Tracking Helaine

I am looking forward to seeing her, but not her reaction to the snow she’ll be seeing!

I’m on FlightAware tracking Helaine’s flight across the country. She’s just left Colorado and now over Kansas.

This is how Thomas Jefferson followed Lewis and Clark, right?

I am looking forward to seeing her, but not her reaction to the snow she’ll be seeing!

Lewis & Clark

What an amazing story! This was the America of Thomas Jefferson. Two thirds of all Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic.

lewis-clark-dvd.jpgLast night, after Helaine had gone to bed and with Stef upstairs watching some form of modern day reality, I sat on the couch looking for something to do. Netflix was fresh on my mind because earlier Helaine and I had blown through a Garry Shandling DVD. I loaded a browser and began to check its online listings.

Old topic, but Netflix ability to stream video to my PC is great. I’m even willing to look beyond the incompatibility with Firefox and terrible search interface. It’s marketed (when it’s marketed) as an adjunct to the DVD service, but it’s really no different that buying a premium channel like HBO or Showtime, except the selection sucks. For that reason alone, no one in their right mind would buy this as a standalone package.

After searching for a few minutes, I came upon a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark. It looked interesting, so I fired it up. What began to stream was a two part doc, narrated by Hal Holbrook and produced by Ken Burns.

What an amazing story! This was the America of Thomas Jefferson. Two thirds of all Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic.

keelboat_s.jpgOnce Lewis & Clark headed west on the Missouri River, they were fading into an unknown void. Simple things, like the stark magnitude of the Great Plains must have been as overwhelming as they were unanticipated. The year round snow caps of the Rockies were unlike anything any of the expedition’s members had ever seen before. How could they not be frightened or discouraged or both.

For a large part of the trip food was plentiful. By and large, the Native American tribes were friendly and helpful, trading for and sometimes freely providing, provisions. But, the expedition was heading upstream, fighting the current with nothing more than their muscle and sporadic wind.

Are there still trips of exploration to be taken? With every passing day I am more enticed by the prospect of exploring. But this is different than anything I could do today. Lewis & Clark were heading beyond the knowledge of white men. The astronauts on the Moon knew more of what to expect than Lewis, Clark and their expeditionary force.

I was puzzled by the use of photographs to illustrate people and places. The first photographs weren’t taken for a few decades after Lewis & Clark. Even then, cameras weren’t easily transportable. Did these shots represent what was in the narration, or were they just reasonably close analogs? What are the specifics of the shots Burns used and why those particular photos?

I wanted to ask but his production company, Florentine Films, claims they don’t have an email address. OK, they don’t have an email address for me – I get it.

That Lewis & Clark traveled all the way to the Pacific while keeping detailed drawings, charts and journals and then returned to tell their story, was an incredible achievement. Actually, it was the least likely outcome of their journey, which presented them with more peril and challenge than they could have anticipated.

Just one man died along the way. It is likely his death was from appendicitis and unrelated to the challenge. He wouldn’t have fared any better had he been near an early 19th Century hospital.

The full documentary ran 3:30. That’s quite a commitment. In retrospect it was well worth while.

Truth In Television

Steffie came home a while ago from a busy Saturday night. I was downstairs in the family room watching TV and invited her to join me.

“Whatever you want to watch,” I said.

C-Span was on at the time. Some guy was answering questions as Thomas Jefferson. I wanted to show I valued her company.

“Cops, Jerry Springer, The Hills. Your choice.”

It’s nice to have her around. Steffie’s killer this summer.

We watched some ‘fine’ MTV reality and Kathy Griffin’s “D List.” Steffie was biding her time. She wanted to watch “Finders Keepers” on Nickelodeon Games and Sports. It was a game show she watched in reruns when she was a little girl – produced when she was one year old!

It was a hoot because it was awful.

We watched for a few minutes and then, as two members of the Blue Team were looking for a cheese sandwich, it happened. A hand, which was supposed to be off camera, actually pointed the contestants to the cheese sandwich. We couldn’t believe our eyes!

Our DVR records all shows, even ‘live’ TV. I rewound. It was there, a hand, briefly, and a finger pointing to the sandwich.

Finders Keepers was fixed!

Steffie says she’s crushed. I am personally offering to find an attorney for the Red Team. They were jobbed. Can I ever look Sponge Bob in the eyes again?

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.