WE DIDN'T KNOW YOU GUYS WERE LIVING ON GREEN BEAN AND POTATO SOUP

After leaving Kentucky under a hail of gunfire, we returned to Rushford and moved in with my folks. Throughout my bumpy ride in radio my folks have always been there to help and support us. Plus they have always encourage me and reminded me many times that "things have a way of working out for the best:". Of course they are right, but it doesn't always feel that way when bad things happen.

Anyway we licked our wounds in Rushford for the summer, played with Erin, who was just a few months old, and waited for the phone to ring with another radio opportunity. I had spent the final month in Kentucky furiously sending out resumes and air check tapes hoping that the nightmare in Appalachia wouldn't be the end of my radio career.

I spent the summer working for my brother and his contracting business and I'll always be grateful for the job. It wouldn't be the last time he offered my work in between radio jobs.

In mid August I got a phone call from David Weinfeld.  He said he got my package, liked my stuff and wanted to meet and talk about a potential Program Director job.

Vicky and I drove to Geneva NY a couple days later, on a Sunday, and meet with David at his radio station. WECQ was located in a Quonset hut building in Geneva. We listened to the station on the drive in and I was very impressed. It was a great sounding station for such a small market and I began to get a real good feeling about our meeting.

David greeted us and took us into the station and into his office. It was cluttered and small. Stacks of papers littered his desk. The walls were cork board and were covered with papers held in place by stick pins. We sat on a small love seat just inches from the front of his desk and he began telling us about a radio station he was planning to buy. WIEZ was in Oneonta NY, a small college town about midway between Binghampton and Albany. David said the station was in bad shape and the owners wanted him to recommend some people who could run the station while the sale was completed.

David told me he had already recommended a man named John Hogan to be the General manager and after a couple of hours of discussion he offered me the job, pending approval of the actual owners.

Vicky and I drove back to Rushford with the happy news and began preparing for another radio adventure. I left for Oneonta in the last week of September with a plan to get set up, find us a place to live and then get Vicky and Erin to join me as soon as possible.

What I found in Oneonta is hard to describe. WIEZ was a FM station at 103 and was truly in bad shape. The facility was located on the second floor of a building in downtown. There was a college bar on the first floor and apartments on the third floor. I met the new General Manger and he began the tour. There was an on air control room with a console and two turntables. No cart machines or reel to reel tape machines, no production room. How to we play commercials I asked John? We don't have any he said.

John then explained that the station had been a wedding present to the daughter of the family that owned the station. She and her new husband were going to move to Oneonta from NY City and run it. Quickly the daughter realized she didn't want to live in Oneonta, or be married to her new husband. His name was Oscar and he decided to station and run the station. He did. He ran it into the ground. Oscar new nothing about radio except that you could get pretty good money for a lot of the equipment in the station. So he began selling off equipment and letting employees go. Soon is was down to Oscar and three part time announcers and that was it. No commercial were sold, Oscar maintained by selling equipment off.

Oscar also discovered that college co eds were intrigued by the line "would you like to go upstairs and see my radio station". Delivered of course on the ground floor in the college hang out. We knew this because there were at least one hundred beer glasses from the bar sitting on every table, window sill and level surface in the station when we walked in.

Oscar had taken up residence in apartment directly above the station. The apartment was part of the station's lease. The power had been shut off, so Oscar had knocked a hole in the wall into the adjacent apartment and run extension cords into his room so he would have electricity. Thankfully the next door apartment was vacant. This apartment was of course the final desination for the radio station tour's Oscar was running.

At some point the family had caught on and booted Oscar. They were in the process of selling the station to David, but wanted to get the station back up and running in the interim.

So, John and I rode to the rescue. As we sat in his office trying to formulate a plan, one of the college students came into the office and notified us that he and his two co workers were starting class on Monday and would no longer be available to work. Our entire air staff gone, just like that. They had each been working 6 hour shifts seven days a week. 6am to Noon, Noon to 6pm and 6 to midnight.

This was on a Wednesday, which meant we needed to get something together by Monday or we would be off the air.

John and I had both come into town without our families and decided we would move into the apartment above the station, sleep on the floor and get to work.

Our initial plan went like this.
John would get up each morning and sign the station on at 5:30. He would work on air until 9. Then he would go upstairs, take a shower put on a shirt and tie and hit the streets to sell commercials. I would take over and work 9 to 4pm. John would then work 4 to 7 and I came back and worked 7pm to 2 am. We wanted to keep the station on until 2am because the other FM station in town stayed on as well.

The format was Top 40 and we immediately got some attention in town. Hey we were commercial free and playing a lot better music selection that Oscar had put together. John was getting some interest and began selling some commercials, which we had to do live of course since we had no way to record anything.

We worked this unbelievable schedule for the first month. Eventually we got some old equipment in and could record and play back commercials and as John began to put some money on the books we got permission to hire one more person. We hired a guy from the other FM station and added him to the on air line up. John still signed the station on, the new guy worked 9-3, I worked 3-8 and he came back to work 8 to 2am. We also added a receptionist slash sales person along the way. The four of us worked our butts off
to make this station happen.

At this point I had found a trailer to rent just outside of town and Vicky and Erin joined me. We moved our meager collection of furniture into the single wide and began to settle into life in Oneonta. It was nice to sleep in a real bed, rather than a sleeping bag on the floor above the station.

Johns was having some real success putting money on the station. Let's face it, it was generating zero dollars when we took over. Within about six weeks we were actually making a few thousand dollars and things began to look up.

I certainly wasn't making much money, but we got by. We met some nice folks in the trailer park who invited us to dinner often and that helped. It was a very lean time however and I remember digging through the car seats to find enough change to by milk for Erin a few times.

In October my folks came to visit and brought us some items out of the garden including fresh green beans and potatoes. After they left Vicky made a big batch of soup out of this stuff and we lived on it for a couple of weeks. Years later I told my mom and dad that story and my mom almost started crying. She said, we never knew things were that bad.

Despite the scrimping to get along I felt like John and I made a good team and that once the sale was done and David was in charge we were going to make a go of the station and perhaps be able to sell it in a few years for a lot of money.

By the time November rolled along we were actually selling a reasonable number of spots and it was beginning to feel like a real radio station. I was having a blast and things were improving almost daily.

I guess that was our fatal mistake.

Our quick turnaround of the station caused the owners to decide that maybe they would keep the station instead of selling. They further decided that John and I couldn't be trusted, since David had recommend us and one week before Thanksgiving they fired us both.

Welcome to the world of idiot radio station owners. High and dry again. At least no gunfire was involved this time.

Next time, The Job that changed my career forever, in a good way.