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

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!

Radio Stories - Part 1 WHN

Over the past 39 years that I've worked in New York Radio, I've been fortunate to work with some incredibly talented people at some legendary radio stations.  I had an email exchange recently with a friend I have known since I started working at 1050 WHN in April, 1972.  Corinne Baldassano is today a VP of Programming and Marketing at a California Media Company, but back in 1972, she was a News Assistant at WHN.  She said of our days at WHN, "I think of it being a slightly less glamorous version of Mad Men."   I countered back, "It was a crazy place…I think perhaps more like WKRP than Man Men."  WHN was a historic New York radio station, having had multiple incarnations over the years as both WHN and WMGM.  In the early 70s, it was a watered -down version of WNEW, playing a middle of the road mix of music, and was staffed by an interesting mix of grizzled veterans and kids new to the business.    I graduated college in the spring or 1971, spent six months at Announcer's Training Studio in their FCC First Class License prep class, had taken and passed the tests required and gotten my First Class License, and started at WHN on April 17, 1972. April 17, 1972 was also the day I met Jack Spector.  I spent the morning watching what was going on in a control room that was very dated and much more like the 50s and 60s, rather than the 70s.  They had an old RCA board and several very large turntables that were left over from the electrical transcription days before they used carts.  The cart machines in the air studio were basically an afterthought, not built in at all, but rather stacked on top of each other on either side of the board.  After watching my trainer Lou Periano for several hours, he told me it was time for me to try it, and suddenly I was engineering.  About 30 minutes into my first try at running the board, this tall guy came in, introduced himself to me as Jack Spector, handed me a Music Sheet and said, "This is my first day so can you tell me if this is the way you do these sheets?", to which I replied, "Beats the shit out of me…it's my first day too!"    Jack laughed, wondered what kind of a radio station he had signed on to work at, and we were fast friends after that.  Jack was a great guy, an incredible storyteller, and a man I learned a lot from in the four years we worked together. I eventually became Jack's engineer, and we worked together everyday and had some great conversations.  He would try anything, and his opinion of other's criticism of him, "Spit balls at a battleship" he use to tell me!  Jack was one of a kind!  WHN's studios at that time were located at 400 Park Avenue @ 54th Street.  Just a couple of blocks down the street from the ABC Building and WABC, where several of my friends worked.  Close in distance, but so far away in concept!  WHN had moved there in 1958, and the physical plant showed it's age.  I worked there for four years, and every summer the air conditioning broke down.  There is nothing better than working in a closed radio studio in the middle of July when the air conditioning isn't blowing!  Corinne remembered a WHN DJ telling her "it's hot in the studio" and then lifting his toupee to air it out.  This must have been during one of those non-air cooled summers!  One lack of AC weekend, I was working with a man who had been in the business for years, Lonnie Starr.  Lonnie was a really nice man who had worked in radio since before my folks probably knew each other, and in his career he'd worked in New York at WNEW and WINS, in addition to WHN.  It was July and hot as hell, and they had brought a big floor stand-oscillating fan into the studio (can not even imagine what that sounded like on the air!!)   Every time the fan oscillated back and forth, the back of Lonnie's toupee would blow up and then flop back down on his head!  Business as usual at the Nifty 1050! One of the mid-day guys in WHN's MOR days was Bob Fitzsimmons.  Fitz was a staple in the NY Radio market for years, and in fact I worked with him again years later when WABC went talk.  When I first got to WHN, the morning man was Herb Oscar Anderson, and Herb only worked a 5-day week.  The Saturday morning show fell to Bob Fitzsimmons, but there was a small problem.  Bob was a guy who liked to party on the weekends, and that included Friday night.  There were some Saturday mornings when Bob was, well shall we, a bit "under the weather" when the show started at 6AM.  His engineer for that first hour was our overnight engineer Julius, who started his shift at midnight, and was ready to go home.  Bob, some days, was a bit beyond selecting music for the show, and over and over made the mistake of telling Julius to, "play whatever you want."  You would have thought Bob would have learned his lesson, but never did.  