For a number of reasons, I found myself diving into a box filled with tapes in that old format last week, listening to mostly radio "air-checks" stretching from 1968 to 1994. One, from my first radio job, is on a small reel-to-reel. The rest are on cassette, that omnipresent tape format of the pre-CD 1970 - 1990's. Some of them were unintelligible, some of them just plain bad. But others! There was an interview with a Soviet Cosmonaut (with live translation), lots of conversations about Bill Clinton and Monica, about Richard Arrington and the always interesting Birmingham City Council. And there was a recording of a show done on the 10th anniversary of the day WERC changed formats from music to news/talk. We had on and off-air folks from the station's past visit and talk...Jesse Champion and John Bomer and Tony Giles ("The Original Trivia Challenge"!) and Kevin McCarthy and Bill Lawson (now of WZZK fame, one of the only DJ's to transition to the new format and become a talk-show host) and Karanel Ezpeleta and Lynn Sampson (who like me, went on to host For The Record) and...trivia question: who was the first person to host the morning show in the News/Talk format? Answer: It was Bob Holmes, who you might better remember for his distinctive "Long Lewis Ford" radio commercials. Does anyone remember the "Five O'Clock News at Four" or "Sunday Morning Breakdown" or "The Peoples' Journal"?
Frankly, radio doesn't have much of a memory, especially now. Conventional wisdom is that three weeks after you leave a station, nobody can remember your name. I doubt very seriously any of the people working at WERC now could easily name the date of the switchover (even the year!), and certainly not the name of the last record played (it was not casually chosen) or who played it. I'll bet there was no on-air mention made of the 20th or 25th anniversaries, which have now passed. Too bad, they could have brought in some much-needed advertising revenue.
As I listened to the dusty old cassette tapes that preserve shows I hosted over the years, I wondered about the millions of words I spoke during tens of thousands of hours on-air, and whether any of them really meant anything. Listening, I remembered the "regular callers" from back then..Don from Downtown and Roy in Hoover and "P.R." and Michael The Tree-cutter, listeners who became self-selected part of the act. Those were perhaps much more innocent times, before the razor-sharp political lines were drawn and hosts were part of one camp or the other. OK, maybe I'm looking at it through, if not rose colored, at least somewhat tinted glasses. But wasn't that a time when you would listen to shows that made 'ya think, instead of just those that reinforced what you already believed?
[NOTE: as with just about every topic, there is a website that records some Birmingham radio and TV history..."Birmingham Rewound". The WERC bumper sticker above comes from that site, I actually have an older one..with WERC AM/FM on it, but my scanner, like the rest of my computer life this week, is screwed!]
[ADDENDUM: The NY Times reports on something that bothered me as I watched the coverage of the Iran election riots. The use of material "we can't confirm"...or they found "impossible to confirm". Uh, then why are you using it?]
[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]
Quite a nice, nostalgic entry, Tim!
ReplyDeleteI recollect listening to the "Old Joe" Rumore Show, but that was WVOK. And, I would imagine there are plenty of folks whom remember Joe and his show(s).
I hope that you're able to preserve those moments, and archive those tapes on DVD or CD! And, maybe there's an opportunity there, as well!
And I agree with you on the revenue thing. There are a host of Alabama-specific businesses that we rarely - if ever - hear about.
For example, some of the sponsors of Rumore's show were:
Alabama Flour Mills
(Mother's Best Flour)
Decatur
ca 1941
now owned by ConAgra
Note: Established by Nebraska Consolidated Mills Company because of the creation of a navigable waterway called "Tennessee River" by FDR's New Deal, it enabled flour to be transported cheaply, in turn sold at a lower cost, and therefore available to more people - consequently, area farmers and residents created the Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Cooperative which served 10 counties, which led to commercial seed sales, alfalfa-drying plants, and increased farmers' accessibility to markets, creating a daily cash market where there had been none. (Not to mention benefits derived from flood and erosion control (lives and property saved), electricity production (improved quality of life & industry), malaria control, all which were significant improvements upon the previous existence.)
Golden Eagle Syrup
Fayette
since 1928
http://www.GoldenEagleSyrup.com/
Sessions Peanut Oil
Enterprise
since 1917
http://www.SessionsPeanuts.com/
You wrote, "I wondered about the millions of words I spoke... whether any of them really meant anything."
I imagine that many, if not most of us, at some stage in our lives, wonder if we had a positive effect upon the people around us.
I think such pondering is a common "affliction" of those whom "suffer the indignity" of possessing a conscience. Possession of a conscience also means, of course, that thought for oneself is neither primary nor narcissistic. It means that those times of introspection actually seek the benefit of another.
For when one seeks the good of others above that of self - when we help others - we help ourselves.
"No man is an island..."
Perhaps that's part and parcel of the contemplative life, eh?
Writing is cathartic in some sense, wouldn't you agree?