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".