friend of my wife retired there a few years ago but left the country with literally their clothes on their backs after having been robbed and beaten in their home by one of the cartels at gunpoint. My wife's friend was beaten pretty badly, and her husband was beaten, stabbed, and almost died.
Other than that, I'm sure it's great.
 
We were in Cuenca for 10 days with a group of friends in February. Our impression was that it was safe. We walked around at night with no problems. There are other cities and areas of Ecuador that are not as safe. We were also in Guayaquil on that trip and were much more careful there. There is a large expat community of retirees from the United States and Canada and it was interesting to talk to them about why they had chosen Cuenca to retire.
 
The year was 1992. I'd just received permission from the FCC to move a Class A FM 10 miles west of Lafayette, Indiana. I was preparing to put up a new 350 foot tall tower.

I received a threatening letter from a competing broadcaster. He said if I caused him to lose listeners, he would sue me. I lit the letter on fire and mailed it back to him.

Shortly afterword's someone broke into my transmitter shed and tossed equipment around and they cut my coax. So much for me being a smart ass. I was off for a day waiting for the splice to arrive.
 
The year was 1986. I'd dropped a new channel into the FCC's table of allotments for a small town 11 miles north east of Lafayette Indiana. Three other groups filed competing applications and they wanted to serve their towns and not mine.

So, I let these guys know I believed in the American free enterprise system and I was going to drop FM channels into their towns as well. And their towns were more prosperous than mine anyway.

I said I'd keep filing petitions for rulemaking until I got a construction permit from the FCC.

How'd it work out? I wound up with three new FM stations to build. Two were close to Lafayette. And one that would serve Indianapolis.
 
Last edited:
FCC Inspector story from my old boss.
Inspection was going OK although the agent was being very picky. They're standing in front of the RCA 10 kw AM and the inspector opens & closes the door shutting it off then on.
"Well, aren't you going log this?" he asks my boss. My boss hands him the log and says "You did it, you log it."
FCC inspector logged the times, reason, and signed it.
 
I was in Eagle Pass, Texas at a Top 40 FM in 1981 when the FCC came in. They wanted me to do an EBS Test. I never gave it a thought but years before we have changed the primary station to WOAI in San Antonio because KGKL in San Angelo, the station we were supposed to have as our primary, could not be received well enough, even with a big outside antenna, to trigger the EBS unit. The FCC rep was really upset. We told him the truth and he said to tune in KGKL. We did and you could barely make it out. He talked about needing an outside antenna. We showed it to him. He was flustered. He didn't fine us and simply said he'd forward the info to Washington.

KINL had a huge commercial load then. The legal page program log sometimes required an add-on page for the additional commercials. Per the GM, we had to separate competitors and had to make judgments. For example, McDonalds and a Steak House could go in the same break. On top of that you had some spots that played twice or three times in an hour. I devised a system where I put a mark next to each cart pulled. A repeating spot got a second mark and when played there was a third mark. He glances at the program log, the marks and the time: 9:07 and asks if those spots have all played in the 9 o'clock hour. I explain my system and he says that is unconventional. I simply showed him the 8 o'clock hour. He said I was subject to a fine for my 'system' but he said he understood the standard would not work in this situation. Back then on a light day we might have 24 units an hour but most weekdays were about 45-50 units an hour with most being 30s. We averaged 5 spots between songs.
 
I can't top anything that anyone has posted here already, but I have one of my own. The old WDXN in Clarksville, TN. This was in the early '90s. The studios were upstairs in a building on 2nd Street in downtown Clarksville, which probably meant that the building had been built in the early 20th century, if not earlier. Because it was upstairs, in the event of a fire, there was a rope that we were to use to lower ourselves to the sidewalk below, in front of the building. (There was no elevator in the building either, but that probably wouldn't have mattered, in this instance, as we probably could not have used it, anyway.) Fortunately, I never had to find out if the rope would have worked in such a circumstance. The building was so old and decrepit that we had to turn out certain fluorescent lights in the building, because rainwater leaked in through those fixtures, every time that we got a heavy rain!

Fortunately, about six months after I started there, we moved to a new facility in the industrial park, away from downtown. About five years after I left that station, a tornado came through and did enough damage to the old building that it had to be torn down. Good riddance! I later learned that the station had moved AGAIN a year or two after I left there, so they had moved twice in the '90s. Once while I was working there, and once again a year or two later. I don't know if anything ever occupied that upstairs downtown space after WDXN left it.

That station has gone through so many management, ownership, format, and call-letter changes since I left there that NOTHING remains of it from the days when I worked there!
 
I have one from the early 80s. This was at what was then WKSI in Eldorado, IL (now WEBQ). The station building was in an old doublewide trailer that was in imminent danger of collapse at any time. During the winter, the furnace went out, so our sales manager went out and traded out a freestanding woodstove that was placed in the kitchen area just off of the hallway to the studios and bathrooms.

My father decided that if you crammed the stove full of wood and opened the air vents on the door wide open that it would heat the building up that much quicker. Well, genius got it going so hot that flames were jetting out the vents like the engines on a Saturn V rocket going to the moon. Of course, I was heading up the hallway to the front when Dad decided to open the door to the stove. A huge fireball shot out of the stove, ricocheted off the door and hit me full-blast in the face. Luckily for me, my glasses saved my eyes, but my hard-earned mustache, eyebrows and the front half of my head of hair were burnt to a crisp. I coughed out some soot, went to the bathroom to clean up my face, and my step-mother did her best to make me look presentable, although I will admit I did get strange looks from little kids when I would stop at the store for the next few weeks.



889b649812d801daecf6d5465dc22728.jpg\
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom