Radio in the Coronavirus Age

Less traffic, clearer skies, porpoises in the canals of Venice and old shipwrecks visible in the clearer waters of the great lakes are some of the reported changes due to the shelter in place orders worldwide. I’ve also been seeing a lot of evidence of a resurgence of radio listenership and a sudden spike in on-line radio; new listeners and new stations popping up all over the world. It’s not just anecdotal either, the BBC and others who track listener data have reported this as well.

Unfortunately it is coming at a time when most of the consolidated broadcast corporations have reduced their live presenters in favor of automation as cost cutting measures in the economic downturn. But, local stations are stepping it up. And they are being creative about it. Many are finding ways to do radio from home. Something the online broadcasters have been doing for years. The best part of it is that the corporate broadcasters who have local air talent are beginning to follow suit.

A good example of the latter is my fellow Columbia broadcaster Teddy Heffner. He recently moved his daily sportscast to a new station when the one he had been on for years was sold. After a short hiatus he started a slot on WCOS –AM, the same station where I started my commercial radio career back in 1965. When COVID-19 struck, the station cut his show off for safety reasons. To my joyous surprise, they worked out a way to do his shows from home. Now he is back on the air every morning. One of the reasons this could be done is that more cost effective technology which was perfected by the on line radio stations is here now. All that was needed was the demand and now that is here.

WXRY-FM here in Columbia is the quintessential example of local radio. They have always promoted local artists and indeed have a weekly show that highlights indie artists live. When the Coronavirus hit, Steve Varholy the owner of the station reached out to the local radio personalities for help during this time. He felt that the more local voices he could get on the air the better it would be for the community oriented station. I’m glad to report that I’m now doing the daily 4:40 and 5:40 PM newscasts there from the Main Street Newsdesk. And I can do it from my home studios in Southeast Columbia maintaining social distancing. Steve has been a pioneer of using new technology in remote radio broadcasting.

One of my favorite local station stories is a small town radio station in McMinnville, Oregon. The station has been around a long time, 70 plus years. My buddy Wes Simpson bought the station when it was about to go dark. Wes is putting his money where his mouth is, he is adding an FM translator and putting a lot of personal effort into the station.

The first thing Wes did when he took over the operation of the station was to reach out to some of the online broadcasters he has been working with for years. Now I’m the weekend DJ there with shows on both Saturday and Sunday mornings. All thanks to the technology that makes it all possible. I even talked my buddy Stu Wright who until recently was on WORG-FM in Orangeburg into doing the midday shift over there. Stu was really missing being on the radio and now he is in hog heaven.

But this is the thing about local radio. KCLA is the only radio station in Yamhill County Oregon and in the short time Wes has taken it over, the station is making a huge difference! A couple of weeks ago we started a KLYC Cares campaign to match able bodied young folks with the older citizens of the community who need to shelter in place. The young volunteers are running errands like grocery shopping and picking up prescriptions for folks who have no business being out of their homes. We are all talking about KLYC Cares in our shows and the campaign is taking off like wildfire. Just this last Friday, the local newspaper, The News-Register ran a story about KLYC Cares and our already busy contact line has gotten even more jammed. That is a good thing.

We also run a very popular daily community interest program called “KLYC In Touch” that discusses local issues in depth. And being in an agricultural region in Oregon, we have a weekly agricultural and gardening show called “To the Root Of It.” All we need now is a “Swap & Shop” show and a police blotter and we will be back to the way radio was back in the heyday! Heck, I even enjoy the commercials from the local restaurants and shops. BTW – the restaurants have NOT changed their spots from when they were full service instead of take out only. They are telling us to keep them running. They want to keep their customer base for when social distancing becomes just a memory.

I have noticed a definite upturn in the listenership for my online shows as well. All are now featuring public service announcements about the COVID-19 pandemic. The Monday morning Backbeat Show that normally runs on WUSC-FM is more oriented to the local audience with updates and news from the University of South Carolina for the students and the local community. These days the show sounds more like 50’s and 60’s radio than ever before. If she were still alive, I would bring Dottie Lloyd’s “Swap & Shop” segment back just for old time’s sake. Oh MY!