Without fail, whenever Bob said those words, Julius grabbed one cart exclusively and the listeners heard Don Ho's rendition of Tiny Bubbles! The General Manager of WHN at that time was an old-time radio salesman from the days of the three martini lunch, a trend that was on it's way out even then, but not in the WHN Executive Suite!  If you wanted anything from the GM, better get to him before noon, because after that, he was either "at lunch" or asleep at his desk!  WHN also had several spots teams on the station at that time.  We were the flagship station of the Mets, Nets and Islanders, and said GM was very hot that sports should be prominently featured in the newscasts.  In fact, his edict was that sports scores had to lead every newscast, regardless of what the important stories were at the time!  That's why on the morning after the death of President Lyndon Johnson, you heard the WHN newscast start with the words, "Islander lose, Nets win and LBJ is dead"…or something like that!  WHN was also the home of the "Feminine Forum" when I started working there.  This was an early talk show that was aimed at women, and that exclusively took women callers.  Each day they'd have a topic that was of interest to women, and all through the day women would call and comment on that topic.  As a call in show, it was done on delay, but the delay systems of the early 70s were nothing like the digital delays that are used today.   This was a real jury rigged system that was made in house, and involved a couple of old Ampex tape machines, a cart machine, a couple of switches and a speaker.  The procedure was that if something was said by a caller that the host didn't want to air, he would say the word CUT.  The engineer would then punch a button that would play a jingle and take the delay machine off the air.  He would then have to turn up a speaker and listen to the output of the tape, and when he heard the objectionable word, he'd hit another button that would switch back to the tape and put the delay back on the air.  Sounds like fun, right? Well, one day my friend Joe Ellis is engineering the show while host Bruce Bradley is on the air.  Joe was a real entrepreneur in those days, running a dog walking service, doing TV repairs and had several other irons in the fire besides working in the WHN Engineering Department.  The topic on that day's Feminine Forum is, "What Animal Does Your Man Remind You Of?"   Joe, as usual for him, was sitting back with his feet up, talking on the phone while he "engineered" the show.  Everything was going along fine till Bruce took a call about halfway through the show from a woman who said that her man was a tiger, and she was his little pussy!  Remember now that this was 1972, and that was definitely not a word that could be said on the air.  Bruce heard it and yelled, "CUT, CUT CUT, CUT!"  Joe heard it, and in his haste to get to the control board, fell on the floor.  Bruce later reported that he looked into the Control Room and only saw Joe's hand pawing at the buttons trying to get the delay off the air from his position on the floor. On the air you heard the jingle playing "WHN New York, New York" followed by "pussy...CUT, CUT, CUT, CUT!"   It was a long time till we let Joe live that down…. More to come!

First Love

I know that I have probably loved cars since I first realized what they were! My Mom tells stories of standing on a corner with me when I was five and of me naming the cars as they passed. I remember the first car our family had was a very used 1946 Dodge 4 door sedan. I recall standing up in the front seat between my Mom and Dad as we drove down the road! The package shelf in front of the back window on that old Dodge was huge, and there were times when I'd nap up there. Seat belts, child safety seats, automatic door locks? Never heard of any of them back then. My God, we are lucky that any of us that were born in the 50s even made it to adulthood!! As I grew up, I continued to love cars and couldn't get enough of them. I remember that during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when my friends David, Richard and I would head to the NY World's Fair, the first place we'd go to would be the transportation area. We were really in our glory riding in a new convertible on the Ford Magic Skyway (even better if it was a brand new Mustang), or traveling to the future of transportation at the GM Futurama, or looking at Chrysler's take on the future..the Chrysler Turbine! The great thing all these pavilions had in common was at the end of the ride, you got to look at, sit in and generally ingest that manufacture's 1964 line of cars! Wow…what could be better for three teenage boys! Sometimes I think that the first sixteen years of my life were just the buildup to that magical day when I could start Driver's Ed! I remember going down to the DMV the first time to take the learner's permit test. I'm sure I had worn out the study book, as I would fall asleep reading through it. By the time I took the test, I could quote from memory the distance one needed to keep from the back of the car