Our original group went through changes quickly at KSND after signing on in March 1995. (Quick refresher on the originals and their roles: Jack [owner-general manager], Keith [owner-operations manager], Bonnie [reception-traffic], Corey [sales], Paul [sales], Clarke [weeknight studio engineer], Cindy [weekend studio engineer].)
Before long, Cindy moved from weekends to full-time days, and we hired a couple of kids younger than me a short time later. Summer joined our staff while going to school, hosting a program we designed called Sunday Morning Coffee. The music was smooth jazz and laid the foundation for what would later be a costly misstep in our station’s programming. Gary joined us as a weekend overnighter.
Other staff changes also took place. Paul abruptly left his sales position to go back to running the Sandbar and Grill with his wife. Being a well-liked and valuable member of the team, that was both a surprise and a disappointment. Not too long after he left, though, Cheryl joined our staff. She had worked in the market for quite a while and brought an established client list with her, which we hadn’t had up to that point.
If I didn’t make it clear in my previous posts, working overnights was an unpleasant experience, but I was off that shift by early 1996, taking a promotion to production director — the creative force behind our commercials and on-air promotional material. I had made Keith proud during December of 1995, picking up the slack on production that needed to be taken care of for our first huge on-air contesting event.
The promotion was called, A K-Sound Christmas. We stockpiled a boatload of CDs in the prize vault to be given away over a two-week period. Whenever a contest sounder was played, the first five callers each won a CD from a particular artist. We ran the contests several times a day. My job was producing those sounders, which included snippets from hit singles on each CD we were giving away. The sounders invited listeners to call and win…NOW!
I had fun with the production. We still had a limited sound effects library and little production music. I was making a lot of the sound effects on the fly with whatever I could find in the building. Santa coming down the chimney with a big bag of CDs was me grunting in front of a microphone and scraping Styrofoam blocks over a ski jacket I was wearing. It worked! As I recall, Santa had an accident flying down the chimney too fast and landed with a big crash in the fireplace. Theater of the mind.
This work really helped launch me into the new 3:00 am to 11:00 am shift as production director, which might not sound great, but I loved it. I lived just a few blocks away, so I could get up late, take a long afternoon nap, and then go to bed late. It gave me plenty of free time and more importantly, a life. The change made a huge difference in my mental state and allowed me to meet people and socialize.
The vacated weekday overnight shift was offered to Kiera, who had worked for one of our competitors. I believe she may have been part-time on the weekends for us, but going full-time meant she would get health insurance. We were the only station in town that offered that to employees — fully paid.
As much as things were looking up as we began growing, the station was in some trouble. We were deep in debt from start-up costs and hadn’t reached the point of being able to pay monthly operating expenses. Frankly, we weren’t even close. We had to rely on the silent third owner who had paid most of the bills up to that point. A major incident in late summer of 1995 turned everything on its head in that regard. That’s when we all met Will.
More to come in Part XVI…