When I started at KSND in December of 1994 it was Jack, Keith, me and the office furniture. Once the new year was underway and the tower site completed, Keith and Jack began hiring the rest of our start-up staff.
While Jack and Keith were owners, they were actively involved in the day-to-day operations. Jack took the role of general manager, which meant he was largely in charge of the business and sales end of the company. Keith was the operations manager, overseeing programming and its staff. Both worked six to seven days a week at launch and pulled operations shifts, too.
I was the first employee, tapped to work overnights from 9:00 pm to 5:00 am Monday night through Saturday morning. This involved changing tapes when a reel ended, doing voice work, and producing commercials. (And of course, changing the reader board!) Basically a studio engineer and air talent. Keith was on from 5:00 am to 1:00 pm while also handling his regular duties. Jack had the 1:00 pm to 9:00 pm shift in addition to his normal responsibilities.
We still needed at least one weekend operator, a receptionist-traffic director (person who schedules commercials), and a couple of sales people. Enter the rest of the cast…
Paul, who owned the Sandbar and Grill in the Nye Beach neighborhood, was our first sales person. A great guy who let us tease him about the bar, which at one time had been a somewhat frightening dive. He turned it into something much nicer and welcoming for families — constructing a two-story ocean view addition in the back with deck. It wasn’t just a place for locals anymore.
We had one other sales person who joined us. I believe her name was Corey, but I’m not certain. She didn’t stay with us long but was one of the originals.
Bonnie was hired as our receptionist-traffic director. A very warm human being. We got along famously. She had a daughter about my age, and in many ways Bonnie was a surrogate mother — my “coastal mom.”
Cindy came on board as our weekend talent, which eventually morphed into a full-time weekday job. She had been a highly visible personality at several big stations in Portland but had wanted to live on the coast — moving there in the early 1990s. Very classy and kind…with a crazy laugh and a wild sense of humor. If laughter is the best medicine, she added years to my life!
We discovered quite a bit about Cindy one weekend early in our existence. There wasn’t a lot of work to do those days other than changing tapes and updating the weather. We had a nice studio, a couple of sound effects CDs and a microphone. Very bare bones, but that was all Cindy needed. She was great at doing character voices.
One Saturday morning she entertained herself (and us when we heard the tape) making an off-air skit of a character named Tugboat Annie, who didn’t like underwear and had a flatulence problem. That seafaring hag of the high seas was the complete antithesis of Heart’s Dreamboat Annie, a song on our playlist that Cindy was parodying. Completely ruined the tune for me. Thanks, Tugboat! The fact that Cindy had cooked this up was almost has funny as the skit itself. Just didn’t see it coming!
That was us. The dream team. Or at least the best that pocket change could buy. So what were we actually doing before the March 1995 sign-on? I was walking around with a cork in my mouth. Literally.
More to come in Part VI…