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…

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…