Now Hear This: Remembering radio days
The signal only carried as far as the city limits, but it was like a thousand miles to the kid behind the microphone.
“This is WSFB 1490 on your AM, radio dial in Quitman, Georgia ? serving South Georgia, and North Florida,” I said, in the most distinguished tones I possessed at 22.
The year was 1962, and I was living a dream. WSFB was only a 250-watt radio station in my home town. Radio stations don’t come any smaller than 250 watts. I guess you could say we were the city’s biggest light-bulb.
We were often knocked off the air during a heavy thunderstorm, but it was radio. I was a disc-jockey, with a third class FCC radio license, and that’s all I cared about. It was 50,000 watts as far as I was concerned.
In the beginning, I worked the weekend shift which was six hours on Saturdays and all day Sunday sign-on to sign-off, sunrise to sunset. My high school drama and English teacher, Mrs. Connie Cunningham, would help me with pronunciation and phraseology. It was that thick South Georgia accent she was trying to work out of me.
Technology, in those days, was a headset, a reel-to-reel tape player-recorder, two turntables for playing records, UPI (United Press International) wire service, and a red light bulb that flashed in the control room when the phone rang. The station’s format was called “blocked programming.”
The music was middle of the road, but always upbeat. Station co-owner Tom Rowland, a master story teller, would fill his show with stories about local personalities. Sometimes they were true, most often not, but the fun of it for the listener was figuring out fact from fiction.
Bill Hoops, also a station co-owner, read the news (rip and read) from noon to 12:15 p.m., which included the local hospital report of those who had checked in and out of Brooks County Hospital, and the Maxwell funeral home death notices, followed by the Eddie Arnold or Pat Boone show, and a 15-minute public service announcement for the Air Force or Navy.
Two to three times a week, after sign-off, it was my duty to cut commercials that would air the next day. For Mitchell’s Grocery store, and Powell’s Farm Supply, two of the stations biggest advertisers, I would turn the tape recorder on, and ad lib their spot reading from their weekly newspaper ads. No sound effects, that came later.
In time I worked every shift during the day, but my favorite was playing the top 40 rock and roll songs of the week. My mentor, at that little 250-watt radio station, was Mike Harvey, who may be the world’s oldest living top 40 disc jockey, who you can hear each Saturday night on “Solid Gold” from coast to coast.
I left Quitman in 1965 with about three years of solid broadcast experience for the University of Georgia in Athens where I continued my broadcast career working for WGAU, while going to school. It was there I met, and became life-long friends with, a young man soon to become one of this country’s most beloved syndicated columnist until his death a few years ago, Lewis Grizzard.
Did I mention that country music Hall of Fame writer and singer Bill Anderson was also a disc-jockey at WGAU in Athens? But, Bill didn’t stay long. Why? WGAU’s format was MOR (middle of the road), and Bill too many times, slipped in a tune by Hank Snow, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash or Webb Pierce.
Bill was fired!
It didn’t seem to be a stumbling block along his career path, however. I left the station awhile later. I was fired too!
A combination of sleeping through my sign-on shift too many times, after being up all night hitting the books, plus a disagreement with station management over certain terms I used broadcasting football games (don’t ask).
But the good news is ? we both landed on our feet in Music City!
(Hope Hines is a television sports reporter and Nashville personality.)