Radio Stories – You Can’t make this stuff up!

Over the years I have heard, seen and participated in some incredible things in or near a radio station.  Some were great fun, some were memorable, some were odd, and some just made you shake your head.  Today's blog will be a collection of some events that fall into the last category. There's the newsman I was working with at WHN recording a public service show in the back production studio (remember back in the days when the FCC required every radio station to carry a certain amount of public service programming?).  His guests this day were several members from a New York area dental association.  Everything was going along fine until he asked them, "Why do black people have such white teeth?"  What happened next was the definition of dead air, as the three dentists in the studio just stared back at him with dumb-founded looks on their faces! This same newsman was working one morning during one of those summer periods at WHN when the A/C would die and it was hot as hell in the studios.  When that happened, fans were brought in, studio doors were left opened and the mode of dress was decidedly casual.  For a reason that none of us could understand, the "On Air" light for the news studio had a pigtail and an AC plug coming out of it that was powered whenever the mic was turned on.   On this particular morning, I guess we were bored.  When we discovered that the cleaning lady had left her vacuum out in the hall, we strung an extension cord and plugged it into that pigtail.  For every newscast, whenever his mic was turned on, the vacuum also came on.  When he closed his mic to play an actuality the vacuum went off.  When he opened it again, sure enough, the vacuum started up.  This went on for several newscasts and we were on the verge of getting hysterical in the control room because he had no idea how this was happening.  To my knowledge he never figured out what we were doing, but did comment after the 3rd or 4th time it happened, "Why does she always start vacuuming just as my mic goes on?" A staple of Christmas Eve programming at WABC for many years was the Midnight Mass from St Patrick's Cathedral in New York.   This was a huge yearly production for the Engineering Department under the direction of Assistant Chief Engineer Bob Deitch.  There were several planning sessions, site surveys every year, a full day of set-up at the Cathedral, and then the live broadcast at midnight.  Back in those days, at the ABC Building at 1330 6th Avenue, there was always a minimum of three engineers on duty at WABC and WPLJ, and the folks back at the studio decided to share in some holiday festivities this particular year.  Because of the importance of the broadcast, some of the people who worked the 4-midnight shift that year were also kept over, so there were a number of food and drink donations that were brought in and set up in Studio 8C, from which  the show emanated.  Now, as background, WABC's Studio 8C had just been re-built as a state of the art audio production studio with a huge custom board built by Rupert Neve in England.  As 8C was mainly a production studio, this board had an incredible array of faders, inputs, outputs, equalizers, and a complexity that our regular air boards didn't have.  On more than one occasion I'd seen an engineer sit down at this board and stare at it with a look on his face akin to what he might have were he sitting in a 747's cockpit, and being asked to land the plane! Ok, so back to our story.  The Mass got on the air as it was supposed to, and the folks at the studios continued their festivities.  One of the engineers had brought in a crock-pot and had food heating for several hours.  About halfway through the lengthy mass, the Cardinal was doing his homily and one of the things he said was, "and in life, God speaks to us all in strange and mysterious ways".   This was, unfortunately, the point that the engineer on the board decided to ask a fellow engineer on the other side of the glass to turn off the crock-pot.  He meant to punch down the intercom button to talk to the studio, but he missed.  Remember, I talked about how complicated this board was, and right next to the intercom button was the slate button which opened the microphone in the program channel.  Rather than push down the intercom button and ask WABC Engineer Bill Mozer to turn off the crock-pot, he pushed down the slate button and the entire New York Metropolitan listening area heard his request.  The folks who were listening to WABC early that Christmas morning may have been confused, or perhaps they mistakenly thought they had truly heard the voice of God, when they heard the Cardinal say, "and in life, God speaks to us all in strange and mysterious ways…(and then heard) Bill, Bill…would you turn the crock-pot off?"

WHN Is Pictures!

The two photos that I posted with my last WHN Blog were just two of many that I collected during my time at The Nifty 1050.  Before I move on, thought I might post a few more from the collection.



