Work Enemy: Dod

I knew Dod as a fellow Radio/TV student at Eastern New Mexico University. The first class we shared together was during my junior year when we were both in audio production. At that time, he was working where I used to work, at KENM/KNIT in Portales. He next worked at KCLV in Clovis. I don't know what happened, but he stopped working there and Tod, who was a friend of his, hired him to work part-time at KZZO in early 1987.

I never really thought he was that good of a DJ. He didn't have a standout personality and his voice kind of had a dull edge to it. It always sounded like he had a dirty rag covering the microphone when he was on the air. But he was able to do the announcing, stick to the format and didn't try any funny stuff, like breaking format or making sexually suggestive comments.

We had a sudden change in our staffing in which the guy who worked six to midnight was going to be doing the morning show. Dod was hired full time and placed in the slot. I lobbied hard to get that shift and they decided to give it to me, but made me wait until after my planned vacation to officially take over the slot. Dod worked that six to midnight shift for about three weeks until I came back. He then went to the overnight shift.

We had staffing turmoil again when Tod and Daz quit their jobs. I thought I was going to get to move into the afternoon drive shift, but Jid gave it to Dod. I really didn't have a problem with that. I enjoyed the six to midnight shift as it was much better than overnights. I found out later that the reason why they put Dod there was because he had a tendency to pretend he was an engineer and try to fix things when he was left alone at the station at night. He would wind up wrecking the equipment if there wasn't someone there in the station to keep an eye on him. Dod was also named the Production Manager.

Dod did something that messed up a good deal for the staff at the station. This couple started a business making submarine sandwiches. (This was just a few months before the first Subway opened in the area.) They purchased advertising on our station. I went there to buy a sandwich. They told me the sandwich was free because they were doing business with us. They did this in hopes of getting us to mention them more on the air for "free" advertising. It actually worked. I went down to the station and told Dod they were letting us have free sandwiches. I said it was probably a good idea if we didn't hit them up more than once a week. I came in a couple of days later, and he had one of their sandwiches in the studio. I didn't think much of it. A couple of days later, I saw he had another sandwich at 3pm. I asked the Program Director if Dod had gotten the sandwich before coming in to work. He said no, Dod had them DELIVER the sandwich and he had been doing that every day for the past week. He also told me that everyone at the station had been trying to get him to stop doing that, but he just kept on calling them up and they'd still deliver the sandwich. Sure enough, we stopped getting the free sandwiches about a week later.

One thing that irritated me about Dod was something he did every single day on his shift. If we had songs that we weren't allowed to play until after 3pm, he would play all of them during his 3:00 hour. We were supposed to rotate them. You might not think this was a problem, but imagine being that one person who happens to tune in every day at 3pm and always hear the exact same songs at the exact same times. There wasn't anything I could do about it, but he certainly didn't realize how bad it made us sound.

We only ever had disagreements on music and the way I was handling things as Music Director. If he didn't like a new song that I added, he would gripe about it every single time he played the song when I was in the vicinity. He would continue to do this even though those songs climbed the charts and hit #1. Dod liked to think he was the ultimate expert on music and was constantly trying to get me to add certain songs to the current playlist and place some of his favorite songs from the 1970s (from his own collection) into our older song rotations. He would tell me, "Jid said we could add these songs into the mix." I'd say, "Well, Jid didn't tell me anything about that." The next thing I knew, Jid would come up and tell me to put those songs in.

The biggest fight we got into over music had to do with the year-end list of the Top 108 songs for 1987. I had developed a rather scientific method for determining what the top hits were locally by using our weekly playlists. When I came out with the list, he got all upset that "Rock Steady" by the Whispers wasn't the #1 song for the year. I guess it was his favorite. He claimed he got more requests for that song than any other the whole year. It was in the Top 20 of my list, but there was no way it was going to be #1 locally. (It didn't even hit #1 nationally.) He strongly suggested that I change my countdown rankings. I wasn't going to do that. I'd worked on that list for a week. New Year's Eve came, and I brought in the records and tapes for the countdown. Dod looked at the list and yelled at me, "YOU DIDN'T CHANGE THIS! I TOLD YOU 'ROCK STEADY' WAS SUPPOSED TO BE #1!" Fortunately, he was only going to be able to air numbers 100 - 40. The rest would run after his shift was over at 6pm, which meant he wasn't going to be able to make any sudden changes to the list on the air. (What was #1 that year? Los Lobos' "La Bamba." With the high concentration of Hispanics in Clovis, there was no way "Rock Steady" could have been more popular than that.)

In June of 1988, after I had put in my notice that I would be resigning from the station. Dod came up to me and told me I needed to show him how to do the playlist and reporting because he was going to be the Music Director. I told him I would figure out a good time later. I then went to the Program Director. I told him, "You know, I didn't quit my job just so Dod could become Music Director." The Program Director said, "What? No, he's not doing the music. I'm going to be doing that. I'll talk to him." I never did find out how that conversation went, but I guess Dod never did get to do the music. But it wasn't like it mattered, because everybody was just playing what they felt like because Jid no longer had a firm grip on the station.

I came back to visit the station a couple of years after I had moved to Denver. Dod was still there. Actually, he had left the station and come back. He had gotten a job as a Program Director at a station in Alamogordo, NM. The owner had a couple of sons who worked at the station as DJs. The owner told him he could do whatever he wanted to help make the station sound better, including firing his sons. The sons were pretty much worthless, so he fired them. Then the owner fired him, and he had to come back to KZZO. He was really upset about that.

That was the last time I saw him. When I searched for him on-line a few years ago, I found that he had become the General Manager for a Christian music station in Albuquerque. It doesn't look like he has that job anymore and I have no idea where he works now.

But I will leave off with this remark: When it came to women, Dod's attitude was "They're only good for one thing." I guess he had a number of bad experiences in the past and just figured that the best he could do was to get what he wanted out of them until they got tired of him (and I'm certain that happened every single time, just like how the sandwich people got tired of being used by him). Then, he'd just hook up with the next one who came along and repeat the process all over again. This would become an issue for me, but it's one I will detail in later posts.