One of the early jocks (who shall remain nameless) was a great guy and a friend of mine. He was also very hyper and very spacy.  I never worked with a guy who left the studio as much as he did. In those days your shift was a whole series of deadlines, three minute and thirty second deadlines or sixty-second deadlines. Nothing was automated and you had to be there to start and stop every record and every commercial precisely on time.  This called for a high degree of concentration and left you surprisingly tired after your show. Bearing down on something for four to six hours uses a lot of brain energy that is just as wearing as physical labor.  It was hard to leave the studio because most of the time you only had a few minutes.  You would learn the minimum amount of time it took for you to do certain things like go to the bathroom. This of course could differ depending on where you were working.  In one building I worked, the bathroom was outside the office by the elevators.  You had to make sure you had a long enough song and you had to make sure that you had your keys or else you would experience one of radio’s nightmares….locking yourself out of the studio.

Around 1971, I was showing my grandfather around the station. I walked him out front to the door and accidentally locked myself out.  There is a panicky feeling for you!  Quickly you figure how much time you have left on the album you are playing inside.  If you are lucky, you would be playing cut number one and you knew you had maybe 20 minutes to get back in before the album tracked to the end and you get that “thsp, thsp, thsp, sound of the needle hitting the inner groove and every listener knowing that someone was asleep at the switch. This of course would happen with an overtired DJ who was right there in the studio.  He would wake up and find his drool on the desk in front of him, the record making that dreaded noise and the phones all lit up! (Phones don’t ring in the studio, they light up.)

Anyway, for some reason the building had this little wooden door that resembled a coal chute.  It was about five feet off the ground and just big enough for a big DJ to squeeze through.  My grandfather got a tire iron out of his trunk and we quite easily opened the door and I got through and got back to the studio just in time to start the next record.  I forgot about the door, it closed back up just fine.  The next day I came into work and someone told me that the police had been there because it looked like someone tried to break into the station last night! I did not reveal the real reason for pry marks on the little door outside.

Back to the nameless guy….remember him?  He would leave the studio during the shortest tunes. He just had to be moving. He would walk into the transmitter room sometimes and reach up and twist a dial or two. He wasn’t being malicious. I watched him do it once or twice. He would just have to be fiddling with something. Once he switched the transmitter into what was called the dummy load.  He acted like he knew what he was doing but he really didn’t and this time he really goofed. For all practical purposes, the transmitter was operating correctly but instead of the signal going to our tower and out to the people, it was going into the dummy load. We could still get the station in the building, but nobody else could.  When people started calling that we were off the air, it took the engineers a while to figure out what was wrong.

We used to play a trick on him because he was so spacy. When you are on the air, you basically listen to a radio tuned to your station. If you just listened directly to what was coming out of the board, you wouldn’t notice right away if you went off the air. In this case, you plugged your headphones right into a regular Pioneer radio receiver and listened that way. When our guy would leave the studio, we would sneak in and change the station to a different station that played similar music.  He would come back in and not recalling that he was playing a different song when he left, would hear the song on the other station start to fade out and he would open the mic to talk. It was funny to see his expression when he started to talk (thereby talking over the song  that he was actually playing!) and hear a different DJ come through the headphones! Sometimes he would be talking and just hear another song come on that he hadn’t started.  It was funny how many times he fell for it.  We realized that it was messing up our own station but it was too funny!

He also would play a long song at the end of his shift and stand in the door to the radio station and wait for me to come. One song that was popular at the time, was “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys”. It weighed in at 11 minutes.  I remember hearing Low Spark three out of five days one week.  Another jock would put a long record on and sit in his car at the end of the driveway and wait till his replacement drove in.  They would wave to each other and both go on their merry ways.