When Radio was Fun

In the early days, radio was a lot of fun. That was a long time ago. Since then AM radio has been taken over by hate mongering fools and FM radio consists mainly of voice-tracked talent in cities far from where the stations broadcast. So consider some of the reasons I enjoyed those days.

Daylight Saving Time brought some unusual changes to Indiana in 1969 or 1970. I was working at WLYV (Fort Wayne) on the Sunday morning of the time change and this is what I wrote.

I was one of the morning news guys at WLYV and liked to harass the overnight disk jockey, Chris O'Brien, by replacing carts that were supposed to contain public service announcements with ones that didn't.

And here's another Chris O'Brien radio sabotage.

The morning DJ at WLYV was Don Beckman. I had hung around WOHP in Bellefontaine when I was in high school and he had the afternoon shift, and we worked together again a few years later at WOMP (Bellaire/Wheeling). I was there on his birthday, probably in 1970.

During the late 1960s, digital recording wasn't yet in use, so WTVN's (Columbus) production studio used reel-to-reel tape. It was fun to harvest bloopers left on these tapes. Here's one now.

And another WTVN production blooper.

John Fraim was the morning announcer at WTVN in the mid-1960s. I was the overnight guy, so there was an opportunity to occasionally put something over on him. This is the first John Fraim sabotage and it was responsible for one of the best known responses in Columbus radio: “Kids in radio!”

On Saturday mornings, my shift on WTVN ended with a newscast leading into John Fraim's show. Sometimes I modified the outro a bit.

WTVN couldn't afford (or didn't want to pay for) jingles to be used in promos for my overnight show. So some of my co-workers (or cow-orkers) put one together for me.

Here's another outtake from the production room at WTVN.

And one more.

I tried another John Fraim weather jingle sabotage using bits of audio I found on production room tapes.

And another Fraim Saturday morning intro. I think he was not amused, perhaps because the Saturday morning show at Taft's Cincinnati station was put together from the weekday shows and the guy had a five-day work week. When Fraim went to the mat on that issue, they showed him the door.

I had moved to WTVN from WCOL, so I knew all of the guys across town. The two stations shared only a few selections on their respective playlists, but one morning when Jerry Dean was on the night shift at WCOL, we conspired to broadcast the same selection at the same time. But we also decided to do it from the same studio. I recorded my bit and played it from the WTVN control room. Jerry was live on WCOL. At the specified time, I started the record from the WTVN production studio, which fed into a phone line for WCOL and into the broadcast console at WTVN. The WCOL engineering staff found it amusing, but I think they didn't tell management. As far as I know, nobody but me at WTVN knew about it.

Here's the perfect example of “Kids in Radio”. Give a first-year college student who thinks he's hot stuff in a radio studio a few sound effects records, some music tracks, and more production equipment than he's ever imagined, and this is what happens. Mike Matthews (Maxwell) was a high-school student who did news on WCOL at night in violation of every child labor law on the books. Nobody noticed because he sounded like he was about 45.

Jack Keefe and I worked the overnight shift Sunday mornings. I figured that nobody of importance would be listening at 4am, so I replaced the beeps that WCOL placed between stories with a bunch of sound effects. I didn't tell Jack that I was going to do this, so it was as much of a surprise to him as it was to anyone who was listening.

Keefe did funny stuff on his own, sometimes something as simple as slightly modifying a musical selection.

Jack and I frequently got into trouble for placing satirical messages on bulletin boards around WCOL. Program manager Dan Morris told us to stop posting funny signs or we wouldn't have jobs any more. Jack gave a small hat tip to that in a newscast teaser.

Here's another example of giving a first-year college student who thinks he's hot stuff in a radio studio a few sound effects records, some music tracks, and more production equipment than he's ever imagined.

I attended the State of the State speech (probably 1966) in which James A Rhodes (not yet a Kent State University killer) spoke. I brought the audio back to the station and created my own report, which was never broadcast.

WCOL saluted listeners who called in news tips each week. There may have been some inconsequential monetary reward, too. Jack created a parody of the Tip of the Week promo.

Jack also created an entirely bogus newscast. As with most of the funny stuff, it was never on the air.

In 1967 and 1968, I was the only person who broadcast on WTVN AM&FM. Except for when I was on, the stations were separate. E Karl Folk had the morning shift on WTVN-FM (later WBUK) and I often hung around to harass him. Tracy St John (Carol Reeder) and I created audio bits on carts that we camouflaged with PSA, promo, or commercial labels. Here's one of them.

Here's one that ran at the beginning of one of E Karl's shifts.

A parody of a parody. Instead of The Big Story, Jack came up with an idea for The Big Bitch.

And another Big Story.

E Karl read his own news on WTVN-FM/WBUK, so I handed him some doctored copy one morning.

Here's another E Karl sabotage that features a recorded E Karl talking over the real E Karl.

All of the sabotages I'm responsible for, I should have expected a little payback. This happened around 5:30 in the morning on WLVY in Ft Wayne.

I brought recordings of Carol K [Tracy St John (Carol Reeder)] with me to Ft Wayne and used some of them to sabotage Chris O'Brien. Again.

And who can forget the Fantastic Feathered Fowl?

It was fun back then, but those days are long gone.