The Dawn Patrol

When I first started at WUSC-AM in 1963, the station played a Middle of the Road, (MOR) format. MOR met its demise a long time ago and the best way to describe it is to say that was the music that was being played by the Armed Forces Radio Service before DJ Adrian Cronauer arrived on the scene in the movie “Good Morning Vietnam.” There was a lot of Ray Coniff, Lawrence Welk and even a couple of albums by Jackie Gleason. Indeed the “Bam, Zoom, Straight to the Moon” Ralph Kramden guy was quite an accomplished orchestra leader. Yes there were some vocal records in the mix as well; Andy Williams, Charles Aznavour and Peggy Lee were some of the more popular singers. It was a far cry from the music I came to love as a teenager listening to WAPE and WPDQ in Jacksonville.

We had a shortened broadcast day as well back then; 4:30 PM until 1 AM. It was neatly designed not to compete with the class or lab schedules at the University. Radio automation as we know it today didn’t exist back then. The closest thing we had to it was a two hour long reel to reel tape playing the “Night Owl Show” from 11 PM until 1 AM on an Ampex 350 reel to reel tape machine that was modified to turn the transmitter off when the tape ran out. This allowed us to extend the broadcast day after the Russell House closed at 11 PM. But all the music we played back then was that MOR elevator music.

Left: The WUSC - AM Master Control Audio Board Circa 1965, the home of our "Dawn Patrol Show." A number of us had our eye on entering the local radio market as part timers in our upperclassmen years and we wanted to cut our teeth on Rock and Roll. By that time several of our DJs had weekend gigs at WNOK and WCOS and they remarked that the transition from MOR to Top 40 took a while to make. It seemed that early morning was our best shot. Russell House opened at 5:45 AM for breakfast in the cafeteria. As chief announcer, I had a key to the station once the building was open. So I proposed to the student body that we run the station from 6 -8 AM Monday through Friday in the Fall of 65 as an experiment. I didn’t have a class until 9 am that semester. They agreed and another member of the exec staff who had a key covered the weekend days.

That summer, Adrian Cronauer was making waves on his “Dawn Patrol” show and that name was becoming pretty popular with Rock and Roll stations around the country, especially the college stations who were beginning to experiment with rock and roll. So naturally we went with the flow at WUSC as well. With a fire in my belly for rock and roll radio, it was seldom that my alarm went off at 5:30 in time for me to shower, shave and walk across Davis Field from the honeycomb dorms to the station. At 5:55, I’d be turning on the studio and warming up the transmitter and rewinding the previous evening’s “Night Owl” show tape. At 5:58 I’d hit the plate switch on the transmitter remote control, putting the station on the air and starting the sign on tape that ended with National Anthem. A quick vocal ID followed and then the 6 AM Mutual Newscast from the network.

During that newscast, there were a few minutes to select a few choice 45’s to start off the show and load the first two commercials on the Ampex 601 reel to reel machines on either side of the console. One of the things I remembered from listening to my home town rockers was to always play an upbeat, feel good song first after the news. It wasn’t until I began working at WCOS that Woody Windham told me that those records were nicknamed “kickers!”

It was also the first time that most of my on air playlist was coming from 45 RPM records instead of those 33 1/3 RPM albums that were the mainstay of our broadcast day. At first we had somewhat of a limited selection of rock and roll; filling up two or three bins out of more than 100 bins each containing 80 or more albums in the music library. I had an old Associated Press Teletype Paper box that I kept under the left turntable in Master Control that I would drag into the library during the news and fill with a bunch of 45’s for the show. Being a college station with few commercials, it was not unusual for me to play 20 or more songs in an hour, so there was usually 60 - 80 records in the box each show for me to choose from. It was back then that I began to take requests over the studio phone line for the first time in my career. That was a bit of a problem until the record distributors caught on that we were rockin’ in the mornings. Soon I had almost every song that was being played on the commercial rockers and filling requests became easier.

Sometimes I wish that I had an air-check recording of one of my WUSC shows but the only one I made wound up with Woody over at WCOS, that led me to my first paying radio gig. I say “sometimes” because I soon discovered that the transition from college radio announcer to Top 40 DJ took some work. Those tapes were pretty rough. I am forever grateful that Woody could see past that and hire me on and kick start my broadcast career.

The other thing that was missing from those “Dawn Patrol” shows was the Pams and Pepper-Tanner jingle packages that were the mainstay of Top 40 radio back in the day. We had short promotional announcements, what they call “liners” today and I made up some really short and really awful “stingers” that were used to add more production elements to those rock shows. Because all of these elements were on reel to reel tape, I was busier than a one armed paper hanger in the studios those mornings. No wonder I was such a skinny guy back then.

The other thing that kept me hopping was that rock radio back in those days required that the DJ talk or play a jingle, liner or stinger between EVERY record. If fact at WCOS we were required to actually say something. “TTBB” was the watchword there. “TTBB” stood for “Time, Temp, Boom-boom” keep it short, keep it upbeat and keep it fun! If you listened to WABC in the 60s, Rick Sklar the iconic program director was so into TTBB that he actually had a chime dubbed onto the end of the song cartridges to make sure that everyone knew what the “WABC Time Chime” was. Hey, as trite as it sounds, remember that WABC dominated the New York City market when Top 40 radio was king.

MY WUSC – FM oldies show begins at 10 AM on Mondays, once a week instead of 5 days a week at 6 AM. Hey – I may not be a spring chicken any more but I can still rock and roll for a few hours each week. Listen closely for the “chime time” tomorrow, it’ll be there. Oh MY!