Remember When We Listened to the Radio?

(I have succumbed to the need for a modest marketing effort, and have, consequently, offered up endorsements from a few readers. There has been a bothersome drop off in readership and subscribers, and it has made me wonder if I am spending too much time writing about politics and not telling enough stories related to my adventures, history, travel, writing, motorcycles, and all the other topics that distract me. Or maybe there are just too many writers offering up material on Substack, and I, like many others creating articles, have been consumed by the white noise. I have one subscriber whose profile indicates they receive just over 970 Substacks. How does that work? Anyway, while I ponder attenuating the political posts with different material, I’m offering up a reworked piece below from my early days in broadcasting. Do I need to write more of this or stick to sticking it to political goons? Please advise. - JM)

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“Remember when we listened to the radio
and I said that’s the place to be?
And how about the job as an FM jock
the day you married me?” – Harry Chapin

After a long career as a TV news journalist, I watched my former craft from the outside as it morphed into a nearly unrecognizable institution. No one truly understood how to accommodate the internet or use it as a tool to reach more people. Executives mostly slapped their sweaty palms on glass desktops and demanded answers from employees. While the introspection led to ideas, few of them generated meaningful revenue. Newspapers, too, worried over whether the right move was to stop print publications. Many of them have ended that practice, more, though, offer a few print versions each week. Digital advertising revenues increase but fragmentation of audiences makes it difficult to predict cash flow. Consumers of information find alternative sources to trust, and those providers proliferate.

Eventually, even major metro areas will lose TV newscasts. Advertising money is disappearing into Youtube channels, Instagram influencers, podcast productions, and narrowcasting efforts that target specific demographics. TV stations, which used to effectively print money with a near monopoly on public airwaves that reached local viewers, are breathing thinner financial air every quarter. The audience that formerly relied on local TV news can find what information it seeks at almost any time of the day. Appointment television news is becoming archaic. Less money also means journalists are barely surviving on their salaries, and those with talent and institutional memory are leaving to find better jobs to care for their families, reconfiguring career plans. Consequently, the information you get is often unreliable and poorly communicated; especially when networks are paying multi-million dollar settlements to a president who didn’t like what they had written or how it had been edited. Audiences will disappear as fast as the freedom of speech.

There are communities, though, where broadcasting continues to survive, and even do well, and they tend to be small towns with radio stations. A population of under 5000 can support a local broadcast outlet with advertising by small businesses and sponsorships of community events. Residents might get their national news from the internet or a cable broadcast from the nearest big city, but what they want, and need to know, about their hometown, has to come from people who live and work underneath the signal from that AM or FM radio tower. The Friday night football broadcasts, local news reports, reliable weather forecasts and warnings, city and county news from officeholders, and details of upcoming events, are all valuable pieces of data that can earn advertising dollars for small and medium sized communities and their radio broadcasters.

When I started out, radio was thriving across America. The signal brought communities together and became a part of the town’s brand image and reputation. Small town broadcasting was a profitable business and a good place to learn how to write and disseminate information that listeners found reliable. With the phone ringing and the Associated Press wire machine clacking in the background, I had to gather information, write news reports, read the weather, play records, and sound, to the best of my capabilities, at least slightly pleasant. The pay, unsurprisingly, was minuscule, and my first job at a small station in the White Mountains of Arizona earned $100 per week, a take home check of $174.83 every two weeks. Fortunately, my half of the rent, sharing an apartment with another announcer, was only $40.

I lost the Arizona job when the bottom fell out of the price of copper, which was being mined in a nearby mountain, and the local economy collapsed. No advertisers meant no money, and I set off across country, hitchhiking and looking for another radio station. I found a town, after a couple of months, with two exits off the Interstate, which gave it stature in my young mind. Rows of beets grew in every direction and during harvest the big container trucks carried the produce to a sugar mill refinery in Fort Morgan after migrant workers up from Texas had brought in the crops. Out there on the Colorado and Kansas line, the 1000 foot AM radio tower could be spotted for miles across the eternally flat High Plains. On the very clear days after a storm, you might even convince yourself the Rockies were visible 150 miles distant to the west.

