On the way to my car, I noticed that Lee was walking with a limp. I didn't say anything about it or ask him why. We arrived at my new apartment, a small, but competent place over the Johnson City line into Carter County, which I had secured before I left on the previous trip. Upon opening the trailer, Lee grabbed my dresser, a heavy Ethan Allen full with drawers of clothes and began to hoist it up by himself. I said whoa,whoa...let me grab an end. Being the strong ox he was, he said, "No, I've got it" and walked it into my bedroom and set it down with little effort. I said well, dam, thanks...that's strong.
He replied that he had been a lot of places, but was still an Iowa farm boy. He added "You probably noticed the way I’m walking.."I was at an apartment in Williamsport, Pennsylvania sitting on the second story balcony, swigging a bottle of Jack Daniels when I fell over backwards into the parking lot. I broke my femur and they inserted a rod and since then, I've spent the past six months learning how to walk again. I worked for a guy named Dick there, it was a weird situation." I said, yeah, weird might make me drink too. I grabbed a couple of long necks from the fridge and we spent a couple of hours talking about where we had been, on what was going on with the station and what being at The New 99.3 would bring.
We discovered that we had worked at similarly formatted Top 40 stations in the Jacksonville metro at the same time. Lee held down the evening show on Y-103 as “The Hitman” while I did mornings on 101-Q as “Stockton in The Morning”. I told him I had been in the 103 studios and knew several jocks who worked there, Hal Jackson, Rick Williams, and Jackson Beach. I had seen the famous flashing red light that said “Y-LINES” when the request line rang above the totally restored vintage Gates control board with big rotary pots (pots are round knobs for controlling various sound elements fed into the board). Indeed, I had frequented the Atlantic Beach Boulevard studios and met up with Rick and Hal at Jacksonville Beach on many occasions when I was on Rock 95 across town.We all used to trade prank “request line” phone calls with disjointed song titles, asked for by listeners with “personality defects”.
Back at US-99, in the Program Director’s office, Lee took a phone call where I heard his side of the conversation “Hale, where are you? No, no, that’s the wrong hotel. I don’t care if your wife likes it there. The company doesn’t have a deal with that one..they’re not going to pay the bill. Pack your stuff back in the suitcase and go over to the Fairfield.” Lee hung up the phone, rolled his eyes and said that was our Midday guy, Hale Loman and his charming wife from Indiana. Lee changed the subject said “Deb’s at the house preparing dinner, why don’t you stop by for some genuine Iowa home cooking tonight?” I told him I’d be happy to accept the invitation.
I found Lee’s townhouse on the north side of Johnson City and parked at his front door. He popped out on cue and we stood on the sidewalk admiring the dramatic mountain range sunset view. It was an inspiring scene with red September skies hugging a jagged range of East Tennessee terrain. Lee recalled that when he first visited the complex, he knew it was exactly where he wanted to live.
Inside, Deb had prepared a smorgasbord, fit for royalty, arranged on a long counter. Roasting pans contained beef roast, chicken and ham with cloves. Casserole dishes were filled with homemade mashed potatoes, French cut beans, creamed corn, pearl onions, stewed tomatoes. Croissant dinner rolls lay protected beneath a red and white cloth. A prodigious tossed salad bowl, sat, adorned with an array of dressing choices. There was organic applesauce with cinnamon sprinkled on top. I spied the cranberry sauce that contained discernible cranberries. Warming in the oven, were homemade pies of cherry and apple with criss-cross patterns on top. I said “this is impressive. Are you expecting someone else?” Lee chuckled, “no, just you tonight. When Deb gets started, there’s no stopping her. She likes to cook!”
We enjoyed a fun night of food, laughter and conversation in a new town we all commonly shared. The prospects were bright and success seemed imminent in my new situation. At home,on my first night in my new apartment, I laid awake and exhaled for the first time in a long time. The job search was over, the move was a done deal.
The New 99.3 was an Adult Contemporary formatted radio station with a mix of 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s music with current “Adult Hits”, very close to Magic 98.3. The target demographic was the female audience between the ages of 25 and 54. The ground zero profile was a 35 year old woman, married with 2 children and a husband. She was employed full time, went to church regularly and ate meals out with her family between the hours of 5 and 7 twice a week.
