Radio Thanksgiving
And being thankful for radio and its listeners
In my many years in radio, I’ve worked plenty of Thanksgiving holidays. The perks, if you’re lucky, are holiday pay and free food.
At KNX, we always had a full spread — turkey, ham, everything you expect, minus the relatives telling you how you’ve ruined your life and you’re going to hell because you picked the wrong denomination.
There were always a few of us working the holiday at KNX. But I’ve also worked gigs where I was the only person in the building. Maybe an on-call engineer was napping in a back office.
Despite all the hassles — bosses, colleagues, equipment, dead-air nightmares, layoffs — I’ve loved this business. I love the idea of radio. I miss it when I’m not in it.
Someone once asked me why. I said it starts with sitting behind a microphone, just me and my voice, speaking to an audience. Everything I love about radio radiates (yes, I went there) from that one simple spot.
If I could never work in radio again, I’d go get a job in a big store making announcements. Just give me a microphone.
It’s changed a lot over the years. When I started, you needed a license. Ownership caps were strict. The big companies weren’t as big as they are today. Some networks don’t even exist anymore — Mutual, SMN, and others I’ve forgotten.
And the work had physical weight. Pulling records and carts. Handling paper. Ripping wire off a teletype. Walking into the back room to take meter readings.
I remember pulling music and commercial carts, checking the log, stacking them for each hour — and once knocking an entire stack over.
I once kicked a hole in a wall. On purpose. Long story. Prehistoric era.
There was the time our station joined a national campaign to show listeners what life without radio would sound like. After the intro, there was supposed to be 30 seconds of dead air. But we cracked the mic halfway through, complaining about someone talking, then about a fly in the studio we had to swat. Squish. Then James Earl Jones came back in: “Pretty quiet, huh? That’s what life would sound like without the radio.”
Another time, a jock was doing a call-in from her car, and right in the middle of it, she crashed. Minor accident. No injuries. But we had it on tape. We mixed it into the Dave Matthews Band song “Crash.” We played it, and I said, “Look, this is not funny. Sure, she wasn’t hurt, but a traffic accident can be scary and traumatic. This is NOT something to make light of. … Okay, let’s hear it again!”
I’ve done just about everything in radio, not just talking into a mic. I’ve been a producer, a program director, a format creator. I’ve worked every shift there is. Sometimes it was all on me, doing everything alone. Other times — like when I moved from music to news at KFI and KNX — I had a team around me.
I’m between gigs right now, which is getting more common in radio. Yes, I have things in the pipeline. Yes, they’re still in radio.
What else would I do?
I love writing stories and recording music. Those have their own magic. But the magic of sitting in a room, facing a microphone and a control board, entertaining an invisible audience — that’s something different. And irreplaceable.
And to everyone who listened, thank you.