On the Air, Out There

The radio station sat in one of the beet fields not far from the frontage road of the superhighway. A tower, steadied against the wind by strong wires, rose out back with a red aircraft warning light that blinked at night. Even as traffic hissed by on the Interstate, there was a loneliness to the spot. The edge of the Earth seemed to be within walking distance. I had seen the tower from a distance when I hitchhiked over from Goodland, Kansas, and I asked the trucker to drop me at the first exit so that I could leave a tape of my Arizona radio broadcasts and apply for work. He looked at my bedraggled appearance, a product of sleeping beneath an overpass, and choked back a laugh. By the time I had walked a mile down the dirt road to the station’s parking lot, I looked more like a drifter seeking food or other handouts than I did a prospective employee, but the receptionist accepted my tape and resume’, and I went back out to the highway, working hard to sustain any optimism about my future..

Burlington, Colorado, ca 1966

My home phone number was on the documents I had left and a few weeks later the general manager had called my Ma up in Michigan to offer me a job while I was camping down in Southern Utah. When I got in touch with him, he said the salary was $550 a month plus an extra $25 a week when I did a half hour roundup of local sports each Saturday. I was also expected to do the play-by-play broadcasts of the high school sports teams, regardless of the fact the station was not on the air after dark. Out of town games were sent back to hometown listeners through a crude cable system that enabled them to turn their TVs to a specific channel to pick up the audio of the game via a phone line.

My boss was a diminutive man with an outsized voice. The program director’s name was Tom Toomey, and during his on-air shift he referred to himself as Tom “Sock-it” Toomey, riffing on the old “Laugh-In” comedy show that had frequent talent transitions with someone saying into the camera, “Sock it to me!” A few times, I did want to sock it to him, and the first one occurred my initial day on the air. Tom was always talking about going out to the country club after he got off work to eat a steaming, greasy plate of Rocky Mountain Oysters. From upstate New York, he had become inordinately fascinated by the fact that he could consume fried bull’s testicles every night of the week. I did not begrudge him this dietary intrigue, but I thought it slightly an odd thing to speak about every day as he was wrapping up his four-hour broadcast. I never was able to discern how he had landed, like me, in the middle of the American nowhere.

Being a supervisor, Tom did not want to work mornings, so I was tasked with signing on the radio station at 5 a.m. and hosting the first broadcast for the next five hours. He met me in the lobby my first day, holding a large styrofoam cup of coffee and a burning cigarette in his mouth, the ash dangling precariously. His expression as he looked at me was one of skepticism and I sensed he had not been fond of the decision to hire a hitchhiker with a backpack. Tom’s attitude grew out of his personal belief that not just anyone was able to operate a radio station and entertain and inform the public and the airwaves ought not be turned over to itinerant drifters. In retrospect, he was probably right.

“Morning, Tommy,” I said, which was apparently a bit too collegial.

“No Tommy, please. It’s just Tom.”

“Okay. Sure. Just trying to be friendly.”

“There are other ways. Follow me. Let’s get to the control room.”

As we walked through the hallways of the portable building that comprised the studio, he looked back at me to see if there was childish wonder on my face at the fact I was being given access to the broadcast booth. There were only three switches on the transmitter to flip and Tommy showed me the readings to take and how to log them and then he led me to the control board.

“Okay,” he said, “those dials are called pots. You roll them up to control volume to your microphones, the turntables, tape machines, and the network feed.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve had a couple of radio jobs before I got here.”

“College radio hardly counts.”

“Okay, but I worked at a station up in the mountains in Eastern Arizona, too. That was kind of a real job. Just didn’t last long.”

“How nice. Well, we are a professional operation here and you’ll find things a bit more challenging.”

“I certainly hope I can live up to those standards.”

