Tag Archives: broadcasting

Newport Tales – Part XV

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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…

Newport Tales – Part XIII

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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…

Newport Tales – Part IX

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March 23, 1995, was a cloudy Thursday. I woke up that morning with great anticipation, but there was a lot of waiting around before we signed on. Friends and family of the owners were arriving from out of town, and a priest was coming to bless our building. Most folks were traveling from Portland — about 130 miles to the northeast and more than a two-hour drive away.

Prior to the big day, Keith and Jack produced an 18-minute sign-on piece to run out of the studio. When that ended they would push the button launching the Schafer automation system, and we’d be off and running. I was scheduled to work my first shift from 9:00 pm to 5:00 am that night.

With loads of time and nothing to do, I wandered down to the station to see what was going on. Flowers and balloons were delivered, and the lobby looked festive. Otherwise, it was fairly quiet with a palpable excitement bubbling under the surface. I took some pictures and headed back home.

My apartment was really close to the beach so I went down there for an afternoon walk, thinking about what was happening. It had been a long journey for me with multiple false starts. I was elated to be on wonderful team and with a start-up operation, which is so rare in the broadcasting business. I knew I was in the right place.

That afternoon I participated in the blessing of the radio station, helping wave incense in all the rooms that were blessed by the Rev. Charles H. Osborn of the Anglican Parish of St. Mark in Portland. This was where Keith and I met in 1993. When the blessing finished, everyone found a seat in the lobby while Jack and Keith entered the studio to begin the sign-on ceremony.

It was an emotional broadcast for them. The first song played was Dance With Me by Orleans — inviting our new listeners to join us on this new radio adventure. Keith spoke of his love for music and the people who influenced him growing up, including his music teachers, which led to In My Life by the Beatles. Keith also explained why the music would sound so much better on KSND than it did on other stations. From there, the broadcast went into Listen to the Music by the Doobie Brothers.

Jack took over at that point. He read a little from Jonathan Livingston Seagull. That led directly into Be by Neil Diamond — the recording artist who wrote the soundtrack for the movie our staff had watched the previous night. There were a few closing remarks, and then it was the moment everyone was waiting for…the revealing of the format. We came screaming out of the sign-on broadcast at 5:30 pm with Gloria Estefan’s Turn the Beat Around. Adult contemporary it was! Licensed to Lincoln City with studios in Newport and transmitting facilities atop Otter Crest, KSND was broadcasting with 6,000 watts of effective radiated power. Game on!

Jack and Keith exited the studio to applause. There was cake and then most people scattered to have dinner. Keith and his family went out for a private celebration. I went to dinner with Norma, one of Keith’s friends from college. Jack stayed at the station as full-time operations got underway. I returned from dinner just in time to start my first shift. Our listening market was Lincoln County, which encompassed the communities of Newport, Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Gleneden Beach, Seal Rock, Waldport, Yachats, Toledo and Siletz — about 50,000 people. A small market station with a large market presentation.

We launched with a window sticker campaign in partnership with the Subway restaurants in Newport and Lincoln City, as well as a TV commercial run on local cable. We were a bomb in the birdcage that was the Central Oregon Coast. Good things were to come.

A few pictures:

More to come in Part X…