Radio Daze

First, I want to thank Scott Garner, the star of the hit show “Highly Sophisticated Rednecks,” who inspired this thread.
He got me to thinking about my brief career as a radio sports announcer.
I was 17, and a friend who worked in the office at WASA-AM WHDG-FM in Havre de Grace, Maryland suggested I apply for the job as the color announcer for the station, which covered the Friday night football games at our high school.
Since I was a former varsity football player who was also the morning D.J. at our in-school high school radio station (“Morris in the Morning”…original, right?), it seemed a natural fit.
Don’t underestimate the talent it takes to spin records (yes, we actually used round vinyl discs to broadcast recorded music back then) at an in-school station.
It takes a lot of skill to develop a hip song rotation and interesting patter in between announcements about today’s lunch (usually something involving a fish by-product or the nebulous term “a la king”).
The music itself was secondary.
Unlike the underground college stations Scott mentioned, our catalog was often determined by the size of our individual weekly allowances.
That’s why my listeners were treated to plenty of “Frampton Comes Alive” and Stevie Wonder’s “Songs In The Key Of Life,” because my meager allowance dictated that my personal album collection involved lots of “Greatest Hits” double-album sets.
I always thought it was more economically sensible to buy records filled with proven older hits than to gamble on a hot new six-dollar album that might or might not have more than two tolerable tracks.
Anyway, the in-house experience led to my first real broadcasting job, as the color commentator on WASA-WHDG.
My contract was extended after the football season to continue with broadcasts of the local high school basketball games.
The “contract” consisted of the station manager saying, “Hey, you want to stick around and do the basketball games? I’ll bump you from $10 to $15 a game.”
Unfortunately, my celebrity run ended with the last basketball game of the season, since the station didn’t broadcast high school baseball.
Nearing graduation, I sat down with the station manager to discuss the possibility of joining the station full time.
You need to understand that the radio station was owned by a widow, and she had put her only son in charge of the station simply because she had run out of family-owned places to put him.
(She and the family lived in Washington, D.C. The son and the radio station were located in northeastern Maryland, in a community of 9,000 people. It wasn’t the end of the world, but you could SEE the end of the world from our town.)
So this ill-at-ease seventeen-year-old sat in front of the station manager and asked for a full-time slot.
His answer, and I’m not exaggerating an inch, was “not unless you have a sex-change operation.”
It seems that he was cooking up a whole new format, where the broadcasting staff was going to be all female.
(Did I mention he was an only child?)
Obviously, this was the late 70s, before such things as “sexual harassment” had become popular as a courtroom distraction.
My broadcasting career had come to an end, and I went on to a job building floor buffers in a chemical factory a few months later.
(Oh, how far the mighty had fallen.)
More “Tales From The Airwaves” to follow over the next few weeks.