Tag Archives: KSND

Newport Tales – Part XV

Posted on by

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 XIV

Posted on by

I wrote about my job as an overnight studio engineer in Part XIII. Living the life of an overnighter — a brutal existence — is today’s topic.

There is a certain antisocial nature to working overnights in radio. Most, if not all of the gig, is worked alone. To an extent, a person starts getting used to that. At home during the day, one sleeps while the world awakes and goes about its activities. In my experience, it’s not a healthy existence. Social contact is important, but it is so limited for an overnighter. As a colleague of mine once said, overnights is a single man’s game. I actually knew of people whose marriages suffered because of the spouse’s graveyard job.

There’s also the complete disruption of circadian rhythms that takes place, which has been linked to obesity, diabetes and depression. I certainly had some struggles with the latter: I worked in a small town where I didn’t know anyone other than my co-workers, and there were few opportunities to meet new people. Gray, dark, rainy and windy were the seasons, and when there was sunshine I slept through it. No fun!

I employed various strategies to improve how I felt. I purchased a full spectrum light bulb that mimicked the sun. Unfortunately it was expensive and a poor substitute for natural light. I tried staying up a little while after getting home in the morning and also attempted going to bed as soon as possible after arriving home — getting to sleep before it got too light outside. Ultimately, the latter worked better. Finally, I reversed my meals, having dinner food when I got home from work in the morning and breakfast food at night. That didn’t work at all! Cheerios before bed in the morning was a lot better than pot roast prior to a daylong snooze.

A problem overnighters face during those day sleeps is the rest of the world working. The biggest irritations I had were apartment inspectors coming in during the day to check appliances and fire detection equipment and maintenance workers sawing through drywall in the common hallway to work on plumbing — noise that could wake the dead. Never mind the sign on my door reading, “Day sleeper. Please don’t disturb.”

I worked the overnight job from March 1995 until early 1996. There was one week in August where temperatures got into the 90s during an extraordinary Oregon Coast heat wave. The average temperature that time of year is 58 degrees, with the high average being 65. It made sleeping in a stuffy apartment difficult, and the high humidity didn’t help. One thing I did enjoy, though, was going to the beach after work. I liked standing in tide pools because they were so warm. That’s unheard of on the coast.

The truth is that I never really adjusted to graveyard. I tried lots of trickery, but my body knew what was going on. I just slipped into an existence of perpetual jet lag and was alone most of the time. My friend and colleague, Cindy, implored me to get involved in the community when I wasn’t sleeping. I loved lighthouses, and became a member of the Oregon Chapter of the United States Lighthouse Society. The problem was that I was the youngest member by at least a decade or more.

The best thing that happened to me was getting promoted to production director, which came about in a sad way that I’ll detail in a later post. The promotion with improved hours certainly changed my disposition and kickstarted my upward career trajectory at KSND.

More to come in Part XV…

Newport Tales – Part XIII

Posted on by

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…