I’d started hanging around KEYJ Radio – a little 1000-watt station on First Avenue in Jamestown, tucked up above a White Drug in the same studio where it’d gone on the air in 1953 – sometime during my sophomore year of high school.  My pal, Dick Ingstad – who was a junior at the time – worked there, and he let me (and, at one point, practically every other kid in the school) hang out there.  It was a classic old radio station, with rooms full of musty old LPs and 45s, stacks of old (very old) equipment, and a control room full of equipment that had seen the announcement of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

In hanging around at least one or two days a week with Dick (who, I should point out, comes from a big radio family; his big brother is legendary über-disc-jockey, voice talent, Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson-staff-announcer and Jim Ramstad-classmate Shadoe Stevens, who’d started at KEYJ in 1957 at age 12), I’d figured out (I thought) some of the basics of doing the job – and figured I might like to give it a try.

My dad knew the station’s owner/manager, Bob Richardson – everyone in town knew both of them, frankly – and around the end of tenth grade, Dad urged me to go downtown and apply for a job.  Bob made a point of keeping a few high school kids on staff, and one of them had just graduated, so, with butterflies visibly shaking me, I gave Bob a call and applied.  He said he’d sure think about it.  That was in May.

In early July, he called back.  “I think we should give this a shot”, he said.  I spent three weeks coming in early in the morning, having John Weispfenning (a summer employee from Moorhead State, who went on to a brief career in the business) show me the basic ropes on the shift that would eventually be mine; Saturday mornings, from 5AM to 3PM.  The shift went a little like this:

1. Get in around 5AM
2. Fire up the transmitter; the station signed off at 11:55PM every night, and sat idle until sign-on, at 5:55AM.
3. Gather up the night’s backlog of AP wire copy, sort it into National, State and Local news, Weather and Sports stacks.  Pick out the stories I’d want to read.
4. At 5:55, sign on; “KEYJ Radio in Jamestown North Dakota is on the air!”. 
5. Play the national anthem.
6. Read two minutes of news headlines and weather, then go to five minutes of network news. 
7. Do a regular hour of music, while getting ready for…
8. …nearly an hour of news, weather, sports and community info at 7AM, again at 8AM, and another at noon.
9. Plus regular hours of music from 9AM-noon and 1-3, during which time I spent most of my time ripping, stacking (and, later, writing) news.

But since it was my first time soloing, I’d do a month on Saturday nights – Dick’s usual shift.  Mostly music, except for another one of those news/weather/sports hours at 5PM.

But that was all a couple of hours in the future.  I’d come in around 1PM, just because I was too excited to hang around the house anymore.  Finally, it was three.  I settled in behind the board – which had been built sometime before World War Two, and was a huge, vertical metal thing that looked like the front end of a ’52 Buick, with big metal toggle switches and large ceramic rotary pots, utterly unlike the sleek, chintzy plastic pushbuttons and slide faders on every board I’ve seen since then – and took my customary three deep breaths.

The AP News ran – all five minutes – and then it was my turn. 

I hit the “KEYJ!” jingle, and launched my first record (as in, “a vinyl 45RPM disk”), “Bright Eyes” by Art Garfunkel.  After that, I introduced myself; nothing new, really – I’d been on the mic a few times during my weeks of training, but this was different; I was solo. 

And, as I recall, I didn’t screw it up.

Well, at least that break.  There were plenty of them later in the evening. 

What do I remember?  Some of the music – “All Things Are Possible”, by Dan Peek (formerly of “America”, if you’re a real trivia geek); “A Little More Love”, Olivia Newton-John; “We Live for Love”, from a just-released Pat Benetar.  Some of the news – there’d been a fight at the State Hospital.  Mom and Dad brought me a burger from the cafe downstairs around 7PM.  Getting phone calls from high-school friends, saying I didn’t suck.

And signoff, read from a yellowed, laminated sheet in a battered old three-ring binder; “At this time, Radio Station KEYJ leaves the air.  KEYJ operates on a frequency of fourteen hundred kilocycles, and is owned and operated by KEYJ Incorporated of Jamestown, North Dakota.  KEYJ operates from studios at 220 First Avenue South in Jamestown.  We invite you to join us tomorrow morning, at 5:55AM, when we return to the air.  Good night”.

And then, as the station did every night, I played “The Lord’s Prayer” by George Beverly Shea, on a rattly old “cart” tape, took my final readings and signed off the transmitter and programming logs, flipped the three switches to shut off the transmitter, locked up, and walked the five blocks home through the muggy summer evening.

I never had much of a radio career – but what I had, started that night.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under mitch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.