45 Years and the new kid in town
My entire radio career was a great accident.
I won a full academic ride at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL… I scored a 34 on my ACT… Mostly in the English and Reading components… I also did well on Science… not so well on Math. (Turns out that I have a learning disability.) But that was a great score and I’d been asked to apply at a bunch of really great schools including Johns Hopkins, Boston University, and Brown… I’d even had invites for grant-in-aid to Yale and Harvard.)
One of my friends later explained to me that with my grades and the fact that I was out of state, in 1976, I would have been accepted on the basis of quota… Colleges were looking for kids to round out their programs.
I was a lot of things at 18 but confident wasn’t one of them.
Woulda, shoulda, coulda… I have no regrets.
I accepted the scholarship and enrolled in Spring Hill and immediately realized that everyone who was studying psychology was as messed up as I was… As I was pondering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs… while walking through the student center … I remember this sandy-blond guy name Ray Barber… who turned out to be the station manager, was in the lobby hustling people to see if they would want to be on WHIL, the 15-Watt Campus radio station… (He was the second most influential “RAY” in my radio career.)
For me, it was fairly easy… I was a good speaker… not great… loved AM radio… but was about to find there was a lot more… had never smoked pot… though I had helped myself to a few Jack Daniels and Cokes at the age of 18… and felt like it might be a great way to meet girls…
I studied for one month, then drove to New Orleans… taking the test at the FCC Building in New Orleans, Louisiana… I also took a few friends to be on the safe side… and that was a strip club episode that I don’t remember… I do remember the bar had a girl on a swing that flew over the street…
So, I was officially a licensed broadcaster… I think I was doing my first daytime show… (I would fill in for anyone… and college kids were not dependable in 1976) when in walks this lanky dude with hair down to his ass… really… and he says he’s the engineer… His name was Tim Camp… we hit it off right away and he did his thing and then we went for drinks when I got off the air… Not sure if I blew off class but that was highly possible.
Tim Camp had an old beige Datsun Station wagon… the stereo system in it was worth more than the car… and we were listening to some quadrophonic recordings he’d made… and I told him that I thought being on the radio would be a great job… and that’s when he told me his brother Dave ran WABF Fairhope… (1220 am… 1000 watts daytime directional for all of you technical people… ) Dave needed someone FAST… One of their people was leaving. WABF is now on 1480AM and located in Mobile now… but then it was a dumpy little building owned by a guy named Russ Kilgore of Eastern Shore Broadcasters…
Dave was a great guy… My audition was simply reading the newspaper out loud… unrehearsed… as Mr. Kilgore liked doing news twice an hour… and in between I would play music…
I’d gone in on Christmas Eve, Friday December 24th… Leslie Fram (a radio legend now) was on the air and she let me run the board for her so I wouldn’t make any mistakes… and she got me set up… She was super sweet… with an amazing voice… I always had a big crush on her…
And then on Sunday December 26, 1976… my sister Irene’s birthday… I went on the air professionally with my first Newscast… and then spent the afternoon playing music until Sunset when the station had to go off the air…
And what music did I play… ? The music we played then was what they called “Middle of the Road”… Frank and Dean… Barbara Streisand and Barry Manilow… Soft Top 40 songs… and a few other things…
The HOT new record in December of 1976 was the Eagles and “New Kid in Town”… (flipside was “Victim of Love” … got it trouble for accidentally playing that a few times….) but that is for another story… For all of you have followed me or listened to me over the years… Big thanks to you… It was fun being the “new kid in town”…