It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XLVI
By Mitch Berg
Monday. April 6, 1987.
I woke up. A restless, miserable weekend was over. It was time to get back to business – finding myself both a living for the short term, and my next talk radio job.
Preferably at the same time.
On the plus side: I’d been through this before. I’d gotten whacked at radio jobs, starting when I was 17, at KQDJ in Jamestown. A couple of slickeeboys had bought KEYJ, changed the call letters, and tried to make it sound like a big-market middle-of-the-road station. Along the way, they fired a bunch of the locals, me included. I’d gotten diced four years later – at the same station, different reasons, same basic deal.
And now, KSTP. I was getting used to one one of radio’s great truths; you never quit a job on your own.
Other pluses: when I heard that the firings were coming, I’d snagged an old copy of the “Standard Rate and Data Service” directory – the SRDS, or “Serds”, a telephone-book-thick listing of every radio station in the country by market, format, power, coverage and rough ad rate. The book was about 700 pages thick, I think, and covered literally every radio station in the US and its territories (as of November, 1986, anyway).
I took a highlighter and started going through the book, starting with the markets I wanted to take a shot at. I focused on finding talk stations in mid-sized markets – Madison, Columbus and the like – as well as suburbs of bigger markets (places like New Bedford MA, Santa Rosa CA and Aurora IL), the kind of place that used to hire 24-year-old kids for peanuts, put them on mid-days or evenings or wherever they felt a need for a solid, reliable local show – and let ’em get some experience.
And of course, I marked down all the talk stations in big markets. While I figured I had a very long shot of getting an actual on-air job there, I’d certainly take another producer gig.
Any port in a storm.
I took a legal pad and started my list; stations, markets, and program directors (where they were listed in the SRDS), all in pencil, since I knew the list would change.
And at 9AM, I started cold-calling. And I stayed on it until lunchtime.
After lunch, I spent a couple of hours cold-calling some of the Saint Paul and Minneapolis neighborhood newspapers. I’d done some writing for a few of them the previous year, trying to stretch my Hubbard paycheck. I’d be stretching even further, now. But I landed a little assignment – worth about $60 – that afternoon from one of the neighborhood papers, which was worth a little celebrating.
And then, back to cold-calling radio stations. And, briefly, a shot of pay-dirt. The program director at WSME in New Bedford, Massachussetts was looking for someone – cheap – to do a mid-day show. He wanted my tape.
I had a cassette and an envelope ready to go. I typed out a cover letter, ready to go out the next morning.
I crossed my fingers. For tomorrow, I was going to call the headhunter for the job in Orlando.
One day of looking. Two solid leads.
My panic was starting to wane, just a little bit.
I think back on that day, today, and find it hard to distinguish from many other days like it – the first work day after a job goes in the tank. It’s happened many times in my life – never actually for cause, of course; in Radio, one never needs cause to get fired. And when you’re a contractor in the software business (as I have been for most of the past 15 years), projects – and contractors’ jobs – are constantly getting shifted and un-funded and put on hold, which has left me out of work at some very inconvenient times.
So the drill you see above – hit the beach running at 8AM, start cold-calling and calling in markers and contacts and rigidly scheduling myself – is pretty much what I’ve done every time I’ve found myself job-hunting unexpectedly. And the drill has served me well; it’s landed me in jobs very quickly almost every time I’ve been out of work. And during the exceptions – the software biz recession of 2003 being the big example, when I spent five months with no income at all – it’s provided a routine, a focus, a basis for the kind of self-discipline I’ve needed to get through.
The tools – the internet, emailed resumes, job-search websites – have improved, and made job-hunting much, much easier. But the stresses I’ve faced – kids to feed, mortgage to pay – have more than kept pace.
One thing I don’t have today is the sense I had back then – that I’m trying to win back the love of my life. Which, in a way, doing talk-radio was, to me, back then; the first thing I’d ever really felt at home doing. It’s nice not having that bit of baggage, anymore.
Back then, twenty years ago? Well, that was another story.
