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| The "Brookyn Cowboy" Jack Spector meets the Grand Old Opry |
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| Contry singer Bill Anderson and WHN GM Chuck Renwick at the WHN 1050 Country Picnic |
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| Del Demontreaux, Dan Daniel and Stan Martin at the pickle booth at the WHN 1050 County Picnic |
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| Jack Spector, Bruce Bradley, Johnny Cash, Stan Martin, Del Demontreaux and Dan Daniel on stage at WHN Country Concert at C.W. Post College |
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| Dan Daniel front and center with backups Lee Arnold, Bruce Bradley and Jack Spector |
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| WHN DJs Del Demontreaux, Lee Arnold, Stan Martin, Jack Spector, Bruce Bradley, Steve Warren, Dan Daniel and country star Bill Anderson |
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| Jack Spector started on WHN doing afternoon drive. Before he left WHN he'd be doing the morning show |
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| The Brice Bradley Morning Machine followed Bruce's successful run on WHN's mid day Femine Forum |
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| 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 |
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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. |
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| Bruce Bradley, Del Demontreux, Stan Martin, Johnny Cash and Dan Daniels at WHN concert at C.W. Post |
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!!
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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! |
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. 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! |
