I’d applied for a job the previous May<\/a>, at the end of my sophomore year of high school.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\nAfter the phone call last May, I waited three months, until I got a call from him the Tuesday before.\u00a0 They’d just fired one of their weekend guys, which gave me an opening.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mr. Richardson told me\u00a0to start showing up at 5:00AM Saturday\u00a0mornings to train with John Weisfenning, a student at Moorhead State who’d been in town working for the summer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
And today was the first day.<\/p>\n
I set three <\/em>alarm clocks –\u00a0two electric and one wind-up – to make sure I got vaulted out of bed at 4:15AM.\u00a0 I jumped on my bike (a three-speed Schwinn that\u00a0used to be Dad’s) and\u00a0was waiting at the door by 4:45…<\/p>\n…for\u00a0Weisphenning, who showed up at 5:10.\u00a0 “Hey, Mitch!”<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 And then the hard part; all the programs I had to run.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I’d absorbed a lot of the basics of the night shift with Dick – but Saturday Mornings were a lot <\/em>more involved.\u00a0 Richardson’s philosophy: everyone was a newsman.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\nThe first job of the morning, at 5:11AM?\u00a0 Roll up the forty-odd feet of AP wire copy that had scrolled out overnight.\u00a0 Rip it.\u00a0 Sort it by content; state, regional, national, weather and sports.\u00a0 Look for local angles to highlight.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Weather – local zone, state and regional forecasts for today, the three-day, and the extended forecast for the coming week.\u00a0 Farm market and crop news.\u00a0 Local news from yesterday; keep and rewrite what was timely, file the rest.\u00a0 Look for opportunities for updates.<\/p>\n
John made it look easy; I could see it taking some getting used to.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And we were off to the races.<\/p>\n
The next nine hours – the airshift ran from signon ’til 3PM – are a blur to me today.\u00a0 They were probably a blur back then, too; so <\/em>much information.\u00a0 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…<\/p>\n3PM came very fast.\u00a0 I was exhausted, and exhilarated, and could hardly wait for next week.\u00a0 I hung around an extra couple of hours for the beginning of Dick’s shift, just to absorb more the place.<\/p>\n
I figured I could dig this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…that I started in radio. Officially, anyway.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Dick Ingstad, a friend of mine who worked there, let me in to hang […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2981","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=2981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33864,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2981\/revisions\/33864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}