Newport Tales – Part IV

Posted on by

Wind. Rain. Reader board. The trifecta of misery! One of my first jobs at the station was changing the board on a daily basis. We prided ourselves on clever and sometimes adolescent witticisms. Rarely was it simple. I’d trudge out to the sign and put something new on the back and front. At first I thought it would be fun, but the elements and equipment problems quickly ended that notion.

Changing a reader board should be a fairly simple task. Not here. The board was elevated and required a suction cup extension pole for installing the letters. The problem was that the suction cup never worked well. It was rare that I could easily get the previous day’s letters off the board unless the weather was dry — also rare. The wind wasn’t particularly accommodating either with the extension pole.

The suction cup would get wet and barely grab hold of a letter on the board. Then the letter would either stick to the wet reader board or the suction cup would release the letter as I tried to lift it out of the board’s retaining lip. Maddening!

I finally learned the more practical approach of pushing the letters along each retaining row and shoving them off the side of the reader board. I had to pick the letters off the sidewalk or out of the bushes, but this inelegant way doing the job was so much easier and effective. Then, I’d dry off the suction cup and put up new letters for the day.

I was originally hired as the overnight studio engineer and air talent. Once we launched I slipped into that role, but I was still responsible for the sign. I’d come in to relieve Jack, who never understood why I wasn’t thrilled when he handed me the daily message he had been cooking up all afternoon. Frankly, I preferred cleaning the toilets. I stayed drier!

Indeed, changing the reader board was synonymous with getting soaked. It took up to an hour to remove the previous messages on both sides and then put up the new letters — the rain and wind adding to the torment. I quickly learned to bring a change of clothes.

In the early days, our radio station had an ancient automation system that was equipped with reel-to-reel machines. Our music was recorded on multiple reels for playback on each of the four machines. When a reel ended, an audible and visual alarm was set off so that the operator knew to change the tape. I tried to time my battle outside with how much time I had left on the reel closest to ending, but it didn’t always work out.

There was nothing like rain, wind, uncooperative letters, soaked clothing and a strobe light alarm (visible from the street) to send me into a Lieutenant Dan-styled rant aimed at the reader board and perhaps worthy of an Oscar. When we had a serious windstorm in December 1995, it destroyed most of the board. I remember being thrilled. The sign was repaired with the reader board section removed and replaced by plain panels. Good riddance!

A couple of pictures:

Before I get too far into the future, it’s time to back up a bit and introduce the cast of characters we had by sign-on day in March of 1995.

More to come in Part V…

Newport Tales – Part III

Posted on by

During the early days I spent a lot of time with Keith, one of the owners at Elite Broadcasting. We were fairly close in age and had a few things in common. Quite a few weekend evenings were spent at the Bayfront Brewery, now called the Rogue Ales Public House.

Trivia nights with Mr. Bill were in full swing there on Fridays and Saturdays. He put on a great show. Multiple rounds of trivia, music between questions, and fun prize giveaways. Being clever shoestring marketers we used our call letters as a team name, but there were quite a few, shall we say — questionable — team names. And as the night wore on and the kids were kicked out of the pub, the music became more risque, too: Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ L’il Red Riding Hood and Garry Lee and Showdown’s Rodeo Song are a couple tunes that come to mind. My eyes popped out of my head the first time I heard the latter.

Over the years KSND donated a lot of CDs as prizes. I got out of there a few times winning coveted Mr. Bill and Rogue Ales tee-shirts that I still have to this day. Fun times! The only problem was that smoking was allowed in pubs back then, so my clothes always smelled like an ashtray when we left. It’s a toss-up which was worse: the clothes or the smell on the bayfront when the fish processing plant across the street was busy.

It wasn’t just the cigarette smoke or fish smells that were troublesome, either. It stands to reason that on the coast, it’s going to rain. I expected that. What surprised me was that it rained…sideways. The wind was determined to blow rain whatever direction necessary to soak the unlucky person caught outside.

The wind made the weather interesting, though. Like the ocean, it demanded respect. The year after I moved to Newport we had a major windstorm in mid-December of 1995. It actually knocked the power out, which was very rare at the coast. Schools were closed. Buildings were damaged. Trees were blown across Highway 101. The peak gust was 107 miles per hour in town.

The wildest thing to happen was the roof blew off the Izzy’s restaurant during a senior citizen luncheon. The restaurant was unprotected on a small hill at the entrance to Yaquina Head. The roof ended up in pieces at the bottom of the hill along Highway 101. The Portland TV news crews came out for that. For the longest time following the incident and the restaurant’s prolonged closure, the locals called it, Wuzzy’s. No one was hurt, as the manager had sensed the roof was about to go and evacuated the building just before the roof gave way.

A few pictures:

Most of the time the wind wasn’t like that. Sure, I could sometimes walk on the beach, lean backward, and have the wind prop me up. Other times it would be nearly impossible to open the car door, especially at a coastal headland, if the wind was active. Mostly though, it was just a nuisance when coupled with the rain. That killer combination made one of my first jobs at the radio station a nightmare: changing the outdoor reader board.

More to come in Part IV…

Newport Tales – Part II

Posted on by

As mentioned in Part I, I really hit it off with one of the owners at Elite Broadcasting. As a result he included me in a lot of different activities that were going on as we geared up for a March 1995 launch of 95.1 KSND…”The Sound of the Central Oregon Coast.”

Our broadcasting equipment was installed at the tower site in January of that year. The format was a closely guarded secret, but we enjoyed messing with our competitors a bit. They were openly guessing on their airwaves what kind of music we’d play. We were busy testing our audio processor settings and would play anything and everything for an hour or so a day during the process. That kept them wondering!

One night I was invited for a signal drive. Jack, Keith, our engineer Chris, and I all hopped into the truck and drove as far north and then as far south as we could while still receiving a clear signal. We ended up in Tillamook to the north and Florence to the south — 118 miles of coastline. I’ll never forget riding in the back listening to Heart’s Magic Man blast through the speakers as we drove along the ocean thinking I landed a killer gig that hadn’t even started in earnest yet.

We ended the night at Mo’s eating clam chowder and talking about how impressed we were with the equipment. KSND ran a mostly digital audio chain with a great deal of state-of-the-art gear — unheard of in a small media market. We were as clear-sounding as a CD. There was nothing small about the station or its presentation, and we were poised to be players — big fish in a little pond.

Not too long after this I got a call from Keith one night. Our music service discs had arrived. Did I want to come over and listen? Uh…yeah! I spent that evening with both Jack and Keith listening to a lot of the songs that we’d play in our format. We were going to be an adult contemporary station, but we were going to rock, too.

A few pictures:

For now this story is more about the job and less about my feelings on Newport, but they are intertwined. I have vivid memories of what took place during my five years on the coast and the people with whom I spent so much time. A lot of that time was spent outside of work, too.

More to come in Part III…