What a strange Easter

This morning, I’m “sheltering in place” quietly, remembering some very different Easters from the past. One of the earliest was getting up to serve the 6 AM Mass at St. Matthews. My brother Gene and I riding our old school Schwinn fat tire bicycles down Birkenhead, right on Bayview, merging onto Blanding and parking them in the bike rack behind the church. Now this was the old church. The one that was a chapel moved from Camp Blanding to the church property. By the time the new church was built, we had advanced to the “prime time” 8 AM Mass and could sleep in.

During my college years, I always came home for Easter with my family. Easter was also “spring break” for us but this was before everyone flocked to the beaches. Now, it seems that flocking to the beaches is not such a good idea even with spring break being separate from Easter weekend. Our big Easter gathering was usually at our house or at an aunt’s home. They were huge thirty or more cousins, aunts and uncles devouring ham and “pot luck” fixin’s and swapping stories of each of our adventures.

In the fall of 1965 I began my commercial radio career as a weekend announcer at WCOS and that would have meant that I would be working the Easter of 1966 but I got lucky; that winter I was promoted to the Allnight Satellite show working overnights Sunday night through Friday night. So I was able to drive home on Holy Saturday afternoon and then back to Columbia after the gathering on Easter Sunday. I arrived in Columbia and went directly to the station around 9 PM and took a short nap on the couch in the closed reception area of the station. I somehow managed to get through the show that night but I can’t vouch for the quality of the show. I completely missed the Easter gatherings during the time I was doing the 8PM - 1AM Nightbeat show from Doug Broome’s

The same was mostly true for the time I was at WIS-TV as I worked the prime time evening shift and had Sunday’s off. There was no time to get to Jacksonville after signing the station off at 1 AM. It wasn’t until when I moved out to WIS Radio that we could make it back home for the Easter Weekend. By then the gathering was in its largest phase with nieces and nephews being added to the noisy mix.

So, I’m sitting here trying to remember if I ever had to work on Easter Sunday morning. This has to be an anomaly for someone who worked so long in broadcasting but I don’t think I ever worked on the air on Easter Sunday morning. Thanksgiving, yes – Christmas, yes, Fourth of July, yes but not Easter. Wow! How did I escape that?

Wait a minute, you say; aren’t you on the air on KLYC this Easter? Actually I am but then I’m not. Through the magic of a thing called voice tracking, I recorded my Sunday morning KLYC show last Thursday afternoon.

OMG, did I really say something nice about voice tracking. I did, I really did. This way I get to enjoy playing some oldies without being in the studio.

That brings me to this “shelter in place” time that we are living through. Being older and “at risk” to the COVID-19 virus has taken away my live show on WUSC-FM for the duration. But being truly fortunate to have a fully capable internet connected home studio I can continue to do shows. So my WUSC-FM show is temporarily airing live on my online station WOGR-DB on Mondays. This is at a time when many radio presenters have been laid off or furloughed until the crisis is over.

Home studio capability has also given me a chance to help out a friend and fellow broadcaster, Steve Varholy at WXRY-FM. For the next few weeks I am doing the 4:40 and 5:40 PM newscasts weekdays from the “Main Street Newsdesk.” Reading the news on the radio is something that I have not done since 1979 at WIS Radio. I’m glad to report that it is like learning to ride a bicycle. You never forget how.

My “lockdown experience” is pretty different than for most folks. Each day is unique, which is a pretty good thing. Most senior residence facilities have huge calendars on the walls and service providers always tell the residents what the day and date are. Now that I’m retired and don’t go anywhere during this quarantine period, I would probably need something like that to keep me oriented to the day of the week. But my on air and recording schedule is doing a pretty good job of keeping me pointed in the right direction.

To my broadcast brothers and sisters I say; these are strange times that have followed a strange time when our business consolidated and contracted. Computers and automation have replaced many of you on the air and the future looks even more uncertain. But like the other unexpected side effects of COVID-19; less traffic, clearer skies and porpoises in the canals of Venice, the need for that local live voice on the radio is being pointed out. The world may be different after the crisis is done. It may look different, like doing radio from home, but it could bring back some of the good old days. Happy Easter Everyone! Oh MY!

