Everyone's First Boss

Last week, I posted a little piece on my history in radio. The response was interesting - Hugh Hewitt gave me a shout out, and I got a lot of great feedback in the comments section as well as some terrific, welcome email.

Including one that got me thinking.

One of the most interesting comments came from a fellow I remember from my fairly early childhood - Dewey Heggen. When I was in early elementary school, Heggen was the anchor at KXJB, Channel 4 in Fargo - one of the two TV stations we got in Jamestown. Along with weather man Jim "Captain Jim" Rohn (host of "Captain Jim", the coolest kids show in the world when I was four years old) and legendary sportscaster Jim Adelson (a man who could have been the model for Ted Baxter - but in a good way, if that makes any sense), Heggen was the face of TV news when I was a little kid.

And he was my entree into being a news guy and interviewer: When I was six, and the great floods of 1969 swept across North Dakota, I watched as Heggen reported (from a helicopter, if I recall correctly) on the flooding in Fargo, Jamestown, Grand Forks and along the Souris ("Mouse") River in Minot. Toward the tail end of the story, Heggen stopped by Jamestown to meet his (I guess) old friends Gordon Olson, George Gaustad, and my dad. We met at Olson's driveway. "Mr. Heggen", I asked, "are there rats in the Mouse river?"

Although you'd never have known it, Heggen and I have one thing in common - we both got our start in radio at KEYJ Radio (AM1400) in Jamestown, North Dakota. And from the day it went on the air in 1954 until the day in 1979 when he sold it to a couple of weaselly dimbulbs from out of town (a couple of the most intensely dysfunctional people I referred to in my post from last week), the voice and face and brain and barking, drill-sergeant-like hypothalamus of KEYJ was Bob Richardson.

Bob Richardson may not have been the last of his breed, but they certainly went out of warranty after he left the business. He had all the audible trappings of a radio guy - the kind of voice you could hear at a gas station and instantly recognize. He was a solid Republican, and unlike most media people today, made damn sure the station was up-front about the station's political stance.

And he had something that has disappeared from almost all the news media today; a commitment to the community that supported his station. He showed that in big ways - broadcasting games for teams from towns barely big enough to field teams, keeping a fulltime news director on staff long after it was economically viable, and - most importantly to me - committing to hiring local kids to work at the station part-time, and letting them grow as far into the station's operation as they could.

And working for KEYJ and Bob Richardson was certainly a learning experience.

First: There was no more thorough teacher of the craft of broadcasting than Richardson. No graduate of any broadcast school got a more intense induction to the fundamentals of radio than all of us high school kids that Bob took under his wing. We learned it the old fashioned way - the same way Marines learn to shoot. Bob Richardson was crusty enough to make Lou Grant sound like Phil Donahue. I doubt that any of KEYJ's many graduates will ever forget the calls from Bob, which could come at any time from the sign-on at 5:55AM through sign-off at midnight, correcting pronunciations, chiding for choices in records (this was ten years before computerized playlists, fifteen or twenty years before computer tracked music), or sometimes just yelling.

But the lessons were good: "Say it, don't read it". "You're not a disc jockey." "You're a reporter who plays records." "Don't bury your lede." "Get your facts straight - and correct pronunciation is one of those facts." "Nobody remembers the Beatles." (Yeah, he was opinionated, and he wasn't always right).

To call Bob gruff would be to call Mark Steyn "clever". But along with the instant, frank, and sometimes earsplitting criticism came timely, tangible and meaningful praise, when you finally got it right; a "good job" from Bob was hard-earned, so it stuck with you. And he and his wife Norma always made sure you knew they appreciated your efforts; to a high school kid, their annual station Christmas party was a Trump-like extravaganza (my horizons were pretty limited in 1979), and they rewarded effort with opportunity. Bob's high school part-timers could move on to doing news, calling play-by-play, writing and producing commercials, learning everything there was to learn about the business.

The station's alumni include a number of serious broadcasters; LA megajock Shadow Stevens, his little brother Dick (a high school pal who hosts a syndicated morning show), and other Ingstad brothers who are mainstays of the west-coast production business; a generation of broadcasting professionals throughout the Midwest, who've managed stations and networks and made a huge mark on the business. Other graduates moved into other fields - politicians, pharmacists, soldiers, teachers. They're as different as a bunch of people can be. The only things, I suspect, that they have in common are a great education in professionalism and integrity from a legend in the business, a huge whale in a tiny pond.

And a distaste for loud, impassioned late-night phone calls.