As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, Newport has an emotional tug for me. A lot of interesting things happened during my five years on the Oregon Coast. One area where I really struggled was the overnight shift, which was my permanent position once KSND was on the air in March of 1995.
While it’s really not the case anymore, back then a radio rookie usually started his full-time career in overnights. Mistakes could be made there without any serious repercussions while the broadcaster worked on his craft. It was all a part of paying one’s dues.
My solo shift was 9:00 pm to 5:00 am Monday through Saturday, eventually changing to Sunday through Friday once we hired weekend part-timers. In the early days there wasn’t much to do. I changed reel-to-reel tapes on the Schafer 903E automation, recorded the nightly weather forecast, altered the witticisms on the outdoor reader board, cleaned the tape machine heads, and programmed the sequential electronic memory on the automation. Exciting stuff.
Sunday nights I had a lot of time to do maintenance cleaning of the equipment while we ran a syndicated ambient electronica show called, Musical Starstreams, on digital audio tape. The music was a vast departure from what we normally played, and the host, Forest, always sounded as though he had been hitting the waterpipe all week. Weird stuff. The show ran from 10:00 pm to midnight.
I also spent some time writing commercials and handling minor production recording duties. While this eventually became a full-time job, in the early days there wasn’t a lot of that work to do. The only other major duty I had was restarting the music rotations at 3:00 am. This kept songs from playing at the same times each day and week.
Overnights did have its odd charms. While larger market stations got calls during the night, we received very few. A stranger one that I remember was a construction worker calling me around midnight and again at 2:00 am to see if I’d dedicate a song to his ex-girlfriend. She lived in Idaho, so I don’t know how this was supposed to help, but he was nice enough — really talkative for that late at night. I had nothing else pressing to do so we chatted. He liked his Journey songs, but Open Arms seemed a silly request since it was his former girlfriend we were talking about.
Some moments I didn’t appreciate as much. Our studio was in a former bank building. On occasion someone would use the drive-through window area as a turnaround, which would trip the alert bell. That always spooked me when it happened in the middle of the night. I’d open the studio door a crack — peeking out to make sure a car wasn’t just sitting there. The window glass was bulletproof, but still!
The melancholy kicked in while watching the laundromat across the street close at night. The owner would come by and clean the building. Once he left, that’s when I felt most alone. A few cars and big rigs would pass by on Highway 101, but it was fairly quiet in that part of town. That’s when I’d wonder if I’d ever get off the overnight shift.
More to come in Part XIV…