The "Brookyn Cowboy" Jack Spector meets the Grand Old Opry



Contry singer Bill Anderson and WHN GM Chuck Renwick at the WHN 1050 Country Picnic

Del Demontreaux, Dan Daniel and Stan Martin at the pickle booth
at the WHN 1050 County Picnic



Jack Spector, Bruce Bradley, Johnny Cash, Stan Martin, Del
Demontreaux and Dan Daniel on stage at WHN Country
Concert at C.W. Post College



Dan Daniel front and center with backups Lee Arnold,
Bruce Bradley and Jack Spector

WHN DJs Del Demontreaux, Lee Arnold, Stan Martin,
Jack Spector, Bruce Bradley, Steve Warren, Dan Daniel
and country star Bill Anderson

Jack Spector started on WHN doing afternoon  drive.  Before
he left WHN he'd be doing the morning show

The Brice Bradley Morning Machine followed Bruce's
successful run on WHN's mid day Femine Forum

I first worked with Fitz at WHN in the early 70s and
then again at WABC in the early talk days where he voiced
spots and was a fill in host.  He left WABC to
do a morning TV show at channel 5. 
The show lasted for years, but Bob's participation didn't

Ruth Meyer

  Ruth Meyer, Jack Spector and Barbara Mandrell at a WHN 1050 Country station event   Ruth Meyer was already a legendary figure in New York radio when we first met her at WHN.  Born in Kansas City, when her dream of writing for a newspaper didn't pan out, Ruth turned to radio, getting a job as a copywriter at KCKN.  Even back then, her enthusiasm for radio was evident and she quickly ended up at WHB working for legendary Top 40 innovator, Todd Storz.  Ruth was a quick study, learning Storz Top 40 lessons, and in 1958 she moved to NYC and WMGM.  Unfortunately, the management at WMGM wasn't able to grasp the way Top 40 worked, and after just three months, a frustrated Ruth quit.  It wasn't long before Ruth was hired at WMCA, and as they say, the rest is history!  Early in my time at WHN, Ruth was hired as the Program Director.  Legendary WMCA Good Guy Jack Spector was already at the station (see my blog WMCA Good Guys http://fd3qa.blogspot.com/2010/09/wmca-good-guys.html), and knowing Jack, he probably had something to do with Ruth's hiring.  Ruth came into the halls of 400 Park Avenue like a tornado blowing through the Kansas plains!  She realized that radio was supposed to be fun, and she wanted that for everyone who worked for her!  She tried to enthuse many of the WHN veterans to see radio her way, but frankly, some of the older folks were very set in their ways and resisted her overture as just another management tactic to hoodwink them into something.  She was much more successful with those of us who were new to the business and still in awe of working in radio. Fellow C.W. Post College and radio station WCWP alumni, Joe Honnerkamp, remembered Ruth this way during his stay with the WHN Engineering  Department. "Ruth was the best PD I ever worked for. She would light up any room in that dreary place. She even tried to include our rag-tag engineering dept. in the team effort at the time. Her memos to the airstaff always started "To: All Airmen...From Ruth Meyer" The former Good Guy members were a bonus....even Joe O'Brien. She would always suggest a better way of doing things. Never any threats of "my way or the highway nonsense" so common with other radio management." As Joe mentioned, along with Ruth came not only the style she'd developed at WMCA, but most of the Good Guy air staff as well!  Jack was soon joined on the air by Dan Daniels, Joe O'Brien, Dean Anthony, Ed Baer and even newsman Steve Powers.  It was great to watch them all interact and almost seamlessly pick up where they left off.  Ruth and WHN were also making a huge change at this point too - - changing the format and bringing country music to New York City! That was a real change for all of us who worked at WHN.  When Jack Spector played the first country song in late February, 1973, the world seemed to slip off its axis just a little bit!  WHN had a new General Manager, Chuck Renwick, who was a Storer Broadcasting veteran, and had a lot of history with country music.  He also was someone who came from the Programming side, and that was a real change for many of us.  He was about the only one on the floor who really knew anything about country music - - but we were all about to learn! One of the first things we learned was that country records were a lot shorter than the MOR cuts we'd been playing.  In fact, they seemed more akin to the 50s and early 60s top 40 hits in length.  We were constantly being caught as a record would end around the 2 minute mark and we'd be grabbing the next element or getting the DJ off the phone!  It was also hard in the beginning to be playing music that we had absolutely zero familiarity with.  We'd never heard of any of the current songs, the vast majority of the oldies or most of the artists we were playing.  It must be like working at a foreign language station when you don't speak that language!  Be that as it may, Ruth immediately opened her bag of tricks, and we were doing all we could as a station to become a part of our listeners' lives.  There were dinner and concert venues in Manhattan that contest winners were invited to (with the concert starring a young Barbara Mandrell), a huge concert out on the campus of C.W. Post College that featured not only country acts (like Johnny Cash), but the WHN DJs in a very a "Good Guy Style" presentation, and a huge WHN Country Picnic that first summer.    