in front of you at any speed. The test was a breeze, and then it was just a wait till my first class in the car, so I could get my hands on the wheel. I think it was only shortly after that first class that I convinced my Mom to take me out for a little practice. We lived in Jackson Heights at the time, and the relatively undeveloped area around LaGuardia Airport was the perfect place – I thought. That was until I made a turn on an unfamiliar road and suddenly discovered that I was on the entrance ramp of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway! I'd probably spent a total of twenty minutes behind the wheel of a car, and here I was trying to merge with traffic that seemed to be flying by – a real baptism of fire! I survived that first session, and ended up being the first one in my Driver's Ed Class to pass the road test. I even remember the date – December 17, 1966! The only problem was my 17th birthday wasn't till January, but living in NYC, the only way I'd get a regular license was with a Driver's Ed Blue Card, and the class didn't end till February! That was a real long two month wait, and because I had my junior license, I didn't want to drive at all and jeopardize getting my full fledged license so the only time I got behind the wheel of a car was the 10-15 minutes a week in Driver's Ed. Painful! I learned to drive on my folks' new 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 4-door hardtop, and loved the way the 390 V/8 got that big car pickup. As with all new drivers, I'd find any excuse to get behind the wheel, and was always the one driving to and from any family outing or errand that came about. Then the moment came to get my own car, and frankly it was about as different from the Galaxie as a car could be and still have 4 wheels! My first car was a 1955 Chevrolet BelAir 2-door sedan. Today, that would be a prized vehicle to an old Chevy collector, but in 1967 it was just an old car. The car was a bilious two-tone green, had a stove bold 6 cylinder engine, a three speed manual transmission on the column, and power nothing! I bought it from friends of my folks for $50, and had to pick it up at their house in New Rochelle. For a cocky 17 year old who had been driving legally for only a couple of months and thought he knew everything, (yes, back in the dark ages when we were teenagers, we too thought we knew everything) driving my first stick shift car from Westchester to Queens was a humbling experience. Starting, slowing, and ultimately stopping a three speed stick shift car was nothing like what I'd imagined, and was an endeavor I was ill prepared for! I managed to make it home in one piece, but stopped as little as possible (like for the toll on the Whitestone Bridge). For the next three weeks I worked on my car and tried to make it look as good as possible. I compounded and waxed the car (at one spot down to bare metal), but I couldn't make the two tone green look any better than bilious. In an attempt to make it look "sporty," I even put a $20 racing stripe on from the trunk to the hood, but the stove bolt 6 was still a boat anchor. I did, however, get much better at the operation of the stick shift, and by the end of that three week period, I could even start from a stop on a hill in a pretty efficient manner. You may notice that I've used the term three weeks several times, and may wonder how, all these years later, I remember exactly how long it took for me to get comfortable with my new car. Well, it wasn't a measurement of reaching a comfort level…it was it's life span. Three weeks after picking the Chevy up, while on the way to work at Alexander's Department Store in Rego Park, I ended her life. It was early on a summer morning, and as my friend Richard and I drove down 34th Avenue in Corona, Queens, and with the morning sun shining in my eyes, I plowed my '55 Chevy into a '52 Chevy that was sitting dead in the road! What was the likelihood that two old cars (one 15 years old and the other 12 years old) would meet in this way on a summer's morning? I hit him hard (pushed him a half a block), hit my mouth on the huge steering wheel (about 5 stitches later in the day), and pretty much ripped the trunk off the '52, while doing a hell of a job on the front end of my car. If I live to be 100, I will always remember that the gentleman's name I hit was Lemberg Nelson, and as he got out of his car after the accident, the first words he spoke were, "Oh my neck". That was the end of my first car, and even now, over 43 years later, I still remember the events of that day better than I remember what I did at work last Friday! The end of a first love is always hard, especially if it gets ended in a traumatic way. For a car nut, the end of your first car is a memorable occasion, and it my case, the fact that it was a short term relationship made it even worse. There have been lots of cars since that Chevy, and I've had them all much longer than that first car, but that's how my first ownership adventure went.

