WIVQ Peru Illinois. My destination. After the phone interview and subsequent hiring I packed everything I owned into my Red Grand Torino (yeah like Starsky and Hutch) and headed for central Illinois. As I made the 12 hour drive I thought about all the things I wanted to do with the radio station. I had lots of ideas and hey, they hired me to program the station, so naturally they believed in my programming prowess. Ha, right.
I arrived in Peru in the evening and found the station. On main street in Peru, located above a drug store, the station had taken over a dentist office and stuck a radio station in there. The on air control room was huge, seems like it had been the main examination room for the dentist. He must have been from Texas. Anyway it was setup in a traditional sort of way with a dj position, with console, two turntables, two cart machines etc. You faced the guest position thru a sort of makeshift wooden rack. On the other side was a table, chair and a guest microphone on a mic stand.
The General Manger, Ben Granger meet me enthusiastically and offered to let me stay in his guest room
in his apartment until I could find a place to live. I gladly accepted the offer.
Ben was a young guy, just a few years older than me and had started as a jock and then moved into
sales. This was his first GM job as far as I know. He had a booming voice, but was quite small, maybe 5'8" or something like that. I learned later that he loved it when he was called upon to fill in for someone on air. you could tell he missed it.
Soon I had located an apartment. It was actually a small studio apartment attached to the landlords house. Ty and Irene Ruva became my first landlords. We shared the two car garage and got along famously.
I set about learning what a program director was supposed to do and handled the noon to 6pm airshift every day. The station was quite typical for that sized market. News and public service, adult contemporty music, local sports play by play, Tradio and on Saturday morning a three hour polka show. -Yikes.
My morning guy was Mark Kohring, from St. Louis. Great guy, we hit it off right away. We shared responsibility for the Polka show. Meaning we alternated working the Saturday morning show 6am to noon, so at least every other weekend, you got the full weekend off. The Polka show began at 9am, so you would
go in, sign on the station and do a normal show from 6 to 9 and then....
Cousin Eddy Nowatarski would stride into the control room, with a stack of polka albums under his arm. He would also have a spiral notebook filled with live copy ( he did his own commercials, live in Polish). Most of
his Polka albums were K tel best of collections and would feature as many as 15 polkas on each side of the
album. Problem was that with that many songs on each side it was really hard to set the needle down in the right place. Invariably Eddie would hand over the album to you and say, cut number 13 please. They you would have to stand on your head with your nose inches from the record to try and count the bands and get it on cut 13. During the show Eddie was totally immersed and practically ignored who ever was running the board for him. He read announcements from the Polish community, did his own news and of course played a lot of polkas. He didn't wear headphones though and wanted the speakers kept low int he studio, so he never actually heard any of the polka music. After a Tim Mark and I agreed that it was much easier to
simply put one polka album on...and then start at the beginning of the side and just play the songs in order, rather than Eddies particular selections. Since he couldn't see into the jock position this seem like a great solution. I know, its gotta be wrong to fool an 80 year old Polish guy, but the bottom line was, nobody listened to this nonsense and Eddie would soon be gone. No not dead, cancelled.
In January of 1979, after a few months of working at WIVQ Vicky and I got married. She moved out
to Peru with me got a job in a nursing home and began building a home for us. She was totally cool with the move. It was a good thing because it was the first of about 13 more moves.
Things were humming along nicely until June of 79 when our radio tower (which was on the roof of our building)took a lightning hit and it was destroyed. We were informed that we would be off the air for 60 days! I gotta give credit tot he little company that owned the station. They kept us on pay role during this period. The problem was that we needed to move our antenna to a larger tower outside of town, but needed some very special balanced phone lines to get the stations signal from the studio to the tower. The local phone company did not have this equipment and it was going to take all that time to get everything in place.
So while we waited I did what any beginner PD would do. I convinced them to change the format to Album Oriented Rock. I said, look let's get rid of Tradio and Cousin Eddie and all that crap and be a hip cool Rock station. Lasalle-Peru is a cool place, lets' give them a cool radio station. They went for it. So during our extended off air time I set about getting records, designing format clocks and dry running
the air staff. We would practice in the on air control room as if we were really on the air. By this time they had purchased new equipment for the studio, repainted and had a carpenter build new cabinets. It was cool.
We decided to rename the station Q-101 and were set to debut on the air as soon as the equipment was in place. The tower site we were using was in huge cornfield just a few miles outside town and as we went out to see it, someone had a brainstorm. Why do we have to wait 60 days....lets just hook up at the base of the tower and broadcast in the cornfield. And that's exactly what we did. We rented one of those construction offices on wheels you see at job sites. We built the studio in the trailer, moved all the equipment out thereand Q-101 went on t he air ahead of schedule...lots of ears tuned in every day. (cornfield, get it).
WIVQ was a great experience, because I was able to treat the station as a laboratory. I experimented and tried new things all with Ben's approval. He seemed to like my ideas and once we made the change to Q-101 that station did really well.
I worked with some wonderful people at IVQ, the amazing Gene Delisio would could do a 15 minute sportscast off the top of his head, with just a quarter sheet of paper with notes. J.C.Hall, who was a production wiz, Bob Grove a local kid who was great on the radio, Ben Granger my first GM, Mark Kohring and of course Cousin Eddie.(He never knew).
During out technical problems I got to know two contract engineers, Gary and Jim who handled all of our technical stuff. I had been at IVQ for about two years and one day Jim told me that he was just back
from Kentucky, where he had picked up a new engineering client. These two guys, who knew nothing about radio had bought the local AM/FM station and were looking for a young guy to run the stations for them. He told me he had recommend me. What! Are you nuts. Run their stations?
He said, look they wanted me to come down for an interview, so why not check it out.
Yup, they hired me. Look out Appalachia here I come.
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