45 Years Ago Today When The Power Went Out!

By the time the back was off the set the lights had dimmed and then – poof – they were gone.

Oops! After publishing this entry Ed Stannard of the New Haven Register noticed it was a day off. Damn you smart print guys!

All the facts are correct except the blackout was Tuesday November 9, 1965, not the 10th. My apologies for the error and gratitude to Ed.

I have changed the entry to correct the error.

I remember exactly where I was 45 years ago yesterday. I was 15 years old in 1965 and in the living room of our tiny apartment in Queens watching TV. It was a Tuesday, but for some reason my father was home.

All of a sudden for no apparent reason the TV picture began to shrink. I called my father over. Voltage regulator we guessed.

We then did what any 1960s father and son would have done–we pulled off the back of the set to check the tubes&#185.

By the time we’d exposed the TV’s innards the lights had dimmed and then – poof – they were gone.

An improperly set circuit breaker at a power station near Niagara Falls took down much of the Northeast! We didn’t know it at the time but nearly all of New York City, New York State and New England had gone dark!

This part of the world was thrust into chaos, yet order was maintained. In fact the biggest takeaway from the blackout was how nice everyone was! There was little crime and lots of helping hands. However, in that pre-cell, pre-Internet era there was plenty of confusion.

Here’s an aircheck from WABC-AM’s Dan Ingram as the power slowly drifted away. He had no idea then his voice would be the most vivid memory of the onset of the Great Northeast Power Blackout!

Addendum: After posting this I got a nice message on Facebook from Ilene Treitler Chalupski who was just Ilene Treitler when she was my next door neighbor in 1965 (She apartment 5D. We apartment 5E).

My father came home and YELLED at us because when he walked in and we were playing with the Horizontal and Vertical controls (Outer Limits stuff!) and he told us NEVER to touch those knobs. Then when he couldn’t make the tv picture stop rolling, he knocked on your parents’ door Geoff, i clearly remember it, and when your mother opened the door, your father had the television away from the wall and was trying to make the picture stop rolling, and within a few seconds the place went black!

&#185 – There were tube testers nearly everywhere including the local drugstore.

They Fired Joey Reynolds

Whereas most radio stations and disk jockeys had jingles cut in Dallas by Pams or TM (or now by my friend Jon Wolfert at Jam) Joey had a jingle sung by the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons!

Word came last night WOR radio let Joey Reynolds go. I can’t help but feel bad because Joey is one of the reasons radio attracted me so much and why I made it my career for 11 years. Though I lived in Queens and had both WMCA and WABC at my beck and call I gravitated to WKBW in Buffalo, a station I could only hear after dark.

Joey was having a party in the studio and I was invited night-after-night. As good as Dan Ingram, Cousin Brucie and Gary Stevens were they were never as approachable as Joey seemed. I sent my self addressed stamped envelope off to Buffalo to get my purple membership card in the Royal Order of the Night People. I wanted in!

I remember hearing about Joey at other stations as his career bounced up-and-down after ‘KB. At one point he was selling jingles (or so I remember) made to be sung over the intro to records. There are some songs I can’t hear today without hearing some now defunct station’s call letters sung over the front!

A few years ago Joey went to WOR New York where he held down the free form all-night talk show. He’s still that party guy I remember with an infectious laugh that’s instantly recognizable.

Even in the best of times you don’t make money keeping a radio station on-the-air 24/7. Nowadays all-nights are a liability in an otherwise awful economic time for radio. Joey was replaced by a syndicated show–one host for scores of stations across the entire country.

Among the things I remember most about Joey is a jingle from his show. Whereas most radio stations and disk jockeys had jingles cut in Dallas by Pams or TM (or now by my friend Jon Wolfert at Jam) Joey had a jingle sung by the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons!

I’ll bet you I haven’t heard this in 40+ years–until now.

[pro-player height=”30px” type=”MP3″]https://www.geofffox.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/joey_reynolds.mp3[/pro-player]

Local Radio Is Dead And I Am Sad

Radio isn’t fun any more. Radio doesn’t have larger than life personalities any more. And, rapidly, radio isn’t local any more.

