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?"