Tag Archives: apartment living

Newport Tales – Part XIV

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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 XI

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I met Kei at Shady Pines sometime in 1995. She was an interesting Japanese woman, in her early 60s, who moved into the apartment across from mine. Kei was divorced and had relocated from Orange County, California. Before leaving, she sold a successful business and most of her possessions. She didn’t talk a lot about her family, but I was under the impression they were a little surprised by the move.

Kei took an interest in both KSND and me, thinking I was very “together” for my age, and we quickly became friends. While working overnights at the station, I had to stay in town Christmas weekend of 1995, and since she didn’t have any family around, she came over to my place to celebrate the holiday. I put up a tree, and we exchanged cards. It was fun.

Eventually, I moved from overnights and had a schedule more conducive to socializing. I had made a few friends closer to my age by then, but none of them got off work at 11:00 am and most had families, so I looked for other things to do. Kei was up for road trips, so we did a little traveling up and down the coast. I drove. She bought dinner. That was a good deal for a starving radio guy. She even introduced me to Japanese food at a little place called Yuzen Japanese Cuisine in the tiny coastal community of Seal Rock — not exactly a place one would expect to find such food!

My colleagues laughed themselves into a collective coma over jokes about this relationship. Kei became known as Mrs. Livingston — a reference to the old sitcom, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. For the most part I ignored it, but the harassment was endless. That’s what happens when a 25-year-old somehow moves into a seniors-only housing community.

Despite the age difference, Kei was a good sounding board. She listened to my tales of dating disasters. There were many; it was a small town! She was encouraging but also realistic — sometimes a little too much. That was a bone of contention between us, but it was nice to have an adventurous neighbor who was young at heart and also wise.

What’s unfortunate is that this friendship eventually flew off the rails before I left the coast. Kei and I, like many friends, didn’t always get along. She had a temper! When something or someone bothered her, she got a scary look and lashed out. One day I ended up on the business end of her wrath.

I had recently gone through a difficult period in my life but felt like I had moved past it. By this time, I was doing a morning show at KSND. One day I came home after a show that went really well. Kei did not agree. She left a rather rude message on my answering machine, critiquing my performance and letting me know I was falling apart. She wasn’t home, so I left a message on her machine, making it clear I didn’t appreciate her unsolicited rant. If she had a problem with the show, she could talk to me face-to-face. There was a little irony there, and in retrospect, I wish I had ignored her message. I laid down to take nap. I heard her come home, though, and one minute later my phone rang. I let the machine get it, and she artistically belted a long, drawn out f-bomb  — encouraging me to do something uncharitable to myself. If Whitney Houston had sung in profanities, this is how it would have sounded.

I jumped out of bed and stomped across the hall. She answered the door with her eyes firing bullets. I apologized for being testy in my message, but she had none of it — slamming the door. Hmmm. I tried going back later, but she made it clear our friendship was over. Just like that. It disappointed me because friends have disagreements, but they should be able to work through problems. It got weirder though…

Months later I was talking with a Newport police officer who started dating a colleague of mine. We hadn’t met, but he knew of me. He was the officer on the call when Kei apparently contacted police to tell them I was listening to her thoughts through the electrical outlets. Their advice to her — neither helpful nor professional — was to cover the outlets with aluminum foil, which she did.

This incident, her anger, and the strange move she made to Newport made me realize there was a lot more going on with her. Compassion didn’t work though. She refused to have anything to do with me, regardless of gestures I made, so I stopped trying. Then one day, not too long before I left the coast, her family came from California to move her out of the apartment and presumably back home. The family smiled at me; she gave me one last look of death, and that was it. I never saw her again. We knew each other four years.

While this was a disappointing life experience, there were more to come in Newport. Quite a few life lessons were learned in the little coastal town. Some of them, though, were a lot more humorous. My dating disaster attempt with “Bank Girl” was one of those.

More to come in Part XII…

Newport Tales – Part X

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There are a lot more stories to tell about KSND, and I’ll get to them. My Newport experience, however, also included various elements of small town coastal living. Some of those were just as entertaining as the radio station antics. For starters, there was the apartment complex where I lived.

I should never have been admitted into Pinewood Manor. It was for adults 55 years and up, which I didn’t know when I applied.  It was also Section 8 housing. I did qualify for that because my salary, like most radio broadcasting compensation — especially in small markets — was paltry. For whatever reason the husband and wife management team let me in, and I secured all 482 square feet of a one-bedroom flat.

When I got the apartment, I didn’t know that the radio station was only five blocks away. Perfect! The beach was six blocks away. Even better! The city’s small sewage facility was right next door. Not so good! Pinewood Manor was centrally located in town, so despite the odor on some days, I couldn’t have asked for a better place. It was a couple miles from Yaquina Bay — home of the fishing fleet. On nights when it wasn’t windy or rainy, I could hear the foghorn in the bay and the sea lions barking faintly in the distance on Bachelor Island and Bachelor Row. (The males hang out from August to June. They swim to California in July to breed with the females, which remain south year-round.) I loved falling asleep to those comforting sounds and miss them to this day.

Living in what amounted to a retirement community had its benefits. I was treated as a grandchild and had a few meals I didn’t have to cook on my own. Perhaps my neighbors heard the smoke alarms in my apartment? The vent exhaust fan in the kitchen was terrible in that it was actually a bathroom utility fan and couldn’t clear anything that wasn’t steam. On more than one occasion I smoked out the kitchen and living room while cooking with olive oil. The unit would smell like smoky ground beef for the next several days.

I had some interesting neighbors during my time at Pinewood Manor, which my sister perpetually referred to as “Shady Pines.” There was John, who took a liking to KSND and me. He had conspiracy theories about Newport and “had to get out of town.” He sold me his coffee table before leaving. There was Jim, the Korean War veteran, who stood outside every day smoking and watching people. He started talking to me after several months. We had the same build, and he gave me a really nice topcoat that he had rarely used. There was Vikki, who saw me as her younger brother. She was one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. Juanita, downstairs, was the friendliest neighbor. She always saw me pull up in the parking lot and waved. Finally, there was Kei, the Japanese woman who was my most immediate neighbor — the one with a fiery temper.

The on-site managers who came through were also intriguing. I don’t remember their names, but the husband and wife who admitted me were an interesting pair. She was gruff. He was friendly but a little clumsy. He almost killed himself in my apartment while installing a bedroom window blind. A total John Ritter sitcom moment. He didn’t have his ladder close enough to the window. He lost his balance, but instead of falling forward he fell backward. He narrowly missed the nightstand on the way down and fell into the side of the bed, which was on castors and rolled backward as he flailed around trying to catch his balance. CRASH! The one-man wrecking crew survived without injury after making a mess of things, but he didn’t come by to do much maintenance after that. The incident was equal parts horrifying and hysterical. I was just glad to have renters insurance.

My favorite manager was Iris, who came on board after the husband and wife were transferred. She was a friendly manager and loved by the residents. She always wanted me to meet her daughter. That happens when the youngest resident in the building is 25!

After Iris, it was Gary. He kept the place running but had a bit of an edge being from New York. “Shady Pines” was his first assignment as a primary manager, and he wanted to make a good impression. He was the one who told me I should never have been able to get a rental contract there being under 55.

We were an interesting collection of residents and managers. Throw in weekly ambulance visits, Wheel of Fortune wafting down the halls, and an infamous pink paint job. (When deciding to repaint the building, the paint swatch was apparently a little different than the actual paint color. Looked like a Pepto-Bismol industrial spill. Hard to miss.) That was Pinewood Manor. The place had character…and characters! One of them was my neighbor across the hall.

More to come in Part XI…