…that I started in radio.

Officially, anyway. 

I’d started hanging around the control room at KEYJ Radio – eight rooms squeedged into the second floor of the original White Drug building on First Avenue in Jamestown – almost a year earlier.  Dick Ingstad, a friend of mine who worked there, let me in to hang around and shoot the breeze; he knew I was interested in the business.  Dick, who was a year ahead of me in school, was pretty much your typical high school kid, with four key differences:

1. His oldest brother, Terry, was (and is) better known as Shadoe Stevens, one of the most successful disc jockeys and voice talents in the history of radio.  Terry had started at KEYJ at age 12, in 1957 – and got a write-up at age 13 in Life Magazine as America’s Youngest DJ, a broadcasting child prodigy.
2. Two of his other brothers were in Los Angeles running the “LA Air Force”, one of the hottest production houses in the place. 
3. While his father ran a men’s clothing shop, a few of his uncles owned a big, powerful chain of radio stations across the upper Midwest, and had originally helped bankroll KEYJ many years earlier.
4. Dick, himself, had a Voice Of The Great Almighty.  Seriously.  At age 17, he had pipes that could rattle plaster off of lath.  We were on the speech team together, in ’79 and ’80; one day, at an event at NDSU, I was getting ready to give my speech in a classroom next to where he was scheduled to speak.  He was giving a speech (the event was “After-Dinner Speaking”, the original humor event) on The Creation Story According to McDonalds (which I’d helped him write).  The speech started “IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE THE GOLDEN ARCHES.  And Ronald said “IT IS GOOD”.  One of the judges in my room next door looked at the other, and said “It’s God!”.  Even without the family connections, Dick was major-market material.  With the connections?  When he was 25, he was the studio announcer for Hollywood Squares (Terry/Shadoe was the center square) in his spare time from working in the majors.  The last I met him, he had a syndicated morning show that was in a slew of medium-sized markets – kinda the life of Riley.

Anyway – I’d applied for a job the previous May, at the end of my sophomore year of high school.  I’d called Bob Richardson, the gruff, irascible boss at KEYJ, one afternoon, calming the butterflies that almost incapacitated me as I worked up the nerve to talk with a legend in regional broadcasting. 

After the phone call last May, I waited three months, until I got a call from him the Tuesday before.  They’d just fired one of their weekend guys, which gave me an opening. 

Mr. Richardson told me to start showing up at 5:00AM Saturday mornings to train with John Weisfenning, a student at Moorhead State who’d been in town working for the summer.  

And today was the first day.

I set three alarm clocks – two electric and one wind-up – to make sure I got vaulted out of bed at 4:15AM.  I jumped on my bike (a three-speed Schwinn that used to be Dad’s) and was waiting at the door by 4:45…

…for Weisphenning, who showed up at 5:10.  “Hey, Mitch!”

I would spend two weeks learning the ropes – how to turn the mike on and off, how to run the ancient (late 1930’s) control board, with its heavy, perfectly-balanced bakelite rotary pots and mechanical key switches, how to take transmitter readings, to turn the transmitter on in the morning and shut it off at night.  And then the hard part; all the programs I had to run. 

I’d absorbed a lot of the basics of the night shift with Dick – but Saturday Mornings were a lot more involved.  Richardson’s philosophy: everyone was a newsman.  So the weekend people did an amazing schedule of news; two local news/weathercasts per hour, plus hour-long blocks of news, weather, sports, community information, fire department reports, funeral home and nursing home reports and the rest of the thrum of small-town life at 7AM, 8AM and noon.

The first job of the morning, at 5:11AM?  Roll up the forty-odd feet of AP wire copy that had scrolled out overnight.  Rip it.  Sort it by content; state, regional, national, weather and sports.  Look for local angles to highlight.  Get the scores from last night sorted out and in order for the array of sportscasts to come (Jamestown High School Blue Jays and Jamestown College Jimmies sports first; then NDSU, UND and Mary; finally, the Twins, Vikings and North Stars, and any other national sports of interest after that.  Weather – local zone, state and regional forecasts for today, the three-day, and the extended forecast for the coming week.  Farm market and crop news.  Local news from yesterday; keep and rewrite what was timely, file the rest.  Look for opportunities for updates.

John made it look easy; I could see it taking some getting used to.

And then at 5:55AM, the big moment; he flipped the three switches that controlled the ancient transmitter, read the station’s sign-on script, and played the National Anthem.

And we were off to the races.

The next nine hours – the airshift ran from signon ’til 3PM – are a blur to me today.  They were probably a blur back then, too; so much information.  Cueing records, playing commercials, noting how John did newscasts and weather breaks, listening to the police scanner for anything of interest (there wasn’t), jumping through the ceiling as the “Plectron” fire alarm (a sort of pager that called the local volunteer fire department up for action; we had one, too) warbled the news of a fire somewhere, which John copied down and passed along on the air as we did with all local fire calls…

3PM came very fast.  I was exhausted, and exhilarated, and could hardly wait for next week.  I hung around an extra couple of hours for the beginning of Dick’s shift, just to absorb more the place.

I figured I could dig this.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 12:01 pm 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.