It was Tuesday, July 28, 1987.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I’d arranged with my new free-lance job – a month’s worth of technical writing – to come in late, around 11-ish, so I could catch up on my phone calling.\u00a0 I was hoping to pour on the gas, and have a talk radio job lined up by the time the freelance contracting gig ended.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As I made calls, I’d make notes on my calendar telling me to follow-up with one talk-radio program director or another, somewhere around the country.\u00a0 I was getting a few nibbles, out there.\u00a0 A station in New Bedford, Massachusetts liked my tape and was interested in bringing me out for an interview…sometime.\u00a0 Another, in Fall River Massachusetts, thought they might need an afternoon guy…eventually.\u00a0 Another in Hammond, Indiana thought they might need a news guy…someday soon.\u00a0 And there was that headhunter with that gig in Raleigh that was still floating out there…more or less.<\/p>\n
And then, at about 10:30AM, the phone rang.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was a program director at a big blowtorch of a station in Cleveland, Ohio.\u00a0 They liked my resume and the tape of my “producer” stuff with and recommendations from Don Vogel and Geoff Charles.\u00a0 I might be the perfect guy…<\/p>\n
…to produce for a very <\/em>temperamental\u00a0 prima-donna who’d been hired for afternoon drive.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cleveland, <\/em>I thought.\u00a0\u00a0 All the little chicks with their crimson lips know Cleveland Rocks, Cleveland Rocks.\u00a0 My Town.\u00a0 <\/em>A job, back in my beloved talk radio.<\/p>\n “I’m interested”.<\/p>\n He described the job; not-spectacular pay (although way, way better than I’d gotten at KSTP), and a weekend show of my own to sweeten the deal.\u00a0<\/p>\n I fought to control my breathing.\u00a0 It was sounding too good to be true.\u00a0 I started sizing up whether everything I owned would still fit into my Jeep.<\/p>\n “Oh”, the program director added, almost as if it were an afterthought, “you would <\/em>need to be here to start the job by Friday”.<\/p>\n I fumbled for a second as I turned it over in my head; could I duck out on my freelance job, stick my roommates with the\u00a0lease, abandon the band with a few gigs lined up, and walk away from a couple of articles I’d sold?\u00a0<\/p>\n Hell, yeah.<\/p>\n Could I do it and be in Cleveland by the end of the week?<\/p>\n My heart bounced off my liver and kept falling.<\/p>\n “I don’t think I can do that.”<\/p>\n “Ah, that’s OK.\u00a0 Sorry to hear that.\u00a0 We’ll find someone local…”<\/p>\n And that was that.\u00a0<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Hard as that was, I found out I probably got the better end of the deal.\u00a0 I heard through the grapevine that the prima-donna host went through three producers in nine months, when the whole show got gassed.<\/p>\n Still.\u00a0 So close.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Tuesday, July 28, 1987.\u00a0 I’d arranged with my new free-lance job – a month’s worth of technical writing – to come in late, around 11-ish, so I could catch up on my phone calling.\u00a0 I was hoping to pour on the gas, and have a talk radio job lined up by the time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}