When I was a kid I loved radio–listened to it intently. I wanted to be on radio and once college told me I was through being educated radio is just what I did.

Radio was everything I expected it to be and I loved it. Sure I fought with my bosses (Peter–I’m talking about you among others) and even got myself fired a few times, but radio was satisfying.

Doing mornings at WPEN is probably my all-time favorite job. I was given reasonably free rein and had a great time. I’d do it a little differently today, but I have no regrets.

I fell in love with radio because of the people I listened to on radio. They were smart, often witty and funny. I listened to Brucie and Dan Ingram on WABC and Gary Stevens on WMCA. Jean Shepard talked to himself for 45 minutes a night on WOR and I never missed him.

My favorite station was WKBW in Buffalo. I couldn’t hear it until the Sun set. I was a member of Joey Reynold’s “Royal Order of the Night People” and listened to Danny Nevereth, Bud Ballou and Sandy Beach. Rod Roddy, who later became the announcer on “The Price is Right” did overnights on KB–and I listened.

Radio was full service back then. Even stations ‘for kids’ had hourly newscasts. It was tough to be an uninformed teen. That’s much easier today.

Radio isn’t fun to listen to any more. Radio doesn’t have larger than life personalities any more. Radio isn’t local any more. What was local is evaporating rapidly.

The radio stations I listened to created a community. There is no more community. I can’t see anyone loving radio the way I loved radio… the way some of my friends loved radio. There is little to love.

Today Clear Channel Communications announced they were cutting another 600 jobs. They cut nearly 2,000 back in January. Local people are being hatcheted and replaced with nationally syndicated shows. Local people used to talk about local things in the time slots now devoted to Ryan Seacrest, Billy Bush, John Tesh and Rush Limbaugh.

R&R has a list of some of those let go. It’s sad to see. Lots of 10 and 20 years veterans. Lots of people whose shows were getting good numbers.

Helaine often says when TV is through with me maybe I should go back into radio. I don’t think there will be any radio left.

I am saddened.

Radio Is In My Blood

I am not really in television – it’s more radio with pictures. Radio was always my first love. As a kid, I knew I’d go into radio (and I did). TV was an afterthought. Other than the actual skill of forecasting the weather, there’s nothing I do on TV that I didn’t do on radio first.

This is going to make me sound old.

I went to high school in the same building that housed the New York City Board of Education’s radio station. We were FM back when no one listened to FM. That was mainly because no one owned an FM radio!

WNYE-FM had an eclectic mix of educational programs. It’s tough to visualize today, but teachers in NYC would bring clunky Granco FM radios into their classrooms so the students could listen to, “Let’s Look at the News” or “Young Heroes.” There’s little in the way of TV today that’s equivalent.

Looking for a way to get out of conventional English classes, I became a radio actor for English class credit. I was cast in dozens and dozens of morality plays and historical recreations. I was young Orville Wright, Thomas Jefferson, Jackie Robinson (in that less politically correct time) and lots of kids named Billy.

In the morality plays, I often had lines like, “If I ride my bike over the hill, mom will never know.” By the second act, my arm was in a cast and I was sorry. In these shows, no transgression went unpunished.

All through high school, I listened to radio – listening to the disk jockeys more than the music. The disk jockeys were cool and hip and in control. They talked back to the boss with impunity, or so it seemed to me. They were quick and witty and sarcastic. I wanted to be a disk jockey.

Though I grew up in New York City, my favorite radio station was WKBW in Buffalo. You could only hear “KB” from dusk ’til dawn, but it boomed in like a local at our apartment in Queens.

The nighttime jocks on “KB” were unbelievable. Over time, there were Joey Reynolds, Bud Ballou, Jack Armstrong and others. KB Pulse Beat news with Irv Weinstein, who I’d later know personally, was a tabloid newscast, back when rock stations had to have newscasts.

This is not to say I didn’t listen to WABC in NYC, because I did. There’s little doubt that Dan Ingram is the best disk jockey to ever point a finger at a board operator. He was all the things that the “KB” guys were, but he operated within the more heavily produced WABC universe. At WABC there was a jingle for everything except going to the bathroom… and maybe there was a jingle for that too.

Back on track… must get back on track… where is this going?

