Radio Memories Vol. 6

To Paraphrase Dickens, “It was the worst of Dayparts, It was the best of Dayparts!” Typically broadcasters divide the day up into shifts called “dayparts.” They include “Morning Drive” (6 AM – 10 AM), “Middays” (10 AM – 2 PM), “Afternoon Drive” (2 PM – 7 PM), “Evenings” (7 PM – Midnight) and “Overnights” (Midnight – 6 AM.) The hours may vary slightly from station to station, but those 5 dayparts are usually how the 24-hour broadcast day is divided.  During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with every one of them. 

When I started full-time at WCOS, I took over the “Overnight” shift from April Black who was leaving radio. WCOS called their 1 AM – 6 AM overnight shift “The All Night Satellite.” It was the middle of the Space Race then, so anything referencing space was cool. I must admit that at first, I hated the shift because I was tired all the time. But after a month or so, my circadian rhythm adjusted and I got more comfortable. 

Around that time, I recognized some of the advantages of working overnight. First and foremost, I was alone in the station with no one to interrupt the flow of my show. Our traffic manager, the sweet soul that she was, was not running into the studio to grab the program log to add more commercials to the schedule. No salespeople were scurrying around asking if you could knock out a recording while a very short record was playing. No news people running back and forth with hot copy demanding that we interrupt for breaking news. It was pure unadulterated bliss with just you, the records, and the audience. 

Overnight audiences were special too. WCOS was the only 24-hour station in town, so for those hours between midnight and 6 AM they were listening to you or some distant station, fading in and out - coming in via “skip.” True, the overnight audience was significantly smaller. But they were YOUR audience. In the '60s, radio was the only “Social Media” of the day. We were not supposed to take requests over the phone except for the “Instant Sixty Request” feature that we ran hourly, but, don’t tell Woody, we did. That meant the old station phone line Alpine 2-2177 and later 252-2177 stayed pretty busy all night. I was never lonely. 

And there was a rich patois of callers too; truck drivers at a truck stop wanting to hear a truckin’ song, mamas with colicky babies who wanted to hear something soft and soothing, mill workers and bakers trying to break up boring shifts, teenaged boys coming down from a hot date, cooks and patrons in overnight diners looking for a background for their conversations, and last, but not least, high school girls dealing with a new romance or a new heartbreak. Lordy, I thought my teenage years were rough, but I had no idea. The amazing thing about this audience was that it was loyal with a capital “L” Some are still listening to me today on WUSC-FM, 55+ years later. 

I learned back then that the musical tastes between boys and girls are universes apart. Boys wanted to hear songs about cars and surfing, and girls wanted to hear songs that made them cry; such as Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey” or Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Get Over You!”

I don’t remember the number of times a high school girl would cry herself to sleep hanging onto the phone while I did a show, periodically checking to see if she was still with me. When I picked up the handset off the desk and heard gentle breathing, I quietly hung up; I knew all was well for that night.  

I mentioned “The Instant 60 Request” a while ago.  I’ll tell you now that it was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done on the radio. I’m not going to break a promise and tell you how we did it, but it went something like this. We’d play a distinctive jingle from our Gates Spotmaster 101 machine that would announce that it was time for an “Instant 60 Request” and followed by saying “Whatever you say, we’ll play, as long as it is on the WCOS top 60!” We would then put the caller on the air live and ask them who they were, where they went to school or worked, and then what would they like to hear. When they said the name of the song, we played a jingle that said “Here it comes!” and immediately played the song they requested. What made this work was the DJ’s intimate knowledge of where the songs were on the “WCOS Top 60 in Dixie” chart and the DJ’s ability to find that record in the wireframe record holder on top of the audio console and cue it up really fast. So the pressure was up there. 

But the even bigger pressure was that this was all live, and I mean LIVE! There was no prerecording of the caller; there was no ten-second delay that could be “dumped” if something went terribly wrong. When you heard the request it was already live out there on the radio! I was never busted by an “Instant 60 Request” One or two of my fellow DJs did suffer with Instant 60s going terribly wrong. On one of the SLOBcasts, Hunter Herring tells of one such very famous incident, where a caller dropped the BIG “expletive deleted” right out there on the air. I was listening while on my way back to the station from doing a show at Doug Broome’s Drive-in while listening. I can tell you that I almost drove off of Two Notch Road when it happened. Fortunately, no one reported the incident to the FCC so no one got fined and no one got fired. (thank goodness for the statute of limitations.) But after hearing that happen, that gut-wrenching fear raised my voice an octave whenever I did one of those “Instant Requests.” When I listen to an aircheck of me doing one of those requests, I swear my voice sounds like I’m saying “Please don’t hurt me!”

On the plus side, taking requests became a part of me but due to the changes in technology, it is difficult to talk to the requester live on the air. But I still love taking them over the phone and now I can do it over the internet on Facebook. Boom shama-lama! Hello Amsterdam, what do you want to hear?

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Photo Credits: 
Gates-ST-101 Sportsmaster: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/...