It was Saturday, August 11, 1979.  My first day “soloing” at KEYJ.

The station was a humble little 1000-watt operation, but Bob Richardson wanted it to do big things.  Bob’s goal for the station was to serve the community, and to Bob that meant news, information, weather and sports – and lots of all of ’em. 

So my Saturday morning shift – which I’d start in another week or so, after I earned my spurs soloing on the easier Saturday Night shift – involved an hour of music from 6 to 7AM, and then an hour of news, weather, sports, farm markets, local hospital reports, fire and police reports, the funeral home report and other such stuff, and then another hour more or less the same at 8, then two hours of music followed by “Trading Post” at 10AM (an on-the-air swap shop), then an hour of music, then another news-weather-sports hour, then usually a Class B basketball game from one of the outlying towns that’d been taped the night before (and would still keep the locals rapt around the radio).

But that was in the future. After a few weeks of training with John and Dick, tonight was my first solo.

I came in around 1PM for my 3 to midnight shift.  I got my news together (there’d be a news hour at 5PM, sorta like the three news/weather/sports/info hours on the morning shift, but only, like, one of them); I drank pop and calmed down and got my mind in order.

And then it was three.  Dick wrapped up his shift, and told the audience to stay tuned for “Mitch Berg, coming up next”.  And then it was off to AP Radio News.

Five minutes.

I sat down in the swivel chair, arranged my three-minute newscast in front of me (five wire stories, some American Legion baseball scores, the forecast and the current conditions), and cued up my first two records, which were (yes, I do remember then distinctly) “Bright Eyes” by Art Garfunkel, and “All Things Are Possible” by Dan Peek. Dick stood by.

The AP News ended, and I hit the cart (like an eight-track tape) with the KEYJ news theme.  “AM1400 KEYJ, I’m Mitch Berg with the news…”

…and that’s about all I remember, except that I got through the newscast fairly well, and then flipped the toggle to start Garfunkel on turntable one.

“Whew.  I got through it…” I started, and then stopped as Dick lunged across the turntable to the mike off.  I’d forgotten.  I’d started talking over a live mike.

I gritted my teeth; calm down. 

And it worked.  I got through my first hours’ worth of spots, dropins, breaks, the bottom of the hour news and weather (yes, we did news twice an hour), weathercasts and music without any more problems, well enough that Dick was able to leave after the first hour or so. 

And I was on my own. 

Sometime after the 5PM news hour (which I remember going quite well, thank you very much), my Mom and Dad stopped by (reminding me that Dick hadn’t locked up the street-level doors when he left), bringing a burger and fries from the White Drug cafe downstairs. I figured they were just being clingy; now that I have kids (gulp) the same age, I guess I know what they were really thinking.

I got through the evening, following the rhythm of the “clock”, or hourly broadcast schedule; network news, local news, music, commercials, weather, taking hourly transmitter readings, watching the sky eventually turn red and then indigo through the window over downtown Jamestown, the ancient remote transmitter controller smelling of ozone, the phone calls trickling in on a desultory August evening on the prairie; song requests, nut cases, high school friends with encouragement (or, of course, not)…

…and finally, at 11:55PM, signoff.  I opened the ancient black folder with the “liners” – the things that were there to be read regularly, like the signoff script. After a few weeks, I’d remember it as clearly as I still remember it today:

 “At this time Radio Station KEYJ in Jamestown, North Dakota, leaves the air.  KEYJ is owned and operated by KEYJ Incorporated, of 411 Main Street in Jamestown, North Dakota, and operates on a frequency of 1400 Kilocycles by authority of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington DC.  Please tune in at 5:55AM tomorrow as we resume our broadcast schedule.  On behalf of the entire staff and management of KEYJ, this is Mitch Berg wishing you good night”.

Then, I tripped the final cart – George Beverly Shea’s version of The Lord’s Prayer, which ran about two minutes.  As the last strain died away, I tripped the switch that shut off the output stage plates on the transmitter, about a mile away on east edge of town, watching as the power gauges dropped to zero, like watching an ozone-spewing giant dozing slowly off.

I signed off my transmitter logs, shut off the lights, locked up the studio, production room and offices, and walked down the stairs to the street. I locked the front door, carefully stowed the keys (the first I’d ever been entrusted with!) in my pocket, and walked home down Jamestown’s hot, sweltering, nearly-vacant Main street. 

It had been a brutally hot summer day, and it was still a hot, sticky night.  I steered clear of the streetlights as I walked down Second Avenue to my parents’ house – in this hot, dry weather, they drew so many mosquitos and junebugs they looked like yellow-gray tornados spotted every 100 yards or so; walking through the cloud of bugs meant getting chewed up alive by North Dakota mosquitos, and having to bat junebugs out of your hair. 

But I didn’t much care.  I was hooked on the only drug that has ever really excited me, my whole life – the feeling that something I said, wrote or did could impact someone else (positively, of course).  The thought that something I said into a microphone could affect the life of someone I had never met, miles and miles away.  The idea that someone out there would actually be paying attention to me and what I was telling them; waiting for their kids’ baseball scores, or to find out where the fire was, or whether to head for the basement because a tornado was bearing down on them. 

I silently calculated the hours until my next shift.

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