You're on the Air!

Nobody ever says that. It's the stuff of movies. Any broadcaster will tell you that all you have is this little lit up box that says, "ON AIR" and half the time somebody has stolen the bulb from it for the mens room light . I got nuts over radio when I was trying to become an actor. I got as far as Universal in Hollywood to meet Mark Malis, the then head of casting. He said, "Yeah, I can help you kid, but you gotta move out here." Great. I have 5 kids and a house, and a low paying job at a radio station, and I'm just going to pack up and move. Hindsight says why the hell didn't you go, and common sense at the time said you can't possibly do this.
I read somewhere that Bob Crane started out in radio and worked his way to Hollywood, so that was the path I would take. Little did I know how the radio business was changing. I worked at it all the time, and waited for those great successful days to come, but radio changed and I was one of the last of the "local" radio shows to go down in flames.
I worked with some amazing talent, some super egos, some talentless morons, and made a lot of friends along the way, but in hindsight again, the only names folks might remember were the names from my earlier years as opposed to the latter part of my career.
I had a short but amazing ride at WREB in Holyoke. I was bringing home a whopping 145 dollars a week from there, so I would get up at 4AM drive 20 miles to the station, turn the transmitter on, and do two hours alone on the air till Richard showed up for his 8:30 block of news. I got off the air at 10, then went to my second job driving an oil truck till about 7, went home, ate, scanned newspapers for items for the next mornings show and was in bed by 10, day in and day out. When you're done wiping your eyes, I'll continue.
I worked with Richard and once with Tracy Cole at WREB. Imet my best friend Jonathan Evans there. I got to know one of radios first sucessful black broadcasters there, Willard Womack, and I got to know the first lady of talk radio there, Barbara Heissler. Now that was a grouping of people. One of the first black hosts, one of the first woman hosts, and a news guy more popular than anybody else on a 500 watt daytime only radio station. I did afternoons and evenings sometimes, Jonathan, (Chip) did mornings, Willard did mid days, as did Barbara. Then we got moved all around. Me to mornings, Chip followed me, Willard folled him, and Barbara finished up the day.
Talk radio today is always the same host and some citizen of the world that calls once and is never heard from again. In the days of WREB, some people would become,"regulars", and everybody new their voices. Take " Sweet Lelani" for example. A woman named Tanya who was on the air more than the hosts were. Like any port in a storm, when the calls were light, she was there. She got the name Sweet Lelani from The Personals of the Air show with Chris Plasse where everybody made up CB names for the show.
This woman had a one track political mind and would head in one direction every time she called, and as I didn't do politics on the air, ( that was Willard's forte ), I tried to figure out how to get this woman from bugging me so much.
One day, for no reason whatsoever, I started talking about diets. "How do you lose weight" I queeried to the masses. A few calls came in, and I had fun with the people calling, because that was my style. Make it funny. Then Tanya called. Step up to the plate as a political pitch is about to be tossed at me.
She starts about some Boston politico and goes into her tirade about taxes, government spending, the moon landing and on and on, so I jumped in with the following question:
" How do you lose weight"?
She said, " Excuse me "?
I said, " How do you lose weight"?
She said, " Simple, you just keep your mouth shut."
I said, " You must be one big woman."
"WHAAAATTTT"????......click.
She stopped calling me after that.
Then we had Dagmar. To this day, I do not have a clue what this was. On Saturday Night Live there was a character who was this androgenous person who could be mistaken as a man or a woman. Nobody was sure what it was. This was Dagmar. This person would call with comments that would make a third grader look like a Harvard graduate, and sounded like a man doing a poor imitation of a woman. At the end of the call, he...or she..or whatever broke into this maniacal laugh and would hang up. If we did remote broadcasts outside the studio, Dagmar would call the next day and tell us what we were wearing, but we never, ever saw he/she/it (please pick one). This went on for years, and nobody ever knew what Dagmar was, and it was never seen, as far as we know, by anybody at the station.
There was this legislation going on in 1980 concerning the Bottle Bill in Massachusetts. The biggest story of the year, a stupid bottle bill. A nickle to return your bottles, and Massachusetts was up in arms.
One day I got a call from a guy who was loaded. It was about 9:30 in the morning. He was tanked and started rambling on about the bottle bill.
He couldn't afford the extra cost, at least I think that's what he was slurring about. Next day he calls back, even in worse shape. Somehow I got him laughing so hard he said he was crying. I asked him his first name. He said it was Bill. That was the beginning of several months of the funniest calls I used to get on my program, from some guy I nicknamed Bottle Billy. He would call twice a week or so, and he built up a following. He'd tell stories, and I would interject comments during those stories, and he would start laughing. This was genuine laughter, and the stories became hysterical.
I thought that this guy had to be some sort of entertainer, so one day I invited him to the studio to do a show to see for myself what I was dealing with. He hopped on a bus from Springfield and showed up on time, drunk as a skunk. A little old unkempt man with a wild sense of humor an a problem with the bottle. He was genuinely funny, when you could understand him, and one of those people nobody would have ever known of if I didn't take the time to talk to him..Bottle Billy got his 15 minutes of fame, and he felt wanted. That's what talk radio used to be. When you called, the guy on the air answered. You got to know voices, and you felt important.
There are no more Dagmars or Tanyas or Bottle Billys on the air. Now you are screened, given instructions, say a few words, and you fade away in a heartbeat. Nobody remembers your words, or know who you are.
Arthur Godfrey was one of the first to try talk radio in the 50's. Back then, a caller would call the number given, and Arthur would answer the phone like you do at hime. Not on the air, but on a regular phone, and he would repeat what you said to the audience because the audience couldn't hear the caller. When somebody figured out how to put the caller on the air, it just took off. Now, you could call your hometown radio station, be ON THE RADIO....holy cow...I WAS ON THE RADIO!! Your friends and people at work heard you. When was the last time somebody said to you I heard you on the radio? Probably the last time you used a hula hoop.
Radio was owned by somebody who lived in the town where the station was. The hosts read the commercials. There was always a PERSON live and local on the air.
Those days are gone, but they don't have to be. Radio is one of the few things left that will still work today like it did yesterday, but the question is, is there still a market for that style of radio? There's that word, market. Bottom line...not the listener, but the bank account. Of course there's a market. If there wasn't, why would people spend thousands of dollars to get a flat screen TV, and cable, and sound system to watch TV Land?
Years ago, there was an episode of WKRP in Cincinati, a spoof of Dickens Christmas Carol. The part of Christmas future featured Herb Tarlick walking into this pure white quanset hut. There was an eerie fog, Herb was dressed in white. Everything was in white. You knew he was the only person still working at the station. The SALESMAN. But of course. He spoke into the mic and said," This is WKRP in Cincinati. Till tomorrow morning at six , Good Night." He threw a switch, and the station was off for the night. When I saw that when it aired for the first time, I thought, " Yeah, like that's going to happen some day." Well it has. Stations don't sign off for the most part at dusk any longer, but there's no people left. Rush Limbaugh will boast about being heard on some 700 stations or so, but did he ever apologize to the 700 plus people whose jobs he took? No.... No.
Go into any radio station after 10 AM and look at that little box outside the broadcast booth. The one that says "On The Air"
It will be dark.
Not because somebody swiped the bulb.
It's dark because nobody's there.