The Lonely Radio Presenter

This week, I am beginning my fourth week of social distancing as we weather the Covid-19 pandemic. Like most of you, I’ve been spending way too much time on social media. But that is not all bad; several Facebook pages aimed at old school radio on the air DJs have really been popping and some of the most frequent memes talk about social distancing not being such a strange thing to old school radio presenters.

The trend of many live radio shows these days is to have a team. You know: “The Morning Team on Rockin’-100” or “The Afternoon Billy Bob and Benny Show.” My apologies if there is really a team with either of these names. But back in the day, teams were a rarity. The norm was a single soul, alone in the control room surrounded by records, cart machines, telephones, microphones and equipment that did gosh knows what. Except for the few of us who were lucky enough to have remote shows from the local drive in restaurant, that is what our lives were like.

Here is the place where your faithful blogger gives the perfect example; Take the movie “American Graffiti.” In the movie, Richard Dreyfuss as Curt Henderson and Ron Howard as Steve Bolander spot a blond in a white T-Bird played by Suzanne Somers. Not unexpectedly Curt decides that he needs to hook up with The Blonde and he employs the social media of the day. According to the plot in Wikipedia: “Curt drives to the radio station to ask the disc jockey "Wolfman Jack", who is omnipresent on the car radios, to read an on air message for her. Inside the station, Curt encounters an employee manning a console of record and cassette players, who tells him The Wolfman doesn't work at the station, and that the shows are pre-taped for replay at multiple stations. The employee accepts the message from Curt and promises to try to have The Wolfman air it. As he's leaving the station, Curt sees the employee talking into the microphone and hears the voice of The Wolfman on the air, so Curt realizes that despite the employee's earlier denials, he really is The Wolfman.” That sense of isolation of the most connected character in the film is what it was like for the average radio DJ. That scene hits home for us Old School guys. We’ve been socially distancing all of our careers.

That is probably why most of us lived for the studio request line. Yes, we talked to thousands of listeners every show but the only real time feedback we got back then was when listeners called. Those connections often grew into lifetime friendships.

But don’t feel bad for the voice alone in the night. Where else could you get paid for playing records and talking to people? This was the life and I for one enjoy looking back and enjoying the memories. When I play a song on the radio today my memory is flooded by young faces and voices from the past. No – I don’t live in the past but I am grateful for the rich memories.

So, I was searching my memory for the time that matches the current situation the closest. The one that sticks out is the curfew that was imposed on most southern cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968 in Memphis Tennessee.

I was doing the Doug Broome’s Nightbeat Show on WCOS-AM from a cinder block radio booth in the parking lot of Doug’s Drive in Restaurant on Two Notch Road near Beltline. The news broke about his being shot just as the show began at 8 PM and then during the 8:30 news, Mike Rast announced that Dr King had died. We didn’t have cell phones back in the day but I noticed a line forming at the pay phone on the brick wall of the restaurant near the door where the car hops skated out of the kitchen with trays laden with hamburgers, fries and chocolate shakes.

The crowd at the teletrays quickly thinned out and by 9 PM, all who were left were the few die hard customers that were there every night. By 10 PM even they were gone. At 11 PM the manager closed the restaurant and I was left as the only one left on the property, indeed aside from the street and traffic lights, mine was the only light shining within sight. And that, my friends, was the loneliest time on the air in my entire career.

The next day I was called into the station early for a meeting with the station management and Doug Broome. The decision was made to move the show back to the studios in The Cornell Arms Building. But since the relationship was a cash and carry one, I was to drive up to the location of Doug’s on Main and Confederate Streets and bring back the nightly fee for the show and place it under the door of our accountant. Around that time, the Mayor of Columbia declared a 10 PM to 6 AM curfew.

