Thursday, August 30, 2018

Boston Man Killed by Fiedler Obituary...



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".








Tuesday, August 28, 2018

My Predawn Hours Up in the canyon...


I wake up too damn early, pre-dawn these days, 3:30 maybe 4. This morning it was 3:10. I got up took a pee, drank some juice and back to bed. I tried to read. I fell asleep, woke up again when my Kindle hit me in the nose, I laid there for awhile and finally got up at 10 to 4. Been up since. What time do I go to bed, you ask? Around 10:30.

What do I do when I get up in the pre-dawn hours? I read, I drink coffee, I talk to Anze the Dog. 






This morning I read a long article about Elon Musk and Tesla. The Tesla S is a hell of a car, in Europe it outsold the big Mercedes S Class, the BMW 7 Series and the other big money Lux-O-Boats, the base price is right at 70k, most go out the door for over 100 grand. The Tesla S out sells those cars in California, too. It's a status car, big time. Ah, but there are problems. Biggest owner complaint? Squeaks and rattles. Electric cars are quiet, no engine or drive train noise making everything else seem louder and more annoying, tire and road noise is amplified or as one owner put it, "Unless I have the sound system one, the car drives me crazy." Another problem, everything is run off the screen on the dash, even the damn door locks. The biggest problem? there no parts in the pipe line, one Tesla S has been sitting at the dealer waiting for a replacement hood for 14 months...as former Ford and Chrysler CEO Bob Lutz said, "Musk is finding out building cars isn't easy." And Lutz is a guy who firmly believes electric cars are the future. We won't even begin the discussion of Tesla production problems assembling their  new models...

On a more personal note

We are in the 2nd week of no construction on our house, it's been nice not having workers tramping around every f'ing day, Monday through Friday since the 1st of March, that's 6 god damned months. So far they've finished a retaining wall on the hill behind the house, a hill so steep they couldn't use machinery to dig the foundation. The hand dug the thing, 70 feet long and 6 feet high and had to haul all the concrete block, re-rod and by back breaking human labor. It took 3 months and it looks like shit.


Speaking of shit, the 2nd major project was the replacement of the septic system. We now have 2 new tanks and a mound system, all built to the new standards, 1250 galloons of tanks, and automatic pump to move the effluviant lup hill to the mound which is 75 yards away. It's an engineering miracle.



Sadly the crews will be back at it after labor day, next up, new porch railings on both levels. Why? They are out of code by 6 inches. Our skylights have to be replaced, two of them, because they are plastic and that's a no-no. Then we get a new roof...the list goes on and on and on.

We've lived for almost 4 years and never closed on the house, because it's is a code violation nightmare, all caused by the guy who lived her since '68 and thought he could beat the system by never filing for a building permit for anything, then he tried to sell it to us and the shit (there's that word again) hit the fan and the county threw the book at him and then threw it again. 




As the old song says, "bustin' rocks in the hot sun" since I'm up and have been close to 5 hours I'd better get to work. It's going to be a long, hard pull to get it to match the other side of the front damned lawn!


That house at the beach looks better everyday! If it wasn't so early, I'd make myself a martini, maybe two.