In college, I knew I wanted to be like them. I wasn’t as cool as they were. I certainly didn’t have ‘pipes’ (the euphemism for a deep, throaty voice). Still, I wanted to be on the air.

At home, or in the car, I’d practice ‘talking up records.’ That means talking over the instrumental bridge that opens songs before the singing begins, and stopping on a dime, effortlessly, as the singing began. That’s called “hitting vocal,” and I was very good at that.

I started in radio at WSAR in Fall River, MA. I was part time, making $2.50 an hour. Before long, the company I was working for, Knight Quality Stations (some of which weren’t on at night, and none of which had quality), sent me to Florida to be program director at WMUM, aka – “Mother.” I was still making $2.50 an hour or $130 for a 6 day, 48 hour week.

WMUM was an “underground station.” Again, it’s a concept tough to understand today. We played everything without resorting to a playlist. It was some sort of misguided Utopian programming concept that never really took hold anywhere for long. But in 1969, at age 19, “Mother” was an unreal place to be.

We were hip and cool and broadcast from a building located adjacent to the parking lot for Lake Worth, Florida’s beach. From our studio, through the soundproof glass, you could watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean. The beach was always filled with girls in bathing suits.

“Mother” didn’t hold its allure for long. Within 18 months, I had moved on to our sister AM station and then two other stations in the West Palm Beach market.

At age 21, I went to Charlotte, NC. There I did nights on a station that truly was heard from Canada to Florida. During my tenure, we even got mail from Cuba and Scandinavia. WBT was a classic radio station with good facilities, excellent promotion and nurturing management. I didn’t know how good I had it until I left.

I became a radio gypsy, moving to Cleveland and Phoenix and finally Philadelphia. I moved enough to qualify for the U-Haul Gold Card. I worked nights at WPEN in Philadelphia for a few years before moving to mornings.

We were a good AM station, playing oldies, at about the time music on AM was dying… rapidly.

I think I was pretty good at WPEN. If you’ll remember that this aircheck is over 25 years old, and I was more than 25 years younger than I am now, you can listen to it by clicking here. I really enjoyed what I was doing.

After a while we could see things weren’t going well in the ratings. A new program director was brought in to change things. Brandon Brooks, my friend and newsman on the show, came to me. Things were going to change but, “Don’t worry Geoff. They can’t fire you.”

I was gone within two hours.

My radio career never got back to that place. I continued to work, but it wasn’t the same. I finally ended up at WIFI, a top-40 FM station where I constantly worried that I, personally, was leading to the degradation of youth and society.

The scene played over and over again as I answered the hitline. I’d say, “Hello, WIFI.” On the other end, a young voice would respond, “Play, ‘We Don’t Need No Education.'” To me, it was like screeching chalk on a blackboard.

WIFI was my last stop before getting into TV. Still I miss radio nearly each and every day.

This is not to say I want to leave TV. I don’t. But, I do have this fantasy where I do radio in the morning and TV in the evening. That’s why, whenever someone from radio calls and asks me to fill-in or come on the air, I jump at the chance. It’s really an involuntary response.

It’s still in my blood.

The reason I’m writing all of this is because of someone I saw today at a charity event. I was helping present a check and toys to support shelters for abused women at the Verizon Wireless store in North Haven. A man walked up to me and said hello. It was Pete Salant.

I know Pete, though not that well. My sense is, Pete could go one-on-one with me with any bit of radio minutiae. It runs through his blood as well. In fact, with him broadcasting is an inbred thing, as his dad&#185 was a giant when CBS was the “Tiffany Network.”

Pete was known mostly as a radio programmer – and a damned good one. It’s probable, though I really don’t remember anymore, that within Pete’s career, he turned me down for a job… maybe more than once. I know he ran places where I wanted to work. Today, he creates commercials for radio station that run on TV.

It was good to see him. It’s always good to think about radio.

&#185 Pete tells me it was actually his cousin… and not a very close one… who was with CBS: “Dick Salant was my cousin twice-removed (grandfather’s first cousin), not my dad.” I’m going to leave the original posting as is, because I want to try and keep this blog as a contemporaneous record, but add the correction here.