That meant that in addition to driving from my apartment to and from the station, I also needed to drive the couple of miles to and from Doug’s . Concerned about the curfew, we called the police chief to make sure that we would not be stopped in our daily rounds. The solution was two-fold; we were told to make ID Cards from station letterhead and we were to put magnetic signs on our cars that said “WCOS News” on them. Fortunately I carried one of those signs in the back seat of my car already to assist when we covered news on the fly.

Driving the deserted streets of Columbia was downright spooky. There was almost no other traffic on the streets. Once or twice I’d spot a pair of headlights blocks away and sure enough a police car would rush up to mine to investigate. That always resulted in a short conversation and a good night from the local constabulary. After the first couple of nights, when the beat cops got to recognize my car at a distance they would flash their lights and wave. Those were different days indeed.

So during these days of social isolation, I’m doing all my shows from my home studios. In some cases, the shows are online instead of being on air. Like the curfew days of the 60s the main uncertainty is how long will this isolation continue. Until then like the old DJ patter went; “I’ll be keepin’ on keepin’ on!” Be safe everyone. Oh MY!

Radio Listenership Is Up!

I saw a piece from the BBC, that reported that since the spread of the Covid-19 virus that radio listenership in the UK and the US was up and that the automated music streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora were down a little bit.

This news does not surprise this old school broadcaster one bit, not even worth raising one eyebrow, much less both. And, although I have nothing but a couple of anecdotal data points to draw this from; the increase in listenership is outside of radio’s “prime times” the morning and afternoon drive time slots.

My take on why this is happening is that people are starved for a mix of information and entertainment. The fresher and more local the information is, the better. And the entertainment needs to be more upbeat to provide a respite from the seriousness of the news. Add to that a personal connection with a presenter who has his or her finger on the pulse of the community. What can do that better than live local radio!

Now, the typical corporate radio programmer might disagree about the drive time. My point is, that in this time of social distancing and shelter in place orders there are fewer people in their cars during the peak drive times of the day. More are listening from their homes and more are listening to online stations that tend to have more live shows than the terrestrial stations do these days with many local live shows being suspended in the name of public safety.

Again this is anecdotal data, but some stations that have provided capability for their DJs to do live shows from home are reporting stronger than normal numbers and stronger audience reaction than normal. The other big change is that instead of the studio phone line, the feedback is coming from social media, Twitter and Facebook.

Even stations that do not have the capability to provide live DJ interaction but have the capability to do voice tracking are doing better, as long as that voice tracking is done at the last minute instead of days earlier. This way, the information that is on the air is pretty much up to the minute.

One thing I believe is that the demeanor of the on air presenter is key to being successful during these times. Facebook and Twitter has been run amok with distressing news and angry reaction to it. More than a few of my FB friends have disappeared from the service because they have been overwhelmed by the bad news and vitriol. I’m not saying that we should ignore the gravity of the information but we need to balance it with good news. One thing that I am doing in my periodic updates from the data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center is to include the number of people that have survived Covid-19. At the time of this writing - 11 am Eastern on March 29, 2020, 145,696 people have recovered, 2,612 in the US alone. I also scour my resources for “feel good” stories to go along with my “feel good” music.

I have no idea if this uptick in radio listening will continue after Covid-19 has run its course. I hope that it reverses the trend of fewer live presenters and more automation by corporate radio back to more live and local. If that happens, I’ll be a happy guy and I doubt that I will be alone in that sentiment.

There is a significant positive personal side effect to this approach for me. Although tomorrow will be the third week in a row that I’ll not be broadcasting my oldies show on WUSC-FM due to the station suspending live shows, I’ve found that I seem to me more at ease with the isolation than I probably would be otherwise. I truly miss the interaction with the student DJs there and my audience over the phone but I am not as stir crazy as I think I would be, knowing how social my nature is.

Among the factors in this are my online shows on multiple stations around the world, even though most of them are pre-recorded. My daily shows on Crusin’ KLYC 1260 out in Oregon helped out too. It will be interesting to see how I do next week now that we’ve brought on a new DJ out there and I am reverting to my weekend only shows there. But honestly, I could not have sustained that much time on the air there more than a week or so longer without giving up some of my other on air activity.

