<a href="mailto:gordandk@aol.com">By GORDIE LITTLE</a>
Small Talk
March 30, 2008 05:17 am
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On Tuesday, I'll be signing papers to purchase a radio station and will begin broadcasting programming that a broad demographic spectrum of the area population wants to hear.
It will be a radio station that you and your friends can personally identify with and feel as though you "own." The announcers, newspersons and disc jockeys will be intelligent, happy, friendly and informed.
April Fool! None of that is true.
MICROPHONE GIANTS
Having spent time in various radio stations from the early 1950s, I'm still a fan. If you think for a moment that I could walk away from radio in April 1997 and never look back, you are mistaken.
Over the past 11 years, I have averaged five dreams a week about those years in the business. It saddens me to realize that a large number of the North Country radio pioneers are now deceased. They can never be replaced.
Part of my radio memories involves not only April Fool pranks, but almost daily behind-the-scenes high jinks that still make me chuckle.
Ten years ago, Calvin Castine held the TV camera as I sat down with Chester O. Bosworth, Bird Berdan and Art Pierce, and we reminisced about our radio days.
What fun. Those giants of the microphone are all gone now, but the memories linger on. A couple of weeks ago, that program was repeated on the regional cable systems. Kaye and I watched and found ourselves laughing and crying to hear the classic radio tales over again.
Those days cannot and will not ever be replicated. Those kinds of lovable and respectable personalities have become almost extinct.
During the program, we slapped our thighs, recalling the practical jokes that we perpetrated.
It was not uncommon for us to use our cigarette lighters to set announcers' copy on fire while they were reading news and commercials live on the air. Doing anything we could to make a person "break up" on the air became a regular game.
Some of the stunts we pulled were so hilarious as to have become the stuff of legends.
CAST-IRON BRASSIERE
I'll protect the innocent victims by not revealing their names. An announcer who is long gone fancied himself having the most mellifluous golden "pipes" in the business.
I connived with the engineer at the time to feed the man's voice through a tape delay and back into his earphones as he was on the air. The result was maddening for him and delightful for us. To hear each word a half-second after it was uttered brought the poor man to his knees, and the rest of the newscast was reduced to shambles.
News and commercials were mostly read live in the early days, and it was not rare for one or another of us to be caught unawares by a prankster who had retyped the "copy" to include a nonsense word, inserted for fun.
Replacing the term "cast-iron brazier" with "cast-iron brassiere" threw me a curve and provided a jocular interlude in the early '60s.
A local newsman got stuck while attempting to pronounce the Russian surname "Kuznetsov," and the rest of his newscast was laden with loud guffaws.
Another announcer tried to be dramatic late at night while reading a story about local fire departments and police agencies conducting a mock atomic attack during the "missile crisis" days. While he was reading, the rest of the staff (myself included) began lighting up his phone lines, leading him to believe that he was doing something wrong.
During a commercial break, he picked up one of the phones, and a voice disguised as an Air Force official told him that a missile with an atomic warhead was actually speeding toward Peru, and all of the local planes from Plattsburgh Air Force Base were being scrambled.
The caller told the announcer not to panic. Too late. He wailed on the air, saying, "I'm sorry. We're all going to be killed."
I came within a hair's breadth of being fired that night.
FOOL'S ERRANDS
When we were kids, Kaye remembers the childish jokes we played on our school friends. One April Fool trick was to tell someone that his shoe was untied or that he had a bug on his head. When the victim "bit," we hollered, "April Fool!"
During my college years, "short-sheeting" dorm beds, cramming rooms with water-filled balloons, drawing things on or spraying shaving cream on our sleeping friends were all popular pranks.
The history of how April Fool's Day started is hidden in the mists of time. However, it probably had something to do with when Pope Gregory XIII directed that the old Julian calendar be replaced with another (the Gregorian calendar) in 1582. It was significant, as New Year's Day was thereby changed from April 1 to January 1.
Frenchmen who refused to make the adjustment or simply didn't get the word were labeled fools and were sent on "fools errands." Today, in France, April 1 is called Poisson d'Avril, which translates as "April Fish." Kids run around trying to stick paper fish on their friends' backs.
I wonder if the signs saying "kick me" started that way. Have a great April 1 on Tuesday and please, drive carefully.
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