The Other Shoe Drops

The station owner was a chronically depressed alcoholic. He always had keystone beer in his trenchcoat pockets. His background was in real estate and I think he probably got bamboozled by the station manager (who was a pretty persuasive guy) into buying the radio station. The station manager owned 1% or 11% depending on who you asked and when. He had put up 1% and the owner had given him 10%. But they were having trouble getting clients to advertise. The owner counted on pity, apparently, as a sales tactic. Who's going to put money into a radio station that the owner thinks he's going to shut down?

So I was the only on-air talen. Well, live on-air talent. We got our feed from a satellite. We had to run certain commercials. It also meant I was the news guy. I told them I wasn't a news guy. After a while, the SM stopped drawing a salary as he tried to make the station work. His wife left him with his kids for some scumbag she knew from chat. (Keep in mind, I got this job from chat through her.) So he got preoccupied with that. After a while, everyone there was commission, volunteer, or me. The SM was eventually fired and replaced with someone who would do the work for free. I was pissed because the SM had been my only friend out there. He had been open and honest with me about things. He had shown me the ropes. We had interviewed Elizabeth Dole together (and scared her press secretary when we didn't ask fluff questions). He'd had faith in me and he had worked damn hard, and now he was gone. I didn't see any way for the station to survive.

The other thing that bothered me was the owner's tendency to refer to people someone as "a good christian man". Being jewish, this bothered me. As if the only way to be good was to be christian. I notified the owner and the new SM that I would be leaving at the end of the month. I told them I had moved halfway across the country and things weren't working out. I had a job lined up back home and would be returning. I also informed them I believed they would have been replacing me with a volunteer PD soon anyway and there was nothing they could do to convince me otherwise. Besides, they hadn't been able to pay me and I was getting into increasingly larger debt. So with that in mind, after four months of living in Keokuk, IA, I packed my things and headed back to Massachusetts. That would be the last time I worked in radio.

But as I look back, I've always been involved in performing in one way or another. So radio wasn't it. Maybe it could be now. I applied for a position at WBCN in 2002 for which I was rejected. I'm far more interesting now than I was then. Far more entertaining. But I think I've found my nitch... for now.

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