I’ve been asked many times why can’t I broadcast on WUSC-FM from my home studio like I do my other shows. One of WUSC-FM’s main guiding principles is to provide an in studio platform for the student DJs, to educate the DJ as well as the audience. So providing a way for a DJ to do a show remotely is correctly not in their list of priorities. Besides, I think I’m the only DJ currently on the air there that has a home studio capable of doing such a broadcast. Providing that capability is much more complicated than just throwing a switch; it is not fair to ask them to provide the effort and expense for just one show a week.

But there is one thing that I can do for the folks who listen to the Backbeat show there every Monday. For the duration of the social distancing event, I will continue to broadcast my WUSC-FM show on http://ourgenerationradio.com 10AM until noon Eastern time and as usual I’ll be taking requests but instead of over the phone I’ll be taking them via my Facebook page; https://www.facebook.com/rick.wrigley Oh MY!

Social Distancing on the Radio

I don’t know how many times I’ve said “holy cow” or something similar to that this week but I can’t count them on my fingers and toes. At the same time, I realize how lucky I am in that I’m retired and pursuing my retirement activity in broadcasting without significant financial worries.

Broadcasting can be a lot safer from my home studio rather than sitting in a workspace that is serially shared by a number of other DJs the way it used to be. Some of my fellow broadcasters have lost their show times on local radio stations due to access to their studios being restricted to “essential personnel” who ride heard on the stations’ automation systems.

That’s a big difference from the way it used to be before automation systems when a live body in the air chair was required if you were to stay on the air. As much as I love live radio and wish there were more of it, I remember the down side also.

One of those memories was of the winter of 1967 when the bug hit the DJs at WCOS pretty hard. Most of our part timers were college students and they went down first. But not before contaminating the equipment in the control room, so the bug hit the full time staff pretty much all at the same time. I am pretty sure that it was a flu bug because the symptoms came on pretty fast, for me during a 5 hour on air shift. If it were a cold, it would have taken a couple of days. I’m going with that self diagnosis because I was young and immortal back then and did not see a doctor. Yeah, the WCOS Good Guy became the WCOS Tough Guys that week, or more precisely we became the WCOS Hoarse Guys. Not a single one of us had any voice left. But the show must go on, sick or not. One of my fellow DJs even brought a pillow from home that he laid on the desk in front of the audio console to put his head on while the records played. I used my winter coat. Somehow, we got through that.

So far only one of my retirement radio gigs has been affected by COVID-19; my Monday morning Backbeat show on WUSC-FM. The campus of the UofSC had been locked down and in person classes have been replaced by online classes for the rest of the semester. Live shows on WUSC-FM have been suspended until further notice and the robots have finally taken over the station. At this time, I have no idea as to when we will resume live broadcasting.

All of my other radio broadcasts (live and pre-recorded) are continuing normally since they all originate from my home studio through the magic of the internet. I have even picked up some extra hours on KLYC in McMinnVille Oregon in the interim while we train a new DJ over there. The local staffs of the stations I am on in Poprad Slovakia and Skegness UK have vacated the main studios to remotely control their broadcast day from their homes as I do for OurGenerationRadio.com. So far most of my other DJs have been able to maintain their show schedules.

I need to point out that it is easier for online broadcasters to weather this period of social distancing than it is for the terrestrial broadcasters because the tools that control the stream are already internet enabled due to the nature of streaming media. Most over the air radio stations have encapsulated their broadcast equipment with private networks for security reasons. There have been several dramatic instances of what can happen if someone hacks into their network, some have resulted in fines for the stations and jail time for the hackers.

In the past week or so, many of my old broadcasting friends have asked why don’t I broadcast my WUSC-FM show from home. This need for security is the main reason. As far as I know, I am the only DJ on the air there that has the setup and technology to go live remotely and it is not fair to ask the station to build out the infrastructure to do that for only me. There is also an expense to that and the fact that the IT technicians who would need to be on site to accomplish the task are not there and have other pressing tasks to accomplish remotely needs to be considered as well.

