{"id":85773,"date":"2023-10-10T11:00:27","date_gmt":"2023-10-10T16:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=85773"},"modified":"2023-10-19T10:48:33","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T15:48:33","slug":"where-credit-is-due-bob-richardson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=85773","title":{"rendered":"Where Credit Is Due: Bob Richardson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It was the long, hot summer after tenth grade when I was looking for a way to make more money than the buck a lawn I was getting from mowing and raking (In retrospect, I think my parents and grandma had quite the racket going). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I had no idea what I actually wanted to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There weren;t a lot of jobs for cripplingly awkward teenagers back then. And I talked myself out of many of the ones that were<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps as much out of exasperation as anything, one day around the time school let out, Dad suggested maybe I should call Bob Richardson at KEYJ, one of the local radio stations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And one day, somehow, I drummed up the nerve to do exactly that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They say you can find anything on the internet. Photos of Bob from 1980 or thereabouts, however, don’t count. This is Bob and his wife of close to 70 years, Norma, from 2012. He doesn’t look a whole lot different today than he did when I worked for him. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bob was the voice of Jamestown. With a booming voice that gave up nothing in authority terms to a drill sergeant, Bob had an easy sense of absolute authority about him that left me pretty much shaking in my shoes as I dialed. As I waited on hold, I took three deep breaths, and he picked up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This is Bob”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I introduced myself, and asked if I might, maybe, apply for a job. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He audibly thought for a moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You’ve got good diction”, he started. “And your dad knows something about speech – he can teach you a think or two…”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He thought for a moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Let’s see how things look in the fall. In the meantime…”, he said, leading into a list of homework I needed to do. Read newspaper stories into a cassette deck, and listen to myself to see if I <\/em>liked the way I sounded. Learn to read to a rhythm. Become familiar with local and regional politicians – the job involved not only reading the news, but writing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so I waited, and read news stories, and listened to the horror that was my adolescent voice, and crossed my fingers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took three months, but one day in late July, Bob called, asking me if I was still interested. I jumped. I spent the next three Saturdays and Sundays waking up at 4:30AM, walking to the studio (above the White Drug store in Jamestown), and learning the basics – how to run the board, how to talk on the air, how to juggle all the elements of doing live radio, the news and weather and sports and fire calls and, least of all, records. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The main control room board at KEYJ. It was built in the late 1930s, which used to seem like a long time ago. That’s nothing; the production room board had a stamping from the 1920s, and I believe it completely. I can still remember what every knob, toggle and button does. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And on August 12, I soloed for the first time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rest is history. Lots of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m writing about Bob, partly because he gave me my first radio job – the job that vaulted me from “cripplingly shy, socially toxic, athletically inept adolescent” to “young fella who was kinda starting to believe in himself”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It went way beyond that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was just the latest. and, as it turned out, last – of a long line of high school kids who got their start under Bob’s wing. Bob had seen it as part of his mission in buying and running that little 1,000 watt station to help teach kids how to do radio. He was uncompromising in his demands; be on time; cover the news, including writing up stories that haopened on our shifts; remember the station’s mission in the community; pronounce names right<\/em> (Bob would have had a great time teaching Hugh Hewitt to do radio); learn and practice the craft of doing good radio. There was no time of the schedule, from sign-on at 5:55AM to sign-off at 11:55PM, where flubbing a name or writing a clumsy bit of copy wouldn’t get you a phone call, a stern talking to and a crisp invitation to do it better, then and there. You don’t repeat mistakes on Bob’s station. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And generations of local kids got their starts at KEYJ and went on to bigger things; legendary LA disk jockey Shadow Stevens (who started as Terry Ingstad at KEYJ when he was 12), as well as his younger brothers, including his youngest brother Dick, himself a highly respected morning guy; North Dakota radio news legends Dan Brannon and the late Mark Swartzell; Mick Wagner, today a very prominent jazz jock; radioman turned state politician Dave Nething. They are just the top of the heap; going to stations like KEYJ was, for a generation of radiomen and women, the best possible job to get out of broadcast school; in your first year, you’d do literally everything one could do in a radio station. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bob’s still with us. I told him, 5-6 years ago, that he was one of my bucket list interviews. I could never close the deal to get him to come on the show; I’m not sure he thinks anything he did was worth an interview. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was wrong. I never got to tell him that when I worked for him. There’s a first time for just about everything. <\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was the long, hot summer after tenth grade when I was looking for a way to make more money than the buck a lawn I was getting from mowing and raking (In retrospect, I think my parents and grandma had quite the racket going). But I had no idea what I actually wanted to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[454],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-wandering-line"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85773"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86104,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85773\/revisions\/86104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}