I was at KADI in 1973 when the station was destroyed by fire. Miraculously, we were back on the air the next day! The transmitter room was not burned but only suffered heat and smoke damage. The engineers replaced some wiring that was damaged by the heat and put us back on the air. We were very generously offered the use of a production studio by KSLQ, which was a Top 40 station based in Clayton.
We had to start from square one! We had nothing… no music, no commercials, nothing! The jocks brought in an assortment of greatest hits albums from their own collections and we just started playing music. It was odd not having any commercials or jingles or program logs or telephone contact with the audience. We just played music while the rest of the staff worked hard to re-construct our commercial schedule.
All our taped commercials were ruined in the fire. All our account executives and copy writers set about contacting what sponsors we could, explaining the situation to them, and asking if they would agree to live spots until we could get their recorded spots back on the air.
The traffic department schedules all the spots for each day and creates the program log, which tells the jocks what spots to play at what time. Soon we had a log, typed on plain white paper with a few spots each hour. The copywriters got to work and typed out live copy for each sponsor. The jocks would then do each break by reading what spots we had live.
One day early on, it struck me that we were broadcasting from a production studio. A production studio is where the station produces any recorded material to be used on the air later. Part of our normal duties at the station, in addition to our air-shifts, was the production of commercials. This could be as simple as dubbing a pre-recorded spot onto a tape cartridge, labeling it, and putting it in the studio. It could also mean starting from scratch, with nothing but a piece of copy (sometimes not even that!) and directions from the client. You would record and edit the spot yourself.
One day I decided to produce a spot on the air! It actually wasn’t that difficult. I “borrowed” a tape cartridge from KSLQ and put it in one of the “cart machines”. I cued up a piece of instrumental music on one of the turntables for the bed. Then, when I was ready to do the spot on the air, I hit “record” on the cart machine, started the music bed and read the live copy. It was no big deal I had done it a million times before. It was basically the same way I would have done it normally. It was a spot for a car dealership, if I recall correctly. Anyway, it was the first post-fire produced spot on KADI. I was surprised at the reaction. Everyone at KADI and even KSLQ was talking about how Radio Rich produced a spot live on the air!
I don’t recall how long we were in that studio, maybe a week or more. They leased space in an office building and set about making us an interim radio station. We scrounged for tape recorders, microphones, turntables, control boards… all the amazing array of stuff needed for a radio station. I had a VW bus at the time, and the program director, Peter E. Parisi, and I drove to Omaha to pick up a new board.
The interim studio was on Brentwood Blvd. across from the Brentwood Theatre. In the building was a Christian oriented business and you would have thought that the minions of Satan had moved in! They did not take kindly to long -haired, rock and roll persons, in “their” building. One day, I happened to notice that one of the so-called “Christians”, gave a vicious key job to the car door of one of our jocks. The next day the perpetrator discovered that the air from his tires had “gone missing”. He stormed angrily into our office and began telling us what a bunch of miscreants we were! His boss came in behind him to see what the hubbub was about. He told his boss what we had done and I was pleased to very calmly tell them that I had witnessed him scratching one of the jock’s car doors with a key and that it was a lot easier putting air back in flat tires than it was to fix a nasty scratch. Neither one of them offered to do anything about fixing the door. In 1973 there was still some animosity shown people simply because they had long hair.
Eventually, we moved into new studios in Clayton on Forsyth, across the street from Famous-Barr.
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