I was struggling not to be sarcastic, but I wondered what kind of excellence was demanded by a listening audience of farmers and ranchers and gas station operators and a few restaurants, nursing home residents, and a couple of doctors’ offices. Maybe a town dentist? Tommy was almost imperious in his determination to protect the multiple hundreds of daily listeners from my looming inadequacies. By the afternoon, he, in contrast to my inexperience, would be flawlessly playing songs by “The 1910 Fruit Gum Company,” “The Archies,” and “The Ohio Express.” He doubted I was qualified for a similar endeavor.

“Okay, this pot is the network news feed,” he said. “Click it all the way to the left so you can hear a tone cue over the monitor and as soon as you do roll it up and ABC Radio News will be on the air here from New York.”

“Gotcha.”

“And while that’s on, pull some wire copy with Colorado regional news and weather. The local forecast is on there, too. You read that over the air at the end of the national news and then play a record. Pick out some songs for your first hour.”

“Gotcha.”

I ran to the Associated Press wire machine and tore off news copy and then quickly sorted through a tall stack of 45-rpm records and sat two of them on the turntables, dropped the needles into the grooves, and cued them for play. When the network newscast concluded I threw the toggle switch on the microphone and began my first morning newscast on the eastern plains of Colorado.

“Good morning, it’s 28 degrees with flurries at 5:15. In Colorado and local news…..”

Nervous energy made the newscast seem brisk and short. I signed off with my name and started the turntable spinning with music as Tom’s hand touched me on the shoulder. I pulled off my headphones.

“We’re a bit more straightforward here,” he said. “Less earnestness is what works for our broadcasts.”

“Okay, well, I’ll tone it down. Guess I was just over-caffeinated or over-enthused.”

“Very well, then,” Tom “Sock it” Toomey said. He took a step back and folded his arms across his chest and waited for what I might say next when I opened the microphone.

I said, “Music radio. This is Michael Martin Murphy and ‘Wildfire,’” and I turned off the microphone switch.

He again tapped my shoulder. “Please, no ‘music radio.’ That’s big city stuff. We just give it to them without flash. I spent a lot of time developing this format. And it works. Please stick to it.”

“I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to say certain things,” I said. “Is there a list?”

“Don’t try to be funny your first day on the job. And especially not your first day on the air.”

“You’re right, I suppose. Humor never works anywhere. I’m sure there’s no place for it on the radio out here.”

“That’s correct. We are a time, temperature, and news format.”

“That’s a format?”

“Yes, it’s our format and it works quite well for our listeners. We don’t use personality.”

“And you developed that?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I guess I have a lot to learn. But don’t worry, I don’t have much of a personality.”

“You will learn. But that’s what I’m here for.”

“Well, I wondered.”

Cottonwoods at Fall on the Colorado High Plains

There was not much time for me to interject any personality into a broadcast even if I had one to share. The entire morning news block was consumed with network and local news, a farm and ranch report, weather, announcement of the school lunch menus, obituaries, swap shop, a few songs, and the daily hospital report. Yes, in a world before HIPAA, we put private patient health news on the air every morning, who was admitted to the local hospital, followed by a commercial break, and then the names of those dismissed.

Community radio was always exploring new concepts for making money and the business managers that had made the strategic decision to employ me had also decided that there was an audience for a daily reading of the admissions and dismissals from the county hospital. Sponsors fought over the availability of buying commercial time on the “Hospital Report,” which generated more reliable ad dollars than anything on the air, except high school football broadcasts. I was a bit stunned that such private information was broadcast but the list of names was in front of me, and I read it without any trace of earnestness, much less irony. The health reasons for the admissions to the hospital were also a part of the information we broadcast, and just to keep listeners tuned in, we broke up the announcements of names and ailments with the sponsor’s commercial.

“I’ll be right back with a list of today’s dismissals from the county hospital right after these words from….”