Doing these online shows and KLYC have helped me to not become quite at stir crazy as I would be otherwise. And for that I’m grateful.

At this time we have no idea as to when the UofSC leadership will relax the campus lock down and give the live DJs access to the station. But there is one thing that I can do for the folks who listen to the oldies every Monday. For the duration of the social distancing event, I will be broadcasting my WUSC-FM show on http://ourgenerationradio.com 10AM until noon Eastern time and as usual I’ll be taking requests but instead of over the phone I’ll be taking them via my facebook page; https://www.facebook.com/rick.wrigley Oh MY!

Beware The Ides of March

This has been one heck of a week; change to Daylight Saving Time, a full moon, Friday the 13th, COVID-19 and now today is the day that Julius Caesar got the point, the Ides of March! Holy Cow!

And as if to pile it on, the University of South Carolina has closed their campus to enable social distancing and that means that WUSC-FM has switched off all live radio shows and gone to a completely automated schedule. So instead of preparing for tomorrow’s Backbeat Show today I guess I’ll watch some March Madness on TV this afternoon. Wait, What! Oh Never Mind.

It’s been said often that when God closes a door, he opens a widow. And my window is that I’ll be filling in on the 10AM – 1PM (Pacific Time) on Cruisin’ KLYC 1260 in McMinnville, Oregon and KLYC.us on the internet! KLYC is an oldies station so all is right in the world.

Well, that is not completely true. All is right if you don’t consider toilet paper or as my Brit friends call it “bog roll.” During our regular Saturday afternoon grocery run we found absolutely no TP in our regular grocery store. They normally have hundreds of packages but the cupboard was bare yesterday. I wasn’t too concerned because there was several days supply in the house but some more would have to be found before next week’s shopping trip. We got a tip from a worker at the local Target that they expected a shipment overnight last night and a quick trip there this morning resulted in a score. We’re good for the next week and a half at least.

What’s up with the TP shortage anyway? There is absolutely no reason for the current run on TP. COVID-19 doesn’t create an increase in the demand. But some idiot on the Internet can! Some socially distanced dude (or dude-ette) thought it would be funny to post something about a TP shortage and got a viral response. Many more knock off posts followed and sure enough, it wasn’t funny any-more. Hopefully we’ll all regain our sanity and start working through our hoards before the cat shreds the family fortune while everyone is out looking for more.

Of course I have absolutely no proof of all this but I do have one sobering thought about this mess. In addition to the TP post, I see a lot of posts questioning the veracity of the COVID-19 crisis, calling it a hoax and denigrating the entire social distancing reaction to the spread of the virus. I’ll just say this, if I were an enemy of the free world and wanted to disrupt western culture, creating an artificial shortage and sewing doubt in medical science would be sure fire attack vectors.

But I digress.

Tomorrow will be one of a handful of Mondays where I’ll not be spinning oldies on local Columbia radio in over ten years. I missed one that fell on a Christmas day a few years ago, one when I was sick, one when the Russell House staff forgot to leave my access on during a time when the Student Union was closed and three in 2018 when I was in Scotland. That gives me a grand total of six shows missed out of 530 weeks on the air since January 4, 2010! I’ll take that 1.1%, but it still feels strange.

I saw a meme on one of the group pages for radio broadcasters on Facebook yesterday that stated that radio personalities were the original practitioners of social distancing. We do it every day. It’s true, it may sound like we are out there in a crowd having a party all day long but in reality we sit isolated in our control rooms with only electronic connections with our listeners; radio and telephones and these days the Internet. As a result we love “remote” broadcasts like the old “Nightbeat Show” sitting in a booth right there next to the first row of tele-trays at a drive in restaurant. Old school DJs also love taking requests and dedications over the phone for the same reason; that two way human contact.

So, my earworm for today is The Ides of March’s 1970 hit “Vehicle.” Did you know that the band began in Berwyn, Illinois (a near western suburb of Chicago) on October 16, 1964, as a four-piece band called "The Shon-Dels." They changed their name in 1966, to The Ides of March, a name suggested by bass player Bob Bergland after he read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in high school. And now we are back to Caesar getting the point! Oh MY!

Ridin’ The Radio Range

One of the duties of old AM radio engineers was to perform something called field intensity measurements on directional radio stations.

A quick explanation of directional AM radio is in order. Directional AM radio stations have two or more towers. These extra towers may be energized part time or full time in order to “channel” the signal in one or more directions. The need for directional stations was to protect other stations on the same frequency that were licensed before the directional station was built. The majority of these stations were directional at night only because AM radio signals would travel farther at night than in the day. Many non-directional stations had to protect these earlier stations by reducing their power at night.

An example of a non directional station in Columbia, SC is WCOS which operated at 1,000 watts daytime and 250 watts nighttime while I worked there. WIS Radio (Now WVOC) was a directional station that operated at 5,000 watts both day and night but at nighttime the signal was channeled to the east-southeast (105 degrees) by the three towers.

Broadcast Engineers (now called Broadcast Technicians) who worked at directional stations had a few more tasks than their brethren who worked at stations with only one tower. One of those tasks was to perform weekly field intensity measurements at designated monitor points. Each Friday afternoon, I’d put the station into the directional pattern and joke with Gracie, our station receptionist as I stepped out of the front door of station with my trusty Field Strength meter tucked under my arm like a lunchbox that I was going out to “ride the radio range.”

The week that I began working at WIS Radio, our brown and tan Potomac meter similar to the one shown on this page arrived to replace the old black and grey one that the station had been using for years. For the first few months, I took both meters out and took readings from both of them to make sure that the new one was reading the same as the old one. I never got rid of the old one because I wanted a stand-by in case the new one failed. I needn’t have worried.

WIS had four monitor points, two on either side of the Saluda River so it took me about 90 minutes to drive to each of those points, fire up the meter take the reading, record it on the log and calculate the percentage difference from the reading it was supposed to be. That took only a couple of minutes at each monitor point. Because there was only one bridge across the river near the station it took me about 45 minutes longer than it would have otherwise as I needed to backtrack my path to cross the river via I-20 which at the time meant that I had to drive all the way down to I-26 to get to it. At the time there was no exit to I-20 from Bush River Road, the main drag near where the station was located on WIS Lane.

I should note here that the FCC required these weekly tests be performed at least one hour after sunrise and one hour before sunset, so that the daytime radio propagation conditions existed. Some of my fellow Broadcast Engineers caught grief from station management about needing to set the station to nighttime pattern for these readings but I was fortunate that I never had that problem; my management took these things seriously. Now, the DJ that was on the air was a different story. When I put the station on the directional pattern, I would walk into the studio and note it on the transmitter log, which he kept at other times. Without fail he would bellyache to me that I was costing him listeners. My response was just as savage. I told him that it was not a problem, that he had no listeners anyway. It was all in good fun and part of our friendship.

I dearly loved the quiet time driving my bright red Karmann-Ghia around Richland and Lexington counties between monitor points. Those were good times for me to mull over a problem that I was having with a piece of equipment or to plan in my head the next project I was going to take on at the station.

My number 4 monitor point was just off of Highway 378 a block off of I-22. It was in front of a mom and pop Lawn and Garden Equipment Shop. The owner was a man in his late 60s who had a gruff countenance and a heart of gold. I looked forward to that stop every week, as I was taking the reading, he would head out of the shop with a couple of ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola and we would sit in the rocking chairs in front of the store and share a five minute conversation about any and everything.

A month before I left WIS Radio, when I made my “radio range ride” the shop was closed and he was not there. The next week was the same. Two weeks later both he and his wife were at the store but he was confined to a wheel chair after having a serious stroke. He had come in that afternoon to tell me good bye and that he was going to sell the store. To this day, if I am out driving in the countryside away from the hustle and bustle of the city, I can still see him in my mind’s eye sitting in that rocking chair wearing his denim overalls and white t-shirt, working on that green tinted bottle of Coca-Cola and mopping the heat off his forehead with his bright red bandana. Oh MY!