The picnic was held on the Queens campus of St. John's which was the "Super Secret Location" that was only revealed to contest winners.  This was a huge affair staring Bill Anderson as well as several other country groups, and featuring the WHN DJs front and center!  There were all kinds of food and events beside the concert, and in typical Ruth style, the DJs were at the heart of it all.  Ruth's philosophy was simple...become a part of the listeners life and touch them in a way that made them a real part of the station's success.   Getting the listener to do something for this involvement was a major part of the equation.  She told me once about a contest she'd done early on at WMCA, where the listeners had to send in a postcard.  She said that the station got listener response and thousands of postcards, which was capitalized on by the sales department, as they sold clients on how involved their listeners were with what was happening on the air!  She was a great lady, and as Joe said, she tried to involve the staff in every way she could.  Those of us who were not resistive of her efforts were rewarded by being a part of all the events that happened, which was great for our moral and only made us want to do more for the station.  It was a lesson that I think alot of folks in radio station management I've worked with since could really learn, as so many of them seem to not have the same sense that including your staff only makes them work harder.  For me, inclusive is always better than exclusive, but then I learned that lesson a long time ago from a true motivational genius. One thing that most who worked at WHN in those days will remember about Ruth, was that she was never separated from her can of Tab.  If she was in the station, she probably had a can of Tab within reach.  What many may not know, is that most days after lunch, there was about a 50-50 chance that the can was filled with Tab, or with white wine!  This was a lesson that Chuck Renwick learned late one day when they were sitting next to each other in a meeting, and he started to choke and grabbed her can of Tab.  He got a huge surprise when instead of a slug of Tab, got a slug of wine!  Ruth and Chuck had a great working relationship, and the station was a real fun place to work when the two of them were at the helm.   I remember a Christmas party that was a hell of a lot of fun and a real change from what we'd had the year before.   The first year I worked at WHN, we had an incredible Christmas party at a fancy East Side restaurant, The Sign of the Dove.  We all got a bonus from the company, and a Seiko watch as a gift!  There was a rather dramatic change the next year when the party was in the General Manager's office, the food was Oscar Meyer liverwurst on a Ritz cracker, and the gift was sticking your hand in a grab bag (I got a $3 bottle of lady's perfume).   Although money was still tight at 400 Park Avenue the next year, they managed to get a trade deal with an Italian restaurant on the upper west side, and once again have a real party.  I remember that the day of the party was cold and snowy, and that getting to the location off Central Park West was a real pain that evening.  It seemed like everyone was of the same mind that night; a nice drink now that we were in from the cold would be just the ticket.  Unfortunately, the bartender had a heavy hand, and with that first drink, the majority of the staff was blotto!  I remember having a conversation with Chuck Renwick that made no sense, and little else of the night.  The one memory I do clearly have was of leaving the restaurant in a group that included our Production Director Allan Kaltor.  Allan got outside the restaurant, raised his hand to hail a cab, and just kept going face first into a snow bank.  Yes, it was just that kind of party!  Ruth was gone from WHN before I moved on to WABC, and we kept in touch and would go out for lunch every couple of months.  I learned quickly that it was best to not make plans for the rest of the day, if you could help it.  We'd meet at her eastside apartment around noon, go to one of her favorite restaurants (usually French), and start lunch and the first bottle of white wine.  We'd talk, she'd tell wonderful stories, and before we knew it, we'd be the only ones in the restaurant. It would be 3 PM and we'd have consumed not only that first bottle, but two more bottles of wine!  Lunches with Ruth were incredible, but they were not something that you could fit into a busy day!  A number of years later I worked with Guy Ludwig at WABC who had also worked with Ruth in a past job.  One day (this is when Ruth was working at the ABC Radio Networks), we got the bright idea to schedule a lunch with Ruth.   I remember we went to the Russian Tea Room for the lunch, but little else about that day.  That's just the way lunches with Ruth Meyer went!  She was a great lady and I was very sad to hear that she had died this past January, but very thankful for the lessons I learned, and the experiences she shared with me.  She is but just one of the radio folks I have been lucky enough to work with along the way who shaped my knowledge and my perception of how radio is supposed to work.



