The location; Route 6 Plaza, just east of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The year; 1973.
The radio station; WHPA, The Friendly 1590. Later renamed WDNH, honoring Honesdale's being the once headwaters of the D&H Canal.
The cast of characters, l. to r.; Dave Fuhr (aka Dave London and other aliases), Scott Perkins, and the blogger.
One thing you can never accuse me of is concealing embarrassing photos of myself. Good Lord, how about that beard? Big, shrubby, bushy, it looks like something you'd pay a landscaper to yank out of your yard and haul away in a pick-up. It was the times, man, the times.
Our "remote studio" seems almost black in that photo, while my recollection is that it was red. It was also a piece of junk. Without benefit of any digital manipulation, that little camper doesn't look half bad. Believe me, it was bad, really bad.
It's not all that tough for me to say that just could have been the best summer of my life. A few others might be up there with it, but in terms of fun, excitement, life-alteration, path-choosing, and long-lasting friendships, it was one hell of a summer.
A few months earlier, it was actually during Holy Week, WHPA had called me. Seems they had this job and thought maybe there might be some interest on my part. Some interest? That's like saying the Blizzard of '93 brought some snow.
The quick backgrounder is that I'd wanted to be on the radio for a long time. Not that I thought I had what it took, but it was a dream nevertheless. Then The American Academy of Broadcasting opened a "campus" in Wilkes-Barre. The "campus" was roughly three rooms in an office building, one of which was an ill-equipped studio. If first impressions are accurate, The American Academy of Broadcasting's newest campus was seriously lame. I attended anyway.
What I Learned in Broadcasting School...
Well, not a whole lot, really. About the only thing I took away from the six-month course was this, "If you get into radio, expect to get fired for no apparent reason at least once." That was it. Surely wise words, yet for the money spent, the nights driving to Wilkes-Barre, then sitting bleary eyed through class after having worked and been in other classes all day, you might think there was more to be had. There was.
The most important thing came a month or two after completing the course. The American Academy of Broadcasting got me my first job in radio.
WHPA was on the phone because American Academy had given them my name. They'd called looking to make a hire for this station in Honesdale. What they had to offer was clearly that first foot through the golden door leading to the magical world of broadcasting. I wanted in bad. They let me in. It's a good thing WHPA's pockets were full of opportunity, since there was little else to put before any prospective employee.
It mattered not at all that WHPA was on the third floor of The Reif Building on Main, upstairs over Liljes(pronounced LIE-leez) Shoe Store in a town of rougly 4,500 souls. Heck, it was radio, nothing else mattered or counted. We were on the radio. All a bunch of young guys, mostly very early 20s, all cutting our teeth, all pretty damned bad on the air, and all having a blast. (Adrian In The Morning was the one among us who had any experience, so he gets a pass on being bad. He was in fact, quite good.)
What Happened at WHPA...
Honesdale was then a cow town in the truest and most flattering sense of the world. I've long had a thing for small towns, and Honesdale epitomized the American small town. There were two tractor/farm equipment dealers right there on the south end of Main Street. While they didn't roll up the sidewalks at night, getting stuck in traffic behind a haywagon or manure-spreader was common enough as to not prompt a second thought. It was still a Mayberry-esque place of neat and tidy homes with fine green lawns, a small courthouse square with a fountain, and a main street whereupon darned near all commerce in Wayne County was centered. Anyone now at all familiar with Honesdale knows that it has dramatically changed. Dramatic doesn't always mean better. My jury is still out.
While forgetting a lot from those days, these are a few of the highlights from that year and a half at WHPA.
We could start with that nifty remote unit pictured above. Hell if it didn't take a nice picture.
Nothing in it, nothing on it worked, N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Turntables - didn't work. Board - didn't work. PA system so you could actually "hear it live" - didn't work. Air conditioning - didn't work. The microphone you see me holding in the picture - didn't work. Whether anything in it ever had worked was an unknown. Worse yet by a mile was the fact that this circa 50s ex-camper was unroadworthy. We'd pull it using an abused and barely running Olds with a shot suspension, which was the official and only station vehicle. Both puller and pullee were literally uncontrollable, both were all over the road, shoulder to shoulder, on even the slowest and shortest of trips. Scott Perkins and I once took it to Hawley(he drove, I covered his rear flank by using my own car to keep distance between "it" and any unsuspecting motorist.) I recall us both being shaken by the experience.
