Work Enemy: Ked

I first met Ked in 1985 when I was working my usual weekend midnight shift at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM. He was a friend of one of the other full-timers who was working that Saturday night before I came on. Ked and this other guy, Read, were hanging out with him inside the studio. (We were not allowed to have visitors inside the station outside normal business hours.) They both worked for the station in Texico, where I had applied once.

Ked was about a year older than me. He was rather tall and muscular. As it turned out, he was a bodybuilder. I know he had done some other radio before he was in Texico, but I'm not certain of the location. After I had started my shift, he continued to hang out in the studio. He was sitting in a chair, reading a trade publication. He saw that I was a little uncomfortable. He asked if I had a problem with him being in there. I replied, "A little bit," so he left. I think he got the idea that I didn't like him, but that wasn't the case. I was kind of irritated that the full-timer had allowed people from a competitor in the station late at night. That wrong impression probably started him on his enemy status.

A few months later, he was hired to work part-time by Dr. D. This was the weekend I was finally working the six to midnight shift and thought I was free of the overnights for good. Ked came in an hour early. I had remembered him from that night he was at the station. I felt a little empowered by my status changing from being the low man on the totem pole and talked to him rather straight-forward about my feelings about the station. One of the things I told him was that Dr. D had come in and made a lot of changes, but that owner Jid made him change everything back, so he didn't have as much control as he originally thought he had.

When I came in the next week to talk to Dr. D after he scheduled me back onto the overnight shift, he said he was displeased that I thought he didn't have any real power as Program Director. My first thought was that I couldn't believe that Ked would just rat me out like that. I knew I couldn't really trust Ked very well after that.

But I have a problem: I want everyone to like me. So, even though I didn't like that he had repeated what I said, I still wanted to be friends with him so we could get along as co-workers. (I have long since learned that I don't need to get along with everyone I work with. I just have to figure out how to avoid them more.)

Ked quickly became full-time after Dr. D started doing mornings with JF. This had been planned all along. I found this out after I called the station and he answered the phone. There was no announcement about this to the air staff, and I don't know why it had to be a secret.

There were a couple of things I found out about Ked in addition to him being a snitch. One was that He didn't like being wrong. The other was that if you tried to prove him wrong, he would flat-out lie.

He and Tod became roommates. Tod was the Program Director at the time. When he left to try to go back to school, Ked was named Program Director.

Somehow, Ked had managed to wrangle control from Jid to be allowed to do what he wanted. I don't know how he managed to get Jid to agree with him to do this, but he had a pretty strong sense of how the music should be run. We started sounding better again.

Ked got it in his head that he wanted to remembered in Clovis long after he left, so he tried to do EVERYTHING. He worked morning AND afternoon drive. He HAD to be the voice on almost ALL the commercials, even the promos for our syndicated programs on Sundays. Tod told me that when Dr. D was there, he was beyond doing tags on promos and usually handed that off to other staff. The fact that Ked would bother with those made him seem like a megalomaniac.

Ked even altered a political advertisement. The original voice was Edd, a DJ with KCLV. The last words on the tag identified the candidate's treasurer. Edd put this gravelly emphasis on the word "treasurer" that made him sound like a complete amateur trying to appear that he had a deep voice. Ked replaced Edd's tag with his voice, WHICH WAS SOMETHING WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO WITH POLITICAL ADS! We're required to run them as is. I'm surprised we didn't get in big trouble for that, but I guess no one on the campaign noticed the ads were different. The guy probably won his race, so it didn't matter.

Ked called the air staff in for a meeting one day. He told us that he had been working weekends at the station in Amarillo where Dr. D used to work. They had offered him a full-time position. Only one other person on the air staff was aware he was working there and it wasn't Tod. We were a little taken back. Tod was still continuing his educaiton, so he did not accept the Program Director position back. It went to the other guy.

About a month after he left, Ked came back and saw me when I was working an overnight shift. He apparently still had a key and came in through the back door. I found out later that what he was doing was stealing records from the Mobile Music Machine. I also found that he had stolen several records from the studio (probably before he stopped working at the station). He had taken advantage of my desire to be friends with him. There was an older song that came up in the rotation and I was looking forward to playing it. I couldn't find it. The sleeve was empty. I think he took it.

The last time I saw Ked was a few months later. I had gone to a concert in Lubbock. I went up to Will Call to get my tickets. He was also there. We quickly said hi, but that was it. I knew I didn't want to talk much more to him than that.

What I've found on him since then is pretty interesting. I know that he did radio in Neillsville, WI and Colorado Springs, CO. According to a newspaper article from five years ago, he started working in a program at a prison to teach inmates how to work at a radio station. There's a station there and the prisoners record music programs that get run throughout the day. These were actual college-level courses that could be transferred to a community college in Glenwood Springs.

The only problem was that not one of the inmates in the program had ever landed a radio job once they got out. Once potential employers found out about their background, they wouldn't hire them. This makes sense. Very likely, the only job someone is going to get out of the program will be starting the overnight shift. Who wants to leave a former inmate alone in a building with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of electronic and broadcasting equipment?

But I wonder how those inmates would have felt to find out that they were learning radio techniques from a snitch.