Sunday, August 11, 2019

And Panic Sets In!

Mid August is almost here! Yikes! Back in the day that meant that you could count the weeks before school starts on the fingers of one hand. And that was back in the day when school did not start until the week after Labor Day. These days it’s earlier; the local school district starts school on August 21 and the next day classes begin at the UofSC. That means you can count the days on the fingers of both hands. The days of leisurely rush hour drives downtown past vacant schools is soon to be over. The number of times that I’ll be able to park on the entrance level floor of the Bull Street Parking Garage for my Monday Morning Radio Show on WUSC-FM is down to like, two!

The door to the studios at WUSC-FM. But like back in the day, my relationship with the beginning of the Fall Semester is a love / hate thing. In my high school and college years I was mourning the loss of the “Lazy Hazy Days of Summer” but at the same time I was looking forward to the excitement of getting back together with my classmates and friends at school. I used to wonder what it would be like when I was out of school and in the work-a-day world.

In the fall of ’66 I discovered that not much changed. I was doing the “All Night Satellite” at WCOS and was not thinking about school too much. But my school aged audience quickly reminded me that it was almost time for school to start again. It became pretty common for a jittery teenager to talk about being nervous about the end of summer. It was particularly bad for those that were making the transition from Middle School (we called it Junior High School back then) to High School. Not so bad for those making the transition from High School to College.

During the months of August and September, I spent more time on the phone than usual reassuring the person making requests that I survived the transitions without too many scars. The usual 30 second request call sometimes stretched out to a half hour. It was a good thing that I was a decent multi-tasker back in those days; I could talk, read the log, and load the next commercial, jingle and record while keeping up the conversation. Having to take and write down the transmitter readings every half hour usually caused the end of a phone conversation. I must say that the old analog phones helped; there was no delay between the listener and me. So I could more easily interrupt the caller when I needed to open up the microphone and say something. With today’s digital phones, it is harder to break in to tell the listener to hold on a second because of the slight delay.

By the time the ’67 fall term arrived, I was able to point to the big blockbuster movie of that summer “To Sir With Love” starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu to let the caller know that they were about to embark on one of the most exciting times of their lives.

When Lulu’s song from the movie was released it was one of the most requested songs by the Doug Broome’s cruzin’ crowd. We were not supposed to have folks from the audience in the booth while we were doing our shows, but I can admit now that occasionally there would be a nervous teenager sitting in that tan metal folding chair under the window A/C unit set in the back wall of the studio, waiting to unburden his or troubled heart about the upcoming semester. To my knowledge, Arthur Broome never told my boss that sometimes I let someone into the booth. At least Woody never called me on it. That could have been because he probably had folks in his booth too back in his “Doug Broome’s Days.” Woody “Got it!” Besides, what can he do about it now?

Complete disclosure: The ratio of female booth visitors to their male counterparts was at least ten to one. But in my defense, the girls were more likely to behave in the booth than the boys were. And they were more likely than the boys to want to talk about it. The boys wanted to be “manly” and expressing feelings was just not done. And that my friends, is one reason that women live longer than men.

While this phenomenon was much more prevalent back in the day than it is today, I still occasionally get a younger listener calling about nervousness at the beginning of a school. The prime reason is that my audience demographic has been out of school for decades. What I do get in the line of studio visitors is someone just wanting to get away from it all and listen to some of their grandparents’ “feel good music” for a while.

The increase of difficulty finding a good parking place is offset by walking to the Russell House in the middle of a throng of students making their way to or from classes. Many are in groups of two or three, excitedly chatting about the things that students talk about. To be honest, that has not changed much over the decades. The girls are talking about their professors, their classes and boys, the boys, mostly about football and girls. The one thing different is that someone who is alone is usually talking on their phone, not walking in silence.

Over the ten years that I’ve been on campus every Monday for my show the thing that has changed is that I’m no longer the strange older dude with wild socks dragging my laptop in a roller bag behind him. I never make it all the way without a student or one of the university staff calling out “Hi Rick” on the way. More than ever, it feels like my undergrad days when I knew a larger percentage of the student body. Well, it WAS a lot smaller back then and the majority lived on campus. Oh MY!

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