Confessions of a Rock and Roll Disk Jockey - the early days - Stories for my Grandchildren

My Senior year of high school I got a job at the local radio station. A man named Hugh McBeth owned the station, KSTB,  and for some reason he gave me a job working  week-ends and later on, after school. I don't remember the circumstances - I think maybe my father put in a good word for me at the Rotary club.

KSTB was a day-time only AM license. That meant it shared the same broadcast frequency as other stations; for some reason radio waves travel further at night than during the day, so to avoid interference with these other stations KSTB was strictly sun-up to sun down. Our broadcast mantra was "On the spot with 1/2 a watt!"

The station played mostly Country and Western when Hugh wasn't giving the farm reports, or when his wife was not conducting the "daily swap meet" where you called up and told people that you had a barely-used dinette set that you would like to sell or swap for a baby crib. They had a guy named Jay Spenser - who was pretty well known in C&W circles working for them - and he played all the latest by Johnny Horton, and Ray Price, and Johnny Cash.

I opened on Saturday mornings and played C&W  and sometimes some of Jay's buddies would stop by to see if he was around; I met several famous and not-so-famous folks that way. I closed on Sundays and apart from the "Gospel Hour" I mostly played transcriptions - huge, 16" inch recordings that lasted 30 minutes apiece. These were for the most part sponsored programs, like "Serenade in Blue,"  featuring standards by the Air Force band.

There were a couple of other "announcers" that worked there; one, a guy named Vern who once set fire to my news. News came to the station by way of a Teletype machine - a clunky  box that was in effect an electric typewriter. The station subscribed to the Associated Press news service, and AP sent stories down the "wire" that printed on long, continuous rolls of paper. There was a 5-minute newscast every hour, so when it came time for the news I would go out in the hall, where the teletype machine was, tear off whatever had been printed and run back in the studio, dragging a trail of paper behind me. I would scan through the printout and read news items until my 5 minutes was up. One time while doing this I smelled smoke and turned to see that Vern had set fire to the string of paper and flames were quickly climbing up to my reading point. I would like to think I finished with some clever remark, but I suspect what really happened was a period of "dead air" while I stomped out the fire.

The console faced a window into the adjacent studio, which was used only on Sundays by preachers who came to expound once a week or so; the rest of the time it was dark. High on the list of DJ humor was to sneak into the dark studio, wait until the guy on the console was turned away, then loom up in the window to startle the DJ. Sometimes this would take the form of a lunar eclipse. The object, always, was to make the DJ crack up and laugh on the air.

For a while we had a morning guy that was not too well liked around the station. He had a bad habit of rushing in at the last minute to get everything going, so one evening a couple of us took everything he needed - his chair, all the phonograph records, the tape cartridges of commercials, the traffic book that had all the promos and such, and hid them across the hall. We left him with a 45RPM record of the Star Spangled Banner, the opening. Sure enough, the next morning at about 6:05, the station came on with the SSB, then there was a long pause, then it played again. Another pause, then came Stars and Stripes Forever, the "B" side of the 45. Then a really long pause, then music from an album that the station didn't own. He had gone down to his car and got a personal album to play while he tracked down everything else. Turns out Mr. McB.was not happy about our stunt, but we survived.

After marching band and football season, I persuaded Mr. McB to let me play Rock and Roll on weekdays - one hour a day, after school was out. Problem was, the station didn't have all that many R&R records. Back then, radio stations didn't buy records, they depended on distribution companies to give them the latest albums and records. Usually the distributors were happy to do this. Air play made songs popular and people bought popular songs (records) from the record stores. Unfortunately the record store business was hit and miss in our little town. Sometimes we had a store and sometimes we didn't. So the distributors paid us little attention. Jay didn't have this problem with C&W songs - he was so well known that all the artists sent him records. By playing some songs twice, and talking a lot,  I could scrape together an hour's worth of music.

The talking a lot part might explain some things.

Next:  Rock and Roll DJ in the Big City - the glory days