Ed Lowe

Today's blog is an unabashed love letter to a man I have never met in real life but only through the printed word. His name is Ed Lowe and I first met Ed through the pages of Newsday. At the time we became acquainted, Ed's official title at Newsday was Columnist, and although that may work on a News Room organizational chart, it falls far short of really describing what he did. Let me use Ed's own words from the introduction of his 1993 book, Ed Lowe's Long Island: "I never wrote a column. I wrote stories." And what stories they were. Some of Ed's Stories would bring a tear to your eye, while others would start you laughing out loud. Ed's stories were of the human existence here on Long Island. They were heartstring pulling tales of trouble in people's lives, and of how they had overcome great obstacles. They were also silly tales of common human experiences, that as a fellow Long Islander you could identify with. More often than not, you didn't know the folks Ed was writing about, but they were Long Islanders, and you understood what their lives were like, and you could identify with them. Ed's columns pointed out his story telling ability. They also pointed out his fondness for "extended" lunch hours at local pups around Newsday's headquarters and the Long Island characters that populated them. I can only imagine what those lunches must have been like and the great stories that went back and forth. I know that over the years, lots of them ended up in his Newsday columns, but I'm sure that there were many more that were outside the bounds of what was publishable! God I would have loved to be sitting on a stool next to Ed Lowe at any bar on Long Island. Now that would be a lunch hour I bet you'd never forget! Shortly after our twins Krissi and Kenny were born in November of 1986, one of Ed's columns dealt with the tragic death of a newborn - his grandson. Being a father that at the time had two premature newborns in Winthrop Hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care unit, this was a story that really resonated with me, and I felt very connected to his story and the participants. I was so touched that I sat down and wrote him a letter at Newsday, drawing parallels between his family's story and ours, and passing along my sorrow at his sad tale. A couple of weeks later I got back a note from Ed thanking me for my good wishes and wishing Krissi and Kenny and our family good luck. I always thought that note said a lot about the kind of person Ed Lowe is, and I proudly still have that letter as a reminder that there are some great people in this world! As often happens in businesses, management changes, finances change, and the relationship one has with their bosses deteriorates. That is what happened between Ed Lowe and Newsday, and in 2004, and after almost 30 years of being a featured columnist for Newsday, Ed accepted "early retirement". Frankly, a loss that I don't think Newsday has ever recovered from… But Ed was not finished with his public career. He soon joined the Long Island Press writing columns for them and other Long Island weeklies, as well as continuing his participation in Telecare TV shows and speaking to various groups around Long Island. In a story in the December 14, 2004 edition of the Long Island Press announcing that he was joining the paper, Ed referred to himself as, "a recovering Irish Catholic, a recovering ex-husband, a recovering ex-teacher, grandfather, son, journalist, consumer, friend, automobile operator, dinner speaker and parent of teenagers." As an Ed Lowe reader, you knew about all those areas of his life and more because unlike a lot of journalists, Ed Lowe's life was never off limits in his story telling! He laughed at himself as much as he did at the folks he highlighted in his stories, and that always endeared him to me. I continued to read Ed in the Long Island Press, but after a few months, the paper got harder and harder to find and I was no longer getting my Ed Lowe fix. I often times wondered what he was up to, where he was, and if he was still writing. It was only earlier this year that I re-connected with Mr. Lowe and once again it was through the written word. I'm not sure how, but I discovered that Ed was writing a blog on a weekly basis called Ed Lowe, Himself (http://edlowehimself.blogspot.com). I also discovered that there had been an unfortunate turn in his life since last we had met. On January 5, 2008, while in Vermont waiting for his second daughter, Colleen, to read from her work at a triumphant close of a grueling course in Creative Writing, Ed Lowe said, "I think I am having a stroke." He was right. In reading the early blog entries from the fall of 2009, Ed recounted what the last year plus had been like for him. In typical Ed Lowe style, he laughed at himself even when much of what he was reporting was not funny at all. But while reading about the pain and the suffering he'd gone through, and his need to relearn how to do everything including using the English language, the Ed Lowe spirit still shined through. Some of the tales were painful to read about and the tasks he had to master were seemingly insurmountable, but as usual, Ed found a way to laugh at himself and to humanize even the worst of it. Can you imagine the pain of a man, who for all his life had used language the way he had, and to suddenly find he still had a mind full of ideas but had no way to communicate them to those around him? So I started to read the blog entries, and since I had such a backlog to catch up on, I gorged myself on Ed Lowe. I would spend a lot of time each day at the computer or my I-Pod Touch catching up with one of my favorite story tellers. As a wanna be writer myself, I'd always loved the way Ed crafted a story, and I found great inspiration in once again being able to read Ed's work and the story of the last 18 months of his life. In fact, here's what I said in my blog entry from September 1st of last year: "Anyway, I am reading Mr. Lowes' blog entries and I am loving it! Rather than having to wait hours or days or weeks for the next installment, here I had a compendium of his writing. Much like having the entire series of an