In this guest commentary, military journalist Marc Yablonka takes us on a trip down memory lane, sharing some of the highlights from his radio career. Do you have your own radio story to tell? Are you a lifer in the radio industry? Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.
I still have those dreams, 42 years later. The record stops … and all there is is dead air. I forgot to cue up the next record.
1965 — Lullabies
It’s bedtime. 10 p.m. on a school night. Worried that my parents down the hall might hear, I pulled the blanket over my head, turned on the transistor radio by my pillow and tuned in “KFWB, Channel 98!” as their jingle sang. I was just in time to hear famed L.A. disc jockey B. Mitchell Reid say, “Everybody welcome to the studio David … Van Cortland … Crosby.”
“Hi,” whispered one of the founding members of the folk-rock group The Byrds and, later, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I was hooked. On The Byrds to be sure. But more importantly, on radio.
1974 — Daydreams
Through a circuitous route, another famed L.A. deejay, Roger Carroll, came into my life when my father met him at a dinner party and told him I was interested in getting into radio. “Have him call me at the station,” Roger told dad.
The following Saturday, there I was in the booth with Roger at powerhouse KMPC on Sunset Boulevard (owned by singing cowboy Gene Autry).
Roger told me he’s only had three jobs in radio: a station in Frederick, Maryland, KMPC and AFN (American Forces Network).
His kindness and the deep voice behind it encourage me to plug on. I do.
Forty winks
The first stop along my résumé was NPR station KCRW(FM) in Santa Monica, where I ran the board and cued the records for a Big Band Era show Saturday nights. “The Don Brown Show.” What was the salary, you might ask? What salary?
I was further buoyed by something music publisher Kenny Weiss told me he’d learned after attending a lecture on radio.
“You don’t have to go to radio school to work in radio,” the lecturer said. “All you have to do is get into your car and drive towards Bakersfield!”
I sort of did that — though I took an aircheck along — and definitely moved up in the world when I landed a weekend gig at “Country K-DOLL” — or KDOL in Mojave, Calif. (which was housed in an old, converted ranch house off the Old Boron Highway). Americans old enough might recall the TV commercials for 20 Mule Team Borax soap! Yeah, that Boron.
I was paid the grand sum of $2.50 an hour to do a country music show from 6 to 10 p.m., and shut the station down Saturday and Sunday nights.
When you went to work full-time at KDOL (I never did), the owner was so cheap that he lowered your salary to $2 an hour!
Outside of the local audience in town, some 3,500 people, the airmen at Edwards Air Force Base nearby, and the jackrabbits and occasional coyotes that called the desert home, I was competing for air time with the field mice that were constantly running around the board!
What I remember most about the gig was driving home to L.A. through the desert after shutting down the station. The FCC mandated that all 100-watt stations like KDOL had to be off the air by 10 p.m. What that did was open the airwaves so that the powerhouse 50,000 and 100,000 watters could literally be heard across the country.
It was very common for me to be driving along through Lancaster or Palmdale and pick up WWL New Orleans, XERB Del Rio, Texas, KOB Albuquerque, KSL Salt Lake City and KCBS San Francisco all the way down to the Los Angeles Basin before L.A.’s stations filled the airwaves.
From there it was on to KNTF Ontario, Calif., a San Bernardino-area medium-market automated country station, where all I did was babysit tapes and rip and read the AP newswire at the top of the hour. Enough said about that!
Circadian rhythms
Next stop, Metromedia powerhouse KLAC Hollywood. Not behind the mic, but producing remote broadcasts for several top-named L.A. disc jockeys. Three of them come immediately to mind:
Sammy Jackson, whose career in movies had floundered after a string of B flicks failed to propel him to further stardom, so he slid into a career in radio. Perhaps his best-known film, “None but the Brave,” starred Frank Sinatra and Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. It was an anti-war film before anti-war films were in vogue.
Art Nelson, otherwise known in his native Texas as “the Corsicana Flash.” Art had soldiered at the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, and thought his service was over when, all of a sudden, the army beckoned him again and sent him to Japan to serve in the Occupation Forces after the war. Like a lot of people in “the business” in Dallas, Art knew Jack Ruby, the bar owner who put an end to the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, who, according to the Warren Commission, assassinated JFK. Art was on the air at KRLD when the FBI came to question him about Ruby. “Marc,” he told me, “They scared the shit outta me!”
Gene Price, another U.S. Army veteran who’d served in Germany during the Cold War, was a third deejay whose remotes I produced. Like Roger Carroll, Gene also had a show on AFN called “Gene Price’s Country World.” His show did run all over the world, wherever U.S. military bases could be found, until the 1990s.
Coincidentally, I also came face to face with the disc jockey who, I could argue, started me down radio’s road, B. Mitchell Reid, who then worked for KMET(FM), the AOR station down the hall from KLAC (both stations being owned by Metromedia).
Our short conversation went something like this: “How ya doin’ man?” Mitch asked me. “Pretty good Mitch. How you doin’?”
What I also remember about KLAC was being in the room with some of country music’s, and Hollywood’s, biggest stars.
Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell, actor/singer Pat Boone, actors James Garner, (TV’s) Clint (“Cheyenne”) Walker, and actress Connie Stevens come to mind.
Zizz
The last avenue I traveled down, radio syndication, found me at Country News in Venice, Calif., bartering Coors Beer commercials to small- and medium-market country stations in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain states.
I had a great boss, Pete Howard, who impressed upon me NOT to make a nuisance of myself. “The high-pressure salesman stuff doesn’t work anymore, Marc,” Pete told me. “Be natural. If the program director tells you, ‘I can’t talk to you now! My wife’s having a baby and I have to hightail it down to the hospital!’ You make a note of it, so when you call back next week, you lead with, ‘Was it a boy or a girl?’”
The natural approach worked pretty well for me until I was “beating up,” as we used to jokingly call it, the PD of the country station in Helena, Mont.
“A good friend of mine’s wife is married to the daughter of Moody Brickett, assistant DA there in Lewis and Clark County!” I chimed in. “Yeah, he’s buried right next to my dad in the cemetery,” the stiff-voiced program director replied. Never did sell the show to Helena, Mont.
Waking up
From there, it was on to a career in journalism. Military journalism to be specific.
Articles for the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes, Army Times and a plethora of magazines followed. So did books. Books mainly about a war I hadn’t fought in. I wanted to make up for that by writing about people who did.
One day, I was lost in a fog about what book to write next. Then Roger Carroll and Gene Price, who I’d profiled for Stars and Stripes years before, popped into my head. I’d already written an article about AFN and profiled Pat Sajak, recently retired host of ABC-TV’s game show “Wheel of Fortune.” Pat had served in Vietnam as an Army disc jockey for AFVN (the American Forces Vietnam Network).
So, there it was. And with a lot of help from my co-author Rick Fredericksen, who had served as a newsman at AFVN, Hot Mics and TV Lights: The American Forces Vietnam Network was born.
But I still have those dreams …