Bruce Bradley, Del Demontreux, Stan Martin, Johnny Cash
and Dan Daniels at WHN concert at C.W. Post



WHN is People

I don't remember if that was the current WHN ad campaign when I started there in April of 1972, or if it was a past campaign.  I do know that I still have a little lamp that has the words "WHN IS People" integrated into the filament so that the phrase lights up when you turn on the lamp.  I also know that I met and worked with some incredible people during the four years I was there, and thought it would be fitting to remember some of them. The first person that I met at WHN was the man that hired me, WHN's Chief Engineer Pappy Dirkin.  Pappy had worked at WHN since the dawn of time, and the only person who called him Bill (his given name), was an older lady in the finance office who had also worked there since the dawn of time.  To everyone else he was Pappy.  I remember going in to meet Pappy about a job, and he asked me how much I wanted a week.  Not having any idea, I threw out a figure of $150 (remember, 1972!).  Pappy said to me, "I never start anyone at less than $160".  I later found out that was the IBEW contract minimum for Summer Relief Engineers, but at the time I didn't know that.  He offered me work that would start mid April and last through the end of the year.  That was a better offer than I'd gotten from the couple of other places I'd interviewed, so I took the job.  Little did I know at that point that I'd spend the next four years of my life working at 400 Park Avenue! Pappy was a very interesting guy and a great storyteller.  He'd sit behind his desk with his feet up and his little cigarillo cigar in his mouth, and regale anyone who'd listen with stories about radio's past.  I was fascinated with his tales, and was often sitting in his office (which was also the shop) hours after or before my work day.  He had great stories about the Brooklyn Dodgers, who, from 1939 till they moved to California in 1957, were heard on WHN (or WMGM).  A younger Pappy had been the engineer for many of those years, and he had great stories.  He told stories about getting to know Jackie Robinson (they both lived in Stanford, Connecticut and would car pool together), and about many legendary baseball characters in a time when they were just guys playing a kids' game for a living, not super stars.  He also had great stories to tell about the early days of radio, and about some of the incredible broadcasters who had passed through the halls of 1050 AM.  He had no shortage of stories, and I never tired of listening.  Occasionally he'd stop to help Tommy Franken diagnose a piece of equipment (he wasn't just a great story teller, but he really knew his was around electronics too), but then he'd launch right back into our discussion.  His stories also taught me alot about working with talent and dealing with people, but one of the most important pieces of advice he gave me was, "always get your last pee of the day on the company." Every day Pappy would leave his office at the exact time, go down the hall to the men's room, take care of business, come back to his office, put on his coat, walk out the back door of the station, and be standing in the 3rd floor lobby and hit the down button for the elevator exactly as the second hand of the station's clocks swept up to 5 PM! You truly could set your clock by him. Pappy would take the train into Grand Central every morning from Stanford, and then walk up Park Avenue to the WHN Studios at 54th Street.  As dependable as he was hitting that elevator button at exactly 5 PM, you could also set your watch by his daily arrival time.  One morning it got to be 9:30 and he wasn't at the station yet.  By the time it got to be 10:30, we were starting to worry.  We had the news department check with the railroad if there were any problems, or if anything had happened on the trip down from Connecticut.  Everything seemed normal, so we got a bit more worried about Pappy.  Just before 11 AM, he breezed into the station, went into his office, took his coat off, threw his New York Times down on his desk and sat down.  He seemed kind of upset – more mad than anything else – but really didn't want to talk about it.  It took a lot of coaxing, but eventually we got this story out of him. He'd taken his regular train into Grand Central that morning, and was heading through the terminal when something happened.  He thought it was gas, but it wasn't – it was much worse!  What to do???  Well, he decided he'd head into the adjacent Roosevelt Hotel.  He went into the Men's Room, took off his pants, and asked the Men's Room attendant to take his pants to the hotel's cleaner and have them rush cleaned.  Pappy then sat himself down in a stall, opened his New York Times and waited.  As Pappy told the story, he waited a half hour, and then an hour, and as his wait approached an hour and a half, he looked for the attendant and asked him where his pants were.  The attendant's first language was not English – in fact it was doubtful that he spoke any English at all!  It took Pappy some time to get him to understand his question about his pants, and even more time for Pappy to understand the man's answer.  The bottom line was, that he had not understood Pappy's request to get the pants to the cleaners.  What he had done was to take Pappy's soiled pants and THROW THEM AWAY!  Here Pappy was, a 60 something gentleman, trapped in the Roosevelt Hotel's Men's Room WITHOUT PANTS!!  It wasn't nice, but we all found that part of the story hysterical!  I'm sure Pappy realized that we would, and that was probably why he was reticent to share it with us.  So, what did Pappy do?  Well, he put on his trench coat, and with his naked legs, socks and shoes hanging out beneath the coat, with as much dignity as he could muster, he went into the Roosevelt's Men's Store and bought a new pair of pants.  Of course, that made us roar even more, making Pappy even sorrier he'd told us the tale! When I first got to WHN, the station was heavily programming sports.  We were the flagship station of Nets Basketball, Islanders Hockey and Mets Baseball, and the WHN Sports Director was legendary sports broadcaster Bill Mazer.  Bill worked during the Nets and Islanders games doing the half-time and post-game shows.  On any night that neither the Nets, Islanders nor the Mets were playing, Bill would host, Bill Mazer's Sports Roundtable from the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel.   I ended up working at night my first months at WHN, and worked a lot with Bill, both at the studio and at the Plaza.  Of course, everyone who remembers Bill from his many years on NY Radio and TV, remembers that his claim to fame was an uncanny knowledge of sports history.  Bill could answer just about any sports question asked, and could discuss just about any era of any sport with not only knowledge, but many times first-hand knowledge.  He was a very interesting man, and we had lots of talks as we killed time during the games or before the shows we did at the Plaza Hotel.  In my mind, I have a picture of Bill sitting in WHN's Studio A, doing a half-time show in a game while eating a Popsicle!  I also remember that Bill was sponsored by the New York Area AMC dealers, and was the first person I ever saw driving the fish bowl-looking AMC Pacer! One night we were sitting there doing a Nets game.  The first half was all the other team, but in the 2nd half, the Nets came alive, and in the end they won the game.  One of the features of the post game show was a player interview.  A spotter at the Nassau Coliseum would get one of the players to a mic and set of headphones, and Bill would conduct the interview from the WHN studio.  Well, on the night of this remarkable turnaround, one of the first questions Bill asked was something like, "What did the coach say to the team during half-time that motivated you to win the game?"   To which the player replied, "he told us to get off our asses and to go out for the second half and kick some fucking ass."  Bill looked at me and I look at Lou Perriano who was the other engineer working that night, and the three of us shrugged our shoulders.  Yep, another lesson learned…do the post-game interview on delay!  Oh well…live and learn! The Sports Roundtable from the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel was one of the best assignments I had during my years at WHN!  This show was on from 7-10 PM on any night that we had no game scheduled, so some weeks we had one or two, and some weeks we had no shows.  I'd get to the WHN studio late in the afternoon and meet producer Del Demontreaux in his office (Del's office, by the way, was a desk shoved in a big closet that also housed the Metrotech machines just off the WHN Music Library), and then the two of us would walk from 400 Park to the Plaza Hotel.  The show took place around a large, round table in the back corner of the Oak Room, and the guests were folks from the world of sports, or entertainment, or even politics (I met Rusty Staub, Whitey Ford, Paul Anka among others doing this show).   The procedure was that Del and I would start setting up for the show using the equipment that was stored at the Plaza.  Once everything was good to go and I'd checked out the radio line (remember those?) back to the studio, we were free till airtime.  Because of the publicity that the Plaza was given from this show, a trade agreement had been set up with the Oak Room.  Guests were invited to come at 6 PM and have dinner before the show went on the air as a thank you for appearing.  Bill, Del and I also ate every night, and the combination of the food, the dinner companions and the conversation only further convinced me that being an engineer at a radio station was definitely better than working for a living.  Every night of show, Bill would show up at about 5:30, and we'd sit down to dinner.  Bill would ask the waiters what was good, and generally that's what we'd have for dinner.  Be it rack of lamb, duck, or filet minion, Bill would also order wine (we secretly thought that his main yardstick for his nightly choice was the price side of the wine list) to go with it.  One thing we discovered early on, was that the waiters were given a straight 15% tip based on how much was spent that night.  Because of that, they were always anxious to rack up a large bill, so they'd offer all kinds of additions to the meal.  A baked potato was one of my favorite additions and the way they would scoop the inside out of baked potato, mash it, then mix it with butter and or sour cream and then re-stuff the potato is still something I recall all too often according to my wife Sue!  Perhaps because of the supior quality of the service in the Oak Room or perhaps because of their desire to keep the bill as high as possible, your glass was never empty – be it a soda, beer or wine – till the program was over @ 10 PM.  I also remember Bill and Del and I walking back to WHN once the show was over.  Bill was interested in so many things and would love to expound on these to Del and me as we walked down Park Avenue. I still have a very clear memory of Bill talking to us about a David Halberstam book he'd just read.  Not sure I understood what he was talking about, but he was always interesting to listen to!  This was pretty heady stuff for a 22 year old new to the radio business, but every night I did this show it only served to further convince me that radio was the right choice.   Oh and by the way…the Sports Roundtable at the Oak Room was not without it's controversy.   It seems that the trade agreement that the station had with the Plaza was supposed to last for the entire year.  Unfortunately, we ran through the whole amount in 6 months!  Oh well, there were some great meals in those 6 months!! Next…Ruth Meyer and the Good Guys invade WHN