author's novels on hand so you can end one and start the next, I can finish one column and start the next (Mr. Lowe is at a very interesting place in his life and along with the stories of others, you also get a very good look at what he is going through. Rather than even attempt to share that with you, I suggest you sit back and let him take you along with him. He will do it with much more humor and insight than I could ever provide.). So while I am in the middle of becoming reacquainted with Ed Lowe and his work, an idea hits me...why don't I get one of these blogs and see if I can find the commitment to write something on a regular basis?" So that's just what I did. Having now caught up with my Ed Lowe backlog, and only able to read new installments when they came out, I started this blog. I was pretty good at keeping up the routine of writing as I've read too many times to count that the only way to get good at it is to keep doing it. I also have to say that I unabashedly stole the format I was going to use from Ed Lowe (hey, if you're going to steal you steal from the best, right?). I based the blog entries on things that moved me in my life. I wrote about our children, the 1964 NY World's Fair, people's attitudes, and memories from my life. My sincere desire was that one day, when I had managed to keep up with my routine for a reasonable amount of time, I was going to send an email to Mr. Lowe and show him what I'd done and thank him for the inspiration to buckle down to the task. Each time I finished reading a new entry from the Ed Lowe, Himself blog I'd learned a little more about Mr. Lowe's current situation or the folks who touched his life, was saddened that my current dose of Ed Lowe was done, inspired to write some more in my blog, and anxious for the week to pass till the next entry appeared. That was until his blog entry of October 8, 2010 entitled "Liver". As was typical for Mr. Lowe, this started off with a recitation of his relationship with liver and how it had changed since his childhood days when he hated it, to the day it was almost forced on him by a bartender at a watering hole on the night that it was the dinner special. As I said, all typical Ed Lowe, until about a third of the way through the piece, when these words jumped off the computer screen at me: "It seems I have liver cancer. I found out two-and-a-half-years after a massive stroke failed for some reason to kill me. And, my liver cancer appears to have nothing to do with my old habits, chief among which was the volume consumption of beer." Honestly, I had to read those words three or four times before I was really sure that they said what I thought they said. It was hard to finish reading the piece, but as sad as I was at Ed's situation, I found myself chuckling at his words as I finished the piece. Then I stopped and thought, "Oh my God, hasn't this man suffered enough??" Here was a man for whom speaking and writing had been his life. He has a massive stroke, looses the ability to do both. and through sheer guts and determination, he doesn't give up…he fights back and he re-learns both of them! How incredible a story is that alone, but now he has liver cancer?? How much is one person supposed to take??? The first comment posted that day on the blog was from Mr. Lowe and it went as follows: "This runs in The Neighbor next Tuesday. Surgery is scheduled for that day. In the unlikely event I don't make it, I want you to know that I enjoyed my relationship with you more than you can know, each and every one of you. See ya all of a sudden." With those words, my contact with Ed Lowe ended for what I hopped would be a brief period. I kept checking his blog for any updates and even found him on Facebook and sent a friend request. When a week or two later my friend request was accepted, I hoped that meant that he was on the mend and would be back with us soon. I kept checking both the blog and the Facebook page, and although there were no added words from Mr. Lowe, new friends were being accepted every week, so I hoped he was doing better and was, at the very least, still with us! That was till this past Wednesday afternoon when I found this new status update on his Facebook page: " Send a cheer for Ed as he finishes his last paragraph! He said I should write something clever about his departure, but there is nothing really cleaver about cancer. It's got him. He sends all his love and appreciation to all of you. Please send him your blessings xoxoxoxo. Coleen" Even reading those words now, I am overwhelmed with the sadness I feel for him, his family and friends, and for us, his huge base of friends who only knew him through his words. I obviously was not alone with these feelings, as hundreds upon hundreds of people have posted comments on his page telling him how much he has meant to us over the years. It's really rather incredible, and if you have even a slight memory of Mr. Lowe and his work, I would recommend that you read the eloquent words. By in large, these are not the words of professional writers, but they are the words of folks who loved Ed Lowe's words. Who loved his choices of stories and the way he crafted his works. Who loved the words he chose, his openness in discussing his own life, and the way he'd made us laugh and cry over the years. I was not alone in feeling that he was a friend; even though I'd never met him. I knew all I needed to know about Ed Lowe through his words. He was my friend that I'd never met, but who had communicated with me for years. He was a man I'd always hoped to meet, or to at least have an email correspondence with one day, but as with so many things in life that you think there's still time for, that will never happen. So I hope you'll join me in wishing my friend Ed Lowe and his family well in this very difficult time. We love you Ed, and we will miss you and your work, and wish there was a way to change fate. Thanks for the great memories and introducing us to so many wonderful people through the stories of the island we all call home. Long Island is a better place because Ed Lowe was a part of it. Godspeed my friend…hope to finally meet you one day down the road in a better place.