After I had informed everyone in the bi-county area about who had been admitted and released from the local hospital, and the nature of their illness, I got back to music. Everybody who had been worried about Aunt ‘Lizbeth’s goiter had picked up on the fact that she had been admitted yesterday and was probably in need of emotional support. As the musical intro was playing to a Gordon Lightfoot song, I related a quick anecdote about seeing him in concert and the fact that he had been so drunk he forgot the lyrics to a couple of his songs. When the recording ended, I added a few more bits of information about that concert. Sock-It Toomey was standing behind me wagging his finger.

“Really, what am I supposed to do? Just throw switches and share the time and temperature? Who in the hell goes into this business to do that?”

“It’s what you were hired to do. Nobody needs your little stories.”

“Jesus, I wish I’d known. Maybe I should quit before the day is over. But why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and let me do my job?”

Tom Toomey’s eyes went wide with an expression that was an indication he had not ever heard such a vile word. He was also pointing behind me. I did not care.

“I asked you to get the fuck outta here. Now please go. You can fire me when I get off the air.”

His pointing turned into jumping up and down, serious histrionics. I turned around and discovered that the red microphone light was still on and the morning audience had heard our entire conversation. The “Great Voice of the Great Plains” was swearing at people as they rolled out of bed.

“Oh fuck,” I said one last time before I switched off the microphone.

Fifteen minutes later, in the pre-dawn dark, the pastor of the Lutheran Church was in the lobby waiting to talk to the new announcer. I made profuse apologies and denied I was routinely profane. Tom Toomey kept giving the pastor skeptical looks and I knew I would have to work hard to gain acceptance into the community. But I was too much of a smart ass to try very hard. I suppose I was also arrogant and viewed the little town on the Interstate as a rest stop on my road to broadcast glory. I grew up to hate guys like me and my karmic fate was to be confronted by such persons at every turn of my broadcast career.

I settled into an adobe, played softball, and watched the wind blow dirt across the plains in broad clouds of brown darkness. Because I did not have a TV or radio, at night, I often sat on the ground next to my old Opel station wagon and listened to the A.M. radio signal of KOMA in Oklahoma City. The station’s 50,000 watt, clear-channel signal was night time entertainment across almost half the U.S. The sound of the announcers’ voices and the music made the cheap speakers of my car rattle and sent silly dreams through my head that I might one day work in such a fantastical operation. The night sky was alive with music. My brain was fired with delusions.

The most exciting part of every broadcast hour on KOMA was always the station identification at the top of the hour. The signal was so strong it bounced off the ionosphere at night and sent news and music to remote locales that were known in the FCC’s legal language as “dark areas,” un-served by the publicly-owned airwaves. The KOMA station ID began with a loud explosion, and then we heard a bass-voiced announcer, who said, “Serving 22 states and three countries, (another explosion), this is KOMA (dramatic pause), Oklahoma City.”

Which gave me an idea. A very, very bad idea.

I went to the radio station that night after the transmitter was shut down and recorded my own local version for our little beet field town. My voice was squeaky from yelling at that night’s fast pitch softball game, but a couple of post game beers had pumped up my puny courage and I struggled hard not to laugh as I produced the station identification. Instead of an explosion, I began with the tinkling of cowbells, and then said, “Serving 22 homes, three gas stations, four donut shops, and ten thousand pickup trucks, this is KNAB Burlington, Colorado.”

My sensibilities, if I had any, were not yet to be found the next morning and I played the station ID over the air just as the general manager was parking her car out front. She let me keep my job, but I was certain I was never going to be asked to speak at the Chamber of Commerce monthly luncheon or read scripture to the congregation at the Lutheran church’s Sunday service. I moved on in less than a year and four decades slipped past without me taking notice or returning to the edge of Colorado and Kit Carson County. The general manager became the owner, and she continued to run the station out near the Kansas line. I sent her an email just to say hello and apologize for my youthful indiscretions. I never got a response.

She might still be embarrassed I was ever hired.