Winter Rain!

Today dawned rainy and cool; one of those perfectly miserable winter days when it is too yucky to step out of doors. There is a cold front knocking on the door and it will pass later today. The good news is that it will be about 10 degrees warmer than yesterday, if you can call 57 degrees good news.

When I first started working part time at WCOS back in ’65 I had a two block walk from my dorm at the University of South Carolina up Sumter Street to the studios in the Cornell Arms Apartments. On days like this, I would wrap up in my London Fog raincoat and umbrella and think how lucky I was that I was not working for WNOK where some of my college buddies were. They had a much longer 8 block walk.

I was working the weekend shifts on Saturday and Sunday evenings just before the All Night Satellite with April Black. When it was really cold and rainy, April would always admonish her listeners to “Watch out for the freezy skid stuff!” I am sure that Brylkreem loved the free plug. Their tag line at the time was “Watch out for the greasy kid stuff!” I must admit that once in a while back in those days I stole April’s line on snowy winter days.

Little did I know that within a few months, April would take her leave of “The WCOS Good Guys” and I would be promoted to full time status taking over the overnight show. By this time I have moved from the dorm to an apartment on the other side of campus and no car, my treck to the station had lengthened to six blocks. On rainy days, despite my best efforts I would arrive at the station with wet feet and soaked trousers up about a foot from my shoes. I would kick off my shoes and place my feet, wet socks and all, directly on the hot water heated floor. Ahhh - by time I started the second hour of the show I was dry and rarin’ to go. It was a good thing that the on air side of the station was covered in vinyl tile that was kept clean by our maintenance guy. My socks never got dirty, as long as I was careful around the teletype machines that spit ink droplets and paper dust all around.

A year later, I was promoted again to the evening time slot, the Doug Broome’s Nightbeat Show. It was a good thing that I had bought my first car, a lime green 1964 Plymouth. Yeah, I did say lime green; you could see me coming for miles. Now I had to drive up to the station and park at a meter in front of the Cornell Arms or in one of the spaces in the parking lot beside the building that was vacated by the day staff. I would pick up the rack of 45’s that made up the Top 60 in Dixie, later the WCOS Fun 40, the latest news and weather copy and the cartridges with the commercial spots that would run that evening.

All of this would go into a large cardboard box in which the paper for the teletype machines was shipped to us. On rainy days this box was a problem. It did not have a cover; the top of the box was cut off so that the fanfold paper could be fed directly out of the box and into the teletype. The best I could do was to cover our precious supplies with newspaper and run hunchbacked to the car. This time, no umbrella so the London Fog was the only protection we had. If it was raining really hard, the newspaper would be soggy by the time I got it to the car and I would have to pull it out of the box before it soaked the copy, carts and records below.

Fortunately, the space behind the radio booth out at the Two Notch Road location of the drive in restaurant was reserved for the DJ, leaving just a few quick steps from the car to the booth in the cold rain. Nevertheless, I was usually soaked again. So the raincoat was hung on the coat-rack next to the heater and it and I began our drying out process. The floor out at the booth was not nearly as clean as the one in the studio so my shoes stayed on. It sure was a good thing that our engineers made certain that all the equipment was properly grounded as otherwise we could have had a shocking incident.

Unfortunately cold rainy weather had a big impact on the audience that kept the traffic moving between us and the booths of the other radio stations moving. Winter rain kept the numbers down to a couple dozen cars driven by the hardcore “cruisers.” Summer was a little better but winters were hard. We did not have a request phone line out at the booth so these “cruisers” were the main source of the requests we got during the night. The car hops loved rainy evenings though. They were not supposed to make requests, leaving it up to the paying audience. On these nights, they were free to bring their own requests. If the rain wasn’t too bad I would even get requests from the car hops and waitresses working in the A & W Root Beer next door and the Burger King across the street.

After the MLK assassination on April 4, 1968, the city declared a 6 PM to 6 AM curfew and we moved the show back to the studios in the Cornell Arms. I sure did miss getting the requests in person and chatting with the folks who brought them, but I now had access to the request line and started doing at least one Instant Request per half hour. I have to admit that I had a love/hate relationship with the Instant Request. It is easy to say why I loved them; they gave me a direct connection with the audience. The hate part is that it was a very stressful minute or so. You had to be able to find and queue up a record while talking to the person making the request live on the radio. Add to that, given that there was no delay/drop circuit back then, there was no way to delete an inappropriate caller comment. This was a bigger danger the later it got. I was fortunate in that I never got burned, but I was listening when some other DJ’s did.

It is a never ending source of amazement to me, that some of the folks I met via the Instant Request are still listening to me now. When I think of that, I realize that the role of the Top 40 radio station and the DJs that made them all work is very different from the role modern DJs have today. It is not just the style, it is also the substance. Music and Radio played a much bigger part of the average teenager and young adult than it does today.

In the morning rain or shine, I’ll grab my “Air Computer” filled with over 20,000 oldies, sweepers and liners, and drive down to the USC campus, park in the garage and walk up the hill and across the same patio where I used to do remotes for WUSC AM back in the day. I have a protected path for all but about 50 yards of the way. But, I have a much bigger umbrella than I did back in the day so I won’t get nearly as wet as I used to. Besides, if I do get wet, I’ll have my Rockin’ Socks on. Oh MY!