It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXVIII

It was my first summer in the Twin Cities - and life was looking fairly decent.

I was entering my third month living in the basement - and enjoying it a lot. My routine; get up around seven, take a bike ride, come home, nosh with the roommates, take a shower, drive out to KSTP...

...assuming my car worked. My '73 Malibu was acting weirder and weirder. It would flood on the flimsiest pretexts; I carried a BIG screwdriver with me to jam into the carb butterfly to let enough air in to start the car, something I had to do a couple of times a week. And for a day or so after a rainstorm, it wouldn't start at all.

Anyway, it was off to work around 10. I'd do a little guest booking as I ran the board for the Owen Span show, then go into the Vogel show production meeting.

The routine was always the same; whomever walked into the room last would say "I've been having trouble with my bank lately". One of the guys already there would say "Which bank is that?" The last person into the room would respond "The Sh*t P*ss F*ck bank..."

We'd start planning the show. We'd usually get a visit from our boss, Scott Meier, the general manager. Scott, in his mid-thirties at the time, was a very talented executive - he'd go on to start WFAN in New York, the nation's first all sports station, and also could fart on command.

"Scott", Dave Elvin would say as Meier stood in the studio, "fart!". Meier would let a little "frrrrp" fly with no more effort than clearning his throat, as Vogel laughed - giggled, really - with glee. "Do it again", Don would usually say, like a baby who's discovered tennis balls. Meier would let another one fly. No problem.

But this day, Sunday, June 8, was different.

I'd convinced Don that the station really, really needed a conservative talk show, if only to keep the FCC happy back in the days of the "Fairness Doctrine" . He pondered the notion for a few days. "Mitch", he finally said, "you need to get an audition tape to Meier. I'll help you".

So we arranged it. I picked him up at his house in North Saint Paul, and we drove to KSTP. We went into the studio - only I sat in the host's chair this time. I felt like the first time I sat in my Dad's car; the ratty swivel chair sat practically nose-to-nose with the glass window into the control room; there were controls for all four microphones in the room, plus the "telemixer" phone controller. I told the person on the board in the control room (who was running some syndicated show at the time) to patch the studio into a reel-to-reel deck and roll tape.

And we started talking. I forget what we talked about - politics of some kind, of course, I'm sure, but the tape is long lost. I also "took some calls" - I'd planted a couple of friends with a topic, and recorded a couple of brief flashes of phone interplay. It went well; I remember feeling exhilarated about it all. The whole thing took about an hour.

I drove Don home, and then came back to the studio. I curled up in a production room for about an hour, editing out the "umms" and "y'know"s. Then I dubbed the whole thing to a cassette tape, typed up a memo to Meier asking him to give it a listen, and stuffed the whole thing in his mailbox.

I drove home. The dice had been rolled.