From the time I started radio broadcasting in the 70’s to the current date, audience research became increasingly scientific. No longer would broadcast professionals be called on for their programming talent and instinct. A gut feeling of what was best was no longer acceptable. The numbers and information was all in black and white. The day of the bean counters had arrived in what was once a free-wheeling business. It used to be that if you didn’t know what to do, an Eight Ball was a good programming tool.
Arbitron ratings were king. Random listeners in a given broadcast market were given "Diaries" to record their listening habits over the period of a week. They were then instructed to send their diary back to Arbitron. When collected, the diaries became the scientific information that media ratings are made of. On occasion, radio programmers were invited to company headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland to view actual rating diaries that rated their stations. Most said it was a sobering experience to see how this company used what could be characterized in some instances as chicken scratch entries on the diaries to rule their fate.
This Adult format was new to Evan. He had managed mostly Country or Oldies type stations in the past and was determined to get this one right. He hired an outside consultant who would handle the research and music.
In the Tri Cities market, WXBQ, The Rabbit Station was, and still is the behemoth country formatted station. Their ratings are among the highest in the format for the entire country. There are stations with more listeners in larger markets, but WXBQ has a phenomenally high share of available listeners in town. Every time a rating report came out, they were on top. Way on top. While the number two station had an 8, 9 or 10 share rating, for total audience share (age 12 plus), WXBQ was at a 28 or 29 share. The saying was that the market was comprised of WXBQ, then everybody else.
The Rabbit Station just celebrated their 80th number one ratings period, led the whole time by Operations Manager, Bill Hagy. Bill is a brilliant programmer and being number one 80 times in a row is a significant accomplishment. That's a lot of years at number one. Also there for the entire time, Midday Personality Reggie Neel has held court in that daytime slot since 1980. Reggie is one of the finest human beings I have ever known.
Owner and General Manager, Pete Nininger was a wealthy man with a hobby of thoroughbred horses. The number two station was either WTFM, an Adult Contemporary or WQUT,a Rock Station. US-99 was down the list. There wasn't a chance against The Rabbit Station. It wasn’t a bad sounding station, it’s just that Country audiences, as a rule,are very loyal and don’t usually tune away from their station. This rule was on steroids in the Tri Cities. A change for US was necessary. Maybe WTFM would be more vulnerable.
On day three, Evan gathered everyone and gave us a reading assignment. Since our core audience was going to be women, the book was “Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus”. Then the painters came in and started painting all the walls in the interior of the building pink. I was glad he spared the men’s restroom from the list of pink walls. Paintings of flower arrangements adorned the walls. It began to feel like a fancy day spa instead of a radio station with grizzled men of experience. I told Lee, next he’s going to hand out high heels for us to wear and we were going to start walking around in drag. Evan’s reasoning was that we, as men, were going to understand women, how to relate to them..how…to broadcast to them. He was leaving no rock un-turned and we were going directly after WTFM’s audience..and by golly, we were going to win. There was no other option.
The new Midday guy, Hale Loman was part of the group meeting and seemed like an introspective guy of few words. He was of medium build, clean shaven with neatly trimmed hair, hiding beneath a Feed and Seed Store ball cap. Hale was from Indiana and had spent his whole life there. He went on the air right after the meeting and Lee and I retreated to the Programming Office at the end of the building to work on some details related to the impending format change. Lee turned up the volume on Hale’s first talk break and said “listen to that perfect Midwest tone.” Hale sounded friendly and well suited for the country format. Earl would be the bull in the china shop at 3.
On Friday of that week, in retrospect, it became the day of the first point of friction between Evan and Lee. Lee suddenly had to have throat surgery to remove some sort of “nodule growths.” Evan, being the type A personality he was, just about had a cow when he got the news. Lee would not be able to speak above a whisper and would be off the air for nearly two weeks. The launch of the new station was scheduled for Monday, at 6 am. Robert would have to fill the morning show until Lee could get back on the air. Evan had billboards going up, newspaper ads and a host of promotional placements with the new line-up that had been planned for weeks. I watched him pace around the building with a bright red complexion. It looked like veins were popping out on his neck and the sides of his face. I thought he was going to expire right in front of me. I stayed way out of the situation, and prepared to take off my Earl McCoy suit and return to the format I had done for twelve years..and win.
Lee’s surgery was successful and he returned to the station with the new format in place. I was enjoying my new found time slot. The Scott Systems took a little getting used to. All the songs, commercials and sound elements were on a touch computer screen that scrolled down as it played. It was cutting edge technology for 1994. I didn’t have to handle any CD’s, commercial tapes or anything. ALL I had was a keyboard and a computer monitor. The song sets segued by themselves. I didn’t have to touch anything, just open the mic and talk when I was supposed to. Everything still ran through a traditional control board with a traditional microphone.
There was an adjacent desktop-type vertical case with a daisy chain of ten hard drives strung together for a whopping total of 10 gigabytes, which was massive in 1994. Today, I could put that whole station on my laptop with well over 300 gigabytes to spare. The beauty of this system was that you could record and upload voice parts to create the most real sounding live show to date. This is how we planned to use Johnny Dark’s talent in the evenings. Broadcast automation systems had been around for years, but they were as large as an old mainframe computer and prone to mechanical failure. There were large tape carousels that jammed, large reels of tape could run out if you didn’t change them. These systems needed constant attention and were an engineer’s nightmare. A fully computerized system could conceivably run perpetually.
We were all on the air as we should have been two weeks earlier and the station started to hum. Evan lightened up as good news and sales accounts started to pour in. About this time, Lee was developing a real “us and them” mentality. He wanted the air-staff together on everything. His characterization of the management portrayed them as the opposition, the enemy, not to be trusted. It’s not a totally foreign concept in radio as evidenced by my immediate prior experience. But something just didn’t seem right.
One day, late in September, Lee called me into his office and closed the door. He tensed up and he said things weren’t working out with me and they were going to let me go. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was in shock. My heart skipped a beat. He leaned back in his chair and knocked on the wall with a strained look on his face. Then, the door flew open and everyone barged in with a birthday cake, complete with lit candles! Got me! I blew out the candles and they sang happy birthday. I almost thought it would be my worst birthday. Lee said “you should have seen his face.” Everybody laughed and it turned out to be a good time.
By this time, I had been a dinner guest at Lee’s, at his insistence on a regular basis. He had Hale and his wife Peggy over as much as I was there. Peggy was compact in stature sporting shoulder length dirty blond hair with a natural wave. Her blue eyes were placed behind gold rimmed glasses. Lee would even call Johnny, our prestigious night guy on the phone and include him in the gathering too. Often, he put me on to talk with Johnny and he’d say, have they moved you in yet? Every time I call, you’re there. Deb cooked consistently great meals and I began to feel my pants getting tight around the waist.
Lee’s idea of an assignment was to have us all over for movie night and show “FM” starring Martin Mull. Hale was always quiet. His wife did all the talking. She would go on and on speaking for Hale constantly. It seemed like anyone could wind her up, and let her go! She always stood and was animated while making her point. She reminded me of some people I knew in Jersey, not an Indianan.
One day, as I was scanning the Johnson City Press newspaper, I noticed that they had our station still listed as Country with the old call letters. So I called the paper and asked to speak to their Features Editor. With the editor on the line, I brought her attention to the error, and quite casually mentioned that the format change had brought a lot of attention to the station with our new line-up of Personalities, including Johnny Dark from NBC fame in New York. I shared with her that the phones were ringing off the hook with new advertisers and listeners...and that if she wanted, she could send a reporter and a photographer over to get the story.
Coincidentally, the next day, Johnny Dark, our night guy, came into town on vacation from Miami and walked into the building followed by a reporter from the paper with a photographer in tow. Lee greeted Johnny and said “what, did you bring your publicist with you?” I greeted the newspaper reporter and showed her into Evan’s office. She interviewed almost all of us and the photographer gathered us in the control room near the on air board and took a series of photos. Before the shooting started Lee leaned over and whispered in Hale’s ear to take his Feed and Seed cap off. Johnny said this is some timing…who arranged this? Lee pointed to me and added “he makes things happen.” I just smiled like the Cheshire cat and nodded.
The Sunday paper came out and the glowing article on us was a full page story on the front of the Features Section with a large third page sized photo of us smiling in the control room with Johnny pointing to the computer screen. From that point on, everyone thought that Johnny was live, on air, every night in Johnson City, Tennessee. I didn't know it at the time, but that was the high point of the “Lee” era at The New 99.3.
Part 4 next
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