The Wayne County Fair was the epicenter of summertime fun...if you didn't work for WHPA. Working for WHPA meant living at the fairgrounds about all of the first week of August. It meant sitting in that camper, wilting for hours and hours and hours. Drenched, soaking wet with sweat, we'd "interview" sponsors who'd gag up the money to be heard live from the fair. On occasional breaks, we'd wander down to the cow barn, where conditions were better. To this day, the very mention of the fair sends a fleeting yet very real wave of fear over me.
The control room board was brand spanking new, mostly because the original had caught fire one too many times. The "original" had to have then been at least 25 years old, and it looked every hour of its age. To the left of the board, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, used mostly to air the Penn State Cooperative Extension reports, a mainstay of agri-minded radio in our state's small towns. This tape machine was prone to hiss, sputter, and hack, but could be coaxed back to normalcy with a sharp whack, either alongside the machine or directly on top of it. You couldn't count the dents in this thing. Like so many other pieces of equipment, this junker was ready for the scrap pile long before they brought it up the stairs and into the station.
We had two reliable cart machines, with the word "reliable" being used in the most relative of senses. Both made a loud kuhhh-THWOCK when you hit the start button, necessitating all jocks develop a special skill for turning off the microphone in about a half-second, that half-second before starting the cart would eliminate anyone listening from thinking, "What in the hell is that noise?" Not that our audio was sophisticated enough for the average listener to discern nuances of any kind. See, our control room microphone was a model that under ideal circumstances might have been one step up from Mister Microphone...then again, maybe not even. Our pop cover was a scrap piece of yellow foam that was held on the microphone by a rubber band.
"Hey, did you see the temperature?" Why? Is it missing? Money was so tight that WHPA was unable to afford a thermometer, even the cheapest hardware-store type you could hammer into the outside of the control room windowsill. All employees, it was decreed and declared, must pause on the sidewalk before entering the building, take a hard glance to the right, thereby seeing and memorizing what the Honesdale Dime Bank's time and temp display had to offer. Then, immediately upon making it up the two flights of stairs to the station, report to the control room and deliver the current temperature. So help me God, that is how we did it. I can all but swear that never once did I give a temp in my year and a half there, because I knew it wasn't accurate.
We had this newsroom, it was adjacent to the main studio. I use the terms both newsroom and main studio with great latitude. The place was God-awful. However, the aforementioned Adrian busted his hump trying to give us jocks something that approximated a real radio station. The man fought an unwinnable battle. Adrian rounded up scraps of wood and paneling and set about cobbling together a "podium" of sorts from which to deliver a news cast. Hammering, pounding, shoving, bending, a driving a few old nails into what still looked like a pile of scrap wood and paneling, there it was attached to the wall. He'd also attached an old and creaky boom for a huge ribbon microphone in the same tentative manner right there in front of the "podium." We had a sports guy, Bob Shilling, a part-timer. Bob was then, oh, in his late 40s/early 50s. Great guy. Bob could get a little animated while doing sports. One afternoon, Bob's animation managed to cause his arm to brush or swipe the microphone boom while he was live on the air. In turn, the boom tore loose from its weak moorings, thereupon crashing down into the Adrian-Crafted podium. From there, the now tangled entire mess crashed to the floor. So did I. I think I may have peed myself then, and I'm coming pretty close to it right now just thinking about it.
Bathroom Duty. Maybe that should be "doodie" or "doo-doo." Somewhere during those very early days, staff was informed that we would all take on the added responsibilities of housekeeping. Yes, we would empty waste baskets, dust, tidy, sweep, mop, wipe, swab, polish, and otherwise maintain the studios and offices of WHPA. Management's inclusion of the station's sole bathroom was where they crossed a line. None of us, not one among us, was willing to clean a bathroom more than, oh, once. In fact, I refused flat out, wouldn't even do it once, and didn't much care what the consequences were. See, not only we were beginners, we were also very young, possessing that arrogance which drives you to just say no in those situations when you felt completely put upon; scouring a toilet last used by someone else met the definition of being put upon. NONE of us would do it. Our General Manager had few options, save for firing the entire staff. He did not. He probably should have. This weakness, this failure, of his to take action led to a number of other challenges to his authority, which ultimately did him in.
About that General Manager. He was a gentleman by the name of Ken Rogers. Ken swore that the more famous singer, Kenny Rogers, had been forced to call himself Kenny instead of Ken because our Ken insisted. Being both members of AFTRA, the more senior of the two ruled. Remember Sky King? Remember those suits, the hat? Now you have a working image of Ken Rogers. With booming baritone voice, he was the big city cowboy come back to his roots in a small town, where he'd impress the locals all to hell. I don't think he did, really. Ken could drink. To be honest, so could we. If we hadn't known how, Ken could have taught us. Ken claimed John Wayne was among his best friends. Ken claimed a lot of things...and maybe they were all true. He also swore he'd starred in a television western called The Streets of Laredo. Although never having been able to confirm that, I have no evidence to indicate it's a falsehood, either. He'd shown an inability to meet disregard for his authority, which surely emboldened some to exploit that weakness. And so it was that Ken was toppled in what amounted to a palace coup about mid-way through my stay there. Certain employees had gone to the station's owners about what they felt was Ken's gross mismanagement of the station, they'd made a pretty strong case of it. I wasn't a coup plotter, I didn't have the juice with the owners to get a glass of water from them. One or two others knew the owners well enough to get their ear. This wasn't the first time, other employees had tried this approach before. Those times it had failed. In 1974, it worked. Ken was fired. Now all would be right with our radio world. Predictably, it was not.
Here's who we were that Summer of '73;
6-9 AM: Adrian In The Morning.
9-12 Noon: Scott Perkins
12 Noon-3: Chuck Pyle, then the above pictured Dave Fuhr/Dave London after Pyle left.
3-7 PM: Vince Sweeney, alternately referred to as The Weird Beard. Yeah, that's right, they really did call me The Weird Beard. It was not of my choosing, but I managed to soldier forward.
I have no pictures of Chuck Pyle, none of Adrian either. What's bewildering is that I was already then a serious amateur photographer who had a really good camera that was always with me. Still, no photos, save for the one above. Who took that shot is lost to the ages, but judging by composition and exposure alone, I'd say it was someone who knew what they were doing, probably a newspaper photog from town.
Yeah, we had a ball that summer. Big men around town, I suppose. Getting recognized quite a bit, sometimes by voice alone, actually having someone ask me for my autograph - a stunning development. When I was asked, I honest to God didn't believe it. Most of our free time was spent, where else, in the saloons of Honesdale, and a few in Hawley too. Our favorite was Bruce's Half Way House. It's still there, presumably Bruce no longer is. I was never sure what "half way" point this joint marked. We worked long, hard hours. So, we played hard when the time came. Weekend air shifts could often stretch into eight and nine hour affairs. We all worked six days a week, sometimes seven. I have no recollection of any vacation time or holidays. We all made crap money. My starting salary and ending salary were the same; $100 per week. I had to fight to get that.
By the time the next summer came around, 1974, much had changed. Lives had moved along. Fuhr had been replaced, Perkins had made a huge leap to Syracuse and kept on leaping right out of the broadcasting business, I was seriously looking to get out and would escape by autumn of that year. Things were bad. Getting paid was always iffy, you never knew whether the station could cover payroll. What benefits we had were lost, management hadn't been paying premiums. Those long hours that were once tolerable were no longer so. Even though all kids, really, fatigue was taking a toll. All of us were the definition of living "paycheck to paycheck." None of us had a spare dime the day before payday. But we had something else.
We had been given the chance to take the first step on one heck of a journey, we'd gotten into our dream field of radio, and we'd sure had more good than bad times in our short time together.
It was a great summer...
