I spent 47 years in the radio business, most of it when radio was fun, the
last 10 or so sucked, mainly because the bankers discovered how good the cash
flow used to be.
Here's the reason radio was so fun, the people were creative and for the most part funny as hell. Here's a couple of funny radio stories....
I had a guy on staff at WVBF in Boston. He was funny on the air and funny
in the halls too. Women really liked him, so much so they would tolerate things
coming out of his mouth that would get most guys slapped or kicked in the nuts.
One day we had a cold cut lunch at the station, free food was always a hit.
In addition to all the meats, veggies and cheeses, there were about 5 different
kinds of bread included baguettes.
After everyone had drifted back to their desks, the funny guy, grabbed one
of the remaining baguettes, unzipped his pants and let the baguette hang out
like it was his, ah you know what I mean.
He wandered down the hall and our National Sales Manager is coming from the
other direction. He's grinning at her and she says with a smile, "Pretty
nasty yeast infection, Tom."
In the summer of 1979, I was the Program Director of WHDH in Boston. Arthur
Fiedler the world famous conductor of the Boston Pops was near death. Jim
Sands, Ed Bell and I began to prepare an audio obituary in advance, we wrote
it, Jim produced it, Donna Halper dug up interviews and music to add to the
obit. We had it ready and all we would need to do is write the latest details
and get it on the air. Arthur Fiedler was an institution in Boston and we
worked our asses off on it. If I remember correctly, when it was all said and
done we won a couple of awards for the production.
We decided it was going to be an hour long, no commercials. We had 50
minutes completed in advance. It was really good. Sands carefully recorded the
master on a 12 inch reel of tape, boxed it and put it on the bookcase in his
office. Fiedler lingered for weeks.
On hot summer day, it was stuffy as hell in the station, Jim opened his
window and used the obit to prop it up. We were on the 9th floor of the old new
England Power Building at the time, just off Copley Square on Stuart Street.
Sands somehow knocked the obit out of the window. Out it went, those old reels
were made of metal, the tape was heavy too. The entire package weighed between
3 and 4 pounds. The obituary just missed a guy walking down Stuart, it bounced
in the air, over a parked car and landed in the middle of the street. Sands ran
out of his office, down the hall and into the elevator. He dodged cars and
rescued the obit from the left hand lane of Stuart. When he came back to the
studios, he said, "The fucking thing just missed the guy by inches! It
would have killed him for chrissakes!"The reel was banged up pretty good.
Sands straighted it and ran the tape onto another reel. It lived to make the
air a few days later.
Eddie Bell, Jim Sands and I went over to the Oak Room at the Copley for a
drink after work. We were sitting there and Bell, ever the newsman said,
"Imagine the headline in the Globe, "Boston Man, killed by Fiedler
Obituary".
