I have gotten the main issues of my college experience out of the way, but I still have a lot more ground to cover before I get into my full-fledged adulthood. I'll be getting into more chronologically correct stories for the time being.
I'll start with the first job I got in radio. At Eastern New Mexico University's Broadcast Center, a notice was posted that the local station in Portales, KENM-AM/KNIT-FM, was looking to hire a part-timer. This was the same station I had gone to with Carz. It was automated and primarily a country music format. I called the number and spoke to the owner, who was also the general manager. He asked me to come in and interview. I told him about my experience with the college AM station. He seemed to like how I sounded and hired me on the spot. I would be working the evening shift every night from 6pm to 10pm and making minimum wage.
At the time I worked there, it was one of very few stations in the country that broadcast the same programming on both its AM and FM signals. Many stations at the time were AM/FM combos and usually required separate staffs to operate. After awhile, other stations in larger markets started doing this so that they could cut back on the number of employees they had to pay.
I was trained by the person I was replacing. I came in and found that the job was relatively easy. I didn't have to cue up any records as everything was on tape. Cassette tapes actually. The owner said that the station had the same system as the college FM station. The only difference at the college station was that all the music was on reel-to-reel.
The owner's son also worked at the station and he actually remembered me from that night I brought Carz by. I didn't really recall him there because it was the other guy doing all the talking. (I previously knew the other guy because he trained me at the college AM station.)
Because of the automation, I didn't really have to do anything. I just had to switch the signal to the evening setting, record some special programs for the next day from the satellite feed, turn off the lights, lock the door and leave. I didn't even really get to announce very much. Every once in awhile, I had to read some sponsor cards, but that was it. Sometimes, I brought homework to complete at the station.
At the station, they had a soda machine. I was able to buy a bottle of Coke for a quarter. When I first started working there, I would buy one soda in the middle of my shift. About a week later, I started drinking two bottles a shift. Pretty soon, I started drinking four bottles every shift. One day, I noticed my urine was coming out brown. I decided to stop drinking so much soda.
Also, I found that I would get a little hungry toward the end of my shift and get in the mood for pizza. I tried ordering from my favorite pizza place in town, which was The Pizza Mill and Sub Factory close to the campus. However, they closed at 10pm every night and wouldn't make any more pizza. I had to resort to getting my pizza from Pizza Hut (which was more expensive, but I could actually afford it now). I had pizza at least twice a week.
As I mentioned earlier, it was a country music station. I was never a country music fan, but I could tolerate it. At the time, the song "Jose Cuervo" by Shelly West was a big hit. I enjoyed that song and looked forward to it coming on every night. However, the rest of the music was really questionable, like the Hank Williams, Jr. song, "Gonna Go Huntin' Tonight (But I Won't Need a Gun)." That got on my nerves real quick. I also remember hating "Swingin'" by John Anderson. I thought that was a stupid song. A REALLY stupid song. And the thing was that it was the #1 song on the Billboard Country Chart! I felt like everyone who liked that song was stupid, and if I had been announcing on the air, I probably would have made some statement to that effect.
We also had a problem with programming music sometimes. While we played almost all of the country hits, there was one song we didn't start playing until after it hit #1 on the Country Charts, and it had already entered the Top 10 on the pop charts. That was "We've Got Tonight," by Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton. I think the General Manager didn't like putting Sheena Easton on our station, but when it hit #1, we had no other choice.
While I was working there, I felt like no one was listening to us. It seemed like we had fewer listeners than the college AM station (which really only ever played in the cafeteria). The phone almost never rang. And when it did, it was the owner calling to comment on some mistake I made on the air. HE was listening.
There were a couple of weird things that happened while I was working. Once, this guy was pounding on the front door. He asked to use our phone because he had been stabbed. It appeared to be a rather superficial wound because there wasn't blood gushing out all over the place. He called someone to pick him up and the ride got there after a short while. The cops weren't called. Another unusual thing was that the owner once called me up and chewed me out for leaving the front door unlocked. I told him I was pretty certain I had locked the front door when I left. He said the morning guy found it unlocked when he got in. He just told me to be more careful, but I'm pretty certain I locked that door. But that's one of those things I'll never know for certain.
I was actually making pretty good money, considering that I didn't have to pay for rent or my regular meals at the cafeteria in college. I could actually see myself continuing to work at the station over the summer, go to school then and be able to pay for it out of my own pocket. I would even be able to pay for all my expenses for my sophomore year and maybe even beyond (although this would have affected my ability to appear in Theatre Department productions). My parents were very excited about the prