No way in hell am I spending the night here...

Manchester Ky turned out to be a tough place to live. Nice people for the most part, but very isolated and backwards in many ways. I hired quite a few "outsiders" to work at the radio station and we all had a tough time getting used to the way things were. A very poor place, with not much middle class. Lots of poor people and plenty of quite well off folks who had made money in coal or oil. Manchester was the only
real population center for Clay county so everyone in the county came to town to shop and take care of all their business. I guess when you live in an isolated place you come to accept some things that others mind find hard. There was lots of open corruption in the local government, sheriff's department, school system and elections.

Vicky had also told me about a get together she had with some women she met through one of our neighbors. At some point all these ladies began comparing their handguns they had in their purses. They kept asking Vicky, what kind of gun she had. Of course Vicky had no gun to show these ladies and they were quite upset and surprised. They advised her that in Kentucky, a woman needed a gun, cause if you caught your man cheating, you could kill him and it was legal!!

 Uh, Vicky is still un-armed. As far as I know.

Election night 1980. We were all excited because we had prepared what we thought was going to be an outstanding night of coverage. All hands on deck. Sales folks, office workers, everybody was working
either in the station answering phones or stationed at a local precinct ready to call in reports.

I have always loved putting together election coverage on the radio, but it's a wonder based on how things went in 1980 in Manchester.

We began the evening, covering all the local races with reports from the field. Very detailed reports that included vote counts from each precinct for all the local races. As the night wore on I asked one
of my guys about something I had seen on the way into the station that evening. I told him that I saw
an RV camper parked near the high school and their was a long line of coal miners standing in line by the front door of the camper. At the rear door a steady stream of miners coming out. What was up with that?'
He smiled and said, look, the high school is a polling place and that's just Jimmy (remember Jimmy) paying for votes. I said what! Yeah, he went on, the go in the front door, get a twenty and he tells them who to vote for and they come out the back. Then they go in and vote. That's just the way it works 'round here.

I was floored. Meantime things were heating up with our coverage. More reports coming in, plus national action on the presidential race. So we made the decision to cut back a little on the vote totals from each precinct to allow more time for other matters. This went on for about an hour when one of
our phone folks found me and said, Uh, Jimmy is on the phone for you. Of course I said, you mean that Jimmy? yup.

I went into my office and picked up the phone and said Hello. Jimmy said, you the manager up there? I said yes sir I am, what can I do for you? I'll tell you what you can do, you can put those precinct totals back
on the G.D. radio!! I paid good money for those votes and I want to hear the totals in every single precinct or I'm gonna be paying your and your family a visit.

After all these years when I think about this, sometimes I wish I had told him to go F*** himself. But I didn't. We put the reports back on the air, but it was very discouraging for my staff for sure.

In addition to these scrapes with the local gun toting crooks, I had other negative experiences in Manchester, due mostly to my in-experience. I was determine to make both radio stations sound great and do good work in the community and I had the full backing of the two Williams.

But a lot of the changes we made upset some people. Like changing the times we aired the obituaries. Seems ironic I know. They went crazy about that.

Then I had to have a meeting with a local baptist minister to try and get him to tone down his remarks during his sermon, that we carried live each Sunday morning. He was always attacking the Catholics during his sermon and the local Priest got pretty upset. So I met with the good Reverend. He did not take kindly to
my suggestions that maybe he could ease up on the brothers and sisters down the road.

Once news of my visit with the man of the cloth got out we encountered an advertiser boycott, organized by you know who of course. Plus I was starting to get personal threats, both on the phone and mail.

Then one morning a found a note on my car as I got ready to leave for work. The note said :

gee wouldn't it be too bad if something happened to that new baby of yours

Erin was just a few months old at that point and of course this infuriated me and scared the heck out of Vicky. I went to the owners with this and their solution was to rush through a conceal/carry permit and give me a .32 revolver with a really nice holster that I wore in the small of my back.

I'm very passionate about what I do, but I am not a crusader. It was clear that Manchester was not a fit for me or my family. Most of the folks I had hired from the outside to come and work had already left because they couldn't deal with the culture shock of Manchester.

I talked to my folks back in Rushford and I remember my dad saying : you need to get the hell out of there.
He said, move back home, don't worry that you don't have a job, we'll figure something out.

I began updating my resume, making tapes and sending them out furiously before I resigned, hoping that
this wasn't going to be the end of my radio career.

Meanwhile my dad, my brother Denny and his wife Pam were on their way to Manchester with a pickup truck and U haul trailer so we could get the hell out of dodge.

We had manged to last just a year and although it was not a great personal experience, professionally it was. I made a lot mistakes, learned from them and got to do a lot of things as a General manger that would
give me excellent perspective in years to come.

On the day of our departure it was hot and our second floor apartment presented a challenge with the furniture and all our stuff. By early evening we were loaded up and ready to go and resting in the apartment, drinking water.

I looked around and said, well guys, we're all really tired do you want to get the air mattress out and spend the night and get a fresh start in the morning?

My brother who had been quiet the whole time looked me square in the eye and said, no way in hell am I spending the night here! I've had the creeps ever since we rolled into town.

We got into our vehicles and headed for home.

Next time: You guys were actually living on Potato and green bean soup?

If you air that story one more time, I'm gonna fire bomb your radio station!

So my engineer friend hooked me up with the new owners of WWXL AM/FM in Manchester Kentucky. They didn't know much about radio and wanted a young manager to get the station up and operating like a
real radio station. William Allen Hensley and William Hugh Bishop both local businessmen bought the station mainly because they wanted one problem fixed immediately. William Allen had built a new house up on the side of the same mountain that the station's studio's were located. His new house had all the bells and whistles including a fancy intercom system that allowed conversations room to room throughout the entire house. But since the house was fairly close to the radio station and the AM ground system was old and in need of repair, the only thing you could hear on the intercom system was WWXL AM, blasting in every room. He was upset and after numerous calls to the station owners, he determined the best way to fix the problem was to simply buy the station. So he and his buddy William Hugh did just that.

My job, was to modernize the station. While William Hugh and William Allen didn't know a lot about radio, they did know that the station didn't sound good, was a mess and needed a lot of work. They were willing to invest in new equipment and construction to improve the place and I got to do some cool stuff. I bought a new FM transmitter, an automation system for the AM, designed and built a new FM studio and totally revamped the production rooms. It was a blast. Here I was 23 years old, writing checks to equipment suppliers for $30,000.

WWXL was basically a simulcast situation, sort of. They broadcast live on the AM a mix country and pop music with live DJ"s working shifts from 5am to midnight. The FM consisted of two Auto Reversing Reel to Reel tape decks. They had two 12 hour tapes featuring elevator music. Each day they would start one of the tapes at 6am, it would play to the end and auto reverse playing another 12 hours of Montavani and the Twin Piano's of Ferrante and Tiesher. They the next day they would use the other tape and so on and so on. There was NO FM studio and no way to play commercials, so they simply rigged up the AM studio so that anytime they played commercials on the AM, it would also play them on the FM, even though it would be in the middle of a song. This way they could charge advertisers more for getting the FM coverage. I've never run across another scheme as dumb as this.

So after fixing the ground system and making William Allen happy with his WWXL free intercom system, we built a new FM studio, hired some folks and put on a Top 40 station. We automated the AM and did country plus local news and of course the all important Obituaries. Sponsored by one of the 9 local funeral homes. God forbid you leave out any kin when reading the obituaries.

Lots of folks in area listened to a Knoxville Tn. station WOKI which featured a very popular night time DJ who called himself Brother John.  Everyone in town seemed to know about him, so what did William Allen and William Hugh do? They hired him. The promised he would be the morning man and PD of the FM station and promised him the world plus a piece of the station. I didn't find out about this until after the deal was done. One Monday morning Brother John showed up at the radio station wearing dirty jeans, a t shirt and sandals. He had a sleazy looking girl with him who he introduced as his girlfriend/co host. I was dumbfounded. I guess the 2 Williams thought they had pulled a real big time play, but after meeting with this guy for about an hour I think we mutually decided that we would not be working together.

So, Brother John and has co host headed back for Knoxville. I called William Allen and told him the meeting didn't go well, and to his credit he supported me and said it was my call. That night Brother John went back on the air at WOKI like nothing ever happened. 

Oops, he had signed a contract with us that included a non compete, meaning he couldn't work in radio in a 100 mile radius for one year if he left WWXL. So even though he quit after only one day, the non compete was in full effect. We ended up in Federal court in Knoxville and we won the case and Brother John had to leave WOKI and sit out working int he market for one year. While on the stand in Federal court I got the worst case of dry mouth of my life. It's very intimidating.

I assembled a staff that included some local folks but also some folks from outside Ky. To say that living there was a culture shock is a understatement. My news director was a young guy right out of college who was eager to make a name for himself. He worked hard to cover local news and was doing a good job. Everything seems to be fine until one day we got wind of a murder in town. Some local truck drivers had organized a strike for better wagers from a local Coal company. They had parked their trucks in a sort of blockade in from of the company headquarters. The guys who ran the company, I'll call him Jimmy (since I'm now sure if he is still alive) came out the main gate to confront the truckers. He never said a word, he simply walked up the first drive standing by his truck and shot him in the head. According to witnesses he them calmly walked back in to his office. The rest of the truckers got into their trucks and left. The strike was over.

I learned shortly after this that this guy had been up on murder charges a couple times before, but a jury never convicted him. The word was that he would either buy the jury or intimidate them and that, that was likely to happen this time. We had a young prosecutor in town who decided he was finally going to "get" Jimmy. He petitioned the court for a change of venue to another city. My news director came to my office to let me know he had just gotten the word on change of venue story and that he was going to break into programming on both stations with the bulletin. I told him to go ahead.

Within minutes the phone rang, the receptionist buzzed me and said "Jimmy" is on the phone for you.
That Jimmy? I said. She confirmed and put him through. It was a short conversation. He simply said
"If you air that change of venue story one more time, I'm gonna fire bomb your radio station"
And with that our days as crusading news reporters came to a screeching halt. I was assured by everyone in the building that he would indeed make good on his threat. I decided I would do everything in my power to avoid any more phone calls from "Jimmy".

That was not to be the case, details in my next time.