Ever been embarrassed by the company you work for? In the early part of 1985 I was flirting with a new career Building airplanes for Gulfstream Aerospace in Savannah, Georgia. In fact I was allowed by my radio job with the Rivers’ 900 AM Gospel outfit at least five weeks away from my regular afternoon DJ gig to train for a new job on the assembly line riveting school. While I was not in class I took on the mid-morning shift. For about 2 1/2 hours a day I babysat the station seeing that it was prime time for our bread an butter brokered preaching shows.
One weekend during this time our underwater studio to transmitter link was severed by, I was told, a submarine. All of a sudden dead air from both our AM and FM studios. Management decided to move air staff out to our transmitter on Hutchinson Island.
The 100,000 watt WEAS-FM had actual functioning studio equipment suitable for broadcasting out at the site. We at the AM on the other hand had nothing. I am not exaggerating, we literally had two Marantz Superscope portable cassette players with one patch cord attached directly to our audio processor. I would play one cassette on air and use the alternate player to cue the next tape. When one tape ended I had to manually switch the patch cord from one Superscope to the other. Not even a simple mixer or microphone was available. I was assigned to enter the production room facilities at our regular location following my evening training in Pooler to make mix tapes and dubs of reel-to-reel to play during the crisis. I guess these tapes were used for music and preaching when I was not on air. Thank God we were only a daytimer. This setup was all we had. The tapes sounded like crap. Cheap. Cheap.
This time of my life was pivotal for me. I was now ashamed of our highly unprofessional emergency station that sounded as if a 5 year old was using his Fisher Price tape player to broadcast Gospel preaching shows. Fortunately, a new line was dropped by the phone company and we were back to normal in less than a week. My passion for this low paying job began to wane. The station did not represent the brand quality I heard elsewhere in the market. I was not proud as I once was of the 5,000 watt station that employed me. My perception was forever changed.
I didn’t accept the job out at Gulfstream and returned full time to radio. As the months passed I slowly slipped into the old routine while extremely dissatisfied making the best of the situation. In those days all I ever looked forward to was change. Our hands were tied by sloppy ownership who seemed to neglect the AM at every turn. Keeping sales people was impossible. Had it not been for the preachers and our FM sister we’d have probably gone dark. The Gospel music or the PSA’s we played couldn’t have supported us. Bad decisions such as call letter change in October of ‘83 were contributing factors to the station’s eventual demise in 1987. Prior to the identity swap we had professional ID’s and jingle packages. As a youngster I felt these elements made a radio station sound pro even if the talent didn’t. No Investment was ever made in the new WWJD branding. An outsider from Arkansas hired as “Manager” invented the new call letters but stopped short by not injecting a new image listeners could relate to or advertising the station in other media. I was too young and inexperienced at the time so I took all these events as normal even though I knew our sound never measured up to other stations. We had potential without focus. I was emotionally driven lacking business knowledge I now take for granted. After the new guy failed in the wake of controversy we DJ’s were left by ownership to fend for ourselves with a tongue twister name and make up it as you go philosophy. I was as though we were mocking listeners saying, “Here we are, we were WEAS-AM, used to sound better, now listen anyway.”
For more information on this topic see “My First Station” on my companion blog, Radio Rewind at http://gospelaircheck.blogspot.com
Stay tuned.
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