Radio Stories Part 2 – WHN Tales Continue…

In my first Radio Stories post, I spoke about the Feminine Forum talk show that was on WHN when I got there in April of 1972.  Started on KGBS in Los Angeles with legendary West Coast radio host Bill Ballance, this was a "daring talk show" for its day.  It was both successful and very different from the kind of stodgy talk shows of the day, so as WHN and KGBS were both owned by the Storrer Broadcasting Company, it made perfect sense to have a New York version of the show.  This wasn't a syndicated show produced at KGBS, but a total local WHN version hosted in two parts: first by Bob Fitzsimons and Bruce Bradley, and later by Fitz and Bob Jones.  While the topics of discussion often came very close to the FCC's 1972 limits, some of the topics were just interesting, and sometimes funny without any double ontondra elements.  Such was the day when the topic was, "What's the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?"  As you can imagine, the vast majority of the stories that day were common, embarrassing moments that mean nothing to anyone but the folks involved.  There was, however, one story that I have remembered for close to 40 years! I was running the board when we took a phone call from a young lady with a subway story.  She told a tale of traveling from Queens to Manhattan in the morning rush hour.  She and her girlfriend were standing on the crowded train (now remember, this was 1972), and because she didn't want to get her white gloves dirty (I told you it was 1972), she had a handkerchief in her gloved hand and was using that to hold the handle.  She looked down at the man sitting in front of her and realized that his fly was open.   She nudged her girlfriend and motioned down with her eyes, and her girlfriend saw the man's fly and started to giggle.  The original girl also started to snicker, and afraid that the man might realize what was going on, she took her hand off the handle and put it over her mouth.  She forgot all about the embroidered handkerchief that she had in her hand, and the snickers turned into laughter as both girls watched the handkerchief float off the handle and down right on the man's pants!  Now they were laughing for real, and the gentleman realized something was going on.  He looked down, saw the folded handkerchief, thought it was the tail of his white shirt, and tucked it in his pants and zipped up his fly!    She ended her story by wondering what the man (or his wife) thought when he got home that night and undressed! Because of the success of the Feminine Forum, taking phone calls was all the rage at WHN.  As the new kid on the block, I often ended up working the over- night shift on the weekend.  It was alot of fun when I first got there, because Del Demontreaux was doing the Saturday overnight.  Del was a young guy - just a couple of years older than me – who wanted to turn this once a week air shift into a full time job (the rest of the week Del produced Bill Mazer's Sports Roundtable from the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, which I engineered a lot – more on that in a future edition), and was doing an oldies show, so it was alot of fun.  While we mostly played music, we would occasionally have a topic that we'd take a phone call or two about.  Such was the case one night when Del decided to ask people to request songs that had parts of the body in their titles.  Now, we all know what kind of trouble you can get into today if you tried to do, say, a Google search using the words "body parts", but we all were a bit naive back then in the early 70s.  We had the usual suspects, such as "Brown Eyed Girl" or "Heartbreak Hotel", but we never saw it coming when a nice young lady called and told Del her song title…Jerry Lee Lewis' Great BALLS of Fire!!  We learned a lesson that night too…do the call-in segment on delay (which we didn't happen to be using that night). Of course, using delay was not always an easy thing at WHN.  As I described before, the physical plant at WHN was not the most state of the art (for an example, our studio backup power source was not a diesel generator but rather a series of car batteries behind the rack in the control room) and the delay systems of the day were typically some type of tape delay, usually an in-house Rube Goldberg creation.  At WHN we had two very old Ampex tape machines that played a loop of tape that the engineers made – a new one for each hour – which gave us seven seconds of delay.   One Saturday, I was working the four to midnight shift, and started Del's show, and then I turned the board over to a guy we called "Silent Eddie".  Ed was an older gentleman who had worked out at the WHN transmitter for 20+ years, and who would pull an occasional shift at the studios.  After twenty years of being at the transmitter all alone, Eddie was not a real talker.  We used to say that working with him was like being alone…but worse! So this particular Saturday night, I say my good-byes, go downstairs, and hop into my 1971 Ford Capri for the ride home to Long Island.  As I headed down 3rd Avenue about to turn into the Midtown Tunnel, Del was just introducing Lalo Schifrin's theme from Mission Impossible.  As I exited the tunnel several minutes later, the theme was still playing…only it wasn't the theme, but rather just a seven second excerpt from the song.  Yep, the Ampex machine had popped out of record, and rather than delaying what was happening in the studio for seven seconds, now all that was coming out of the WHN Transmitter was the same seven seconds of the Mission Impossible theme!! I made it through the toll booth as quickly as possible (remember life pre-Eazy Pass?), got off the LIE at the first exit, and searched for a pay phone!  I searched and I drove, and I searched some more…all the while listening to those same seven seconds of the Mission Impossible Theme! (Oh, for a cell phone!)  Finally, about six minutes after getting out of the tunnel, I found a pay phone!  I called the control room and spoke to Eddie and told him he was off the air.  Eddie said, "no I'm looking at the mod monitor.  We're fine."  It took me another couple of minutes to get him to understand what was on the air, and what had happened to the delay, but it finally sunk in.  I wondered how many listeners Del still had once they went live after about nine minutes of the same seven seconds of a song playing over, and over, and over again!  I can still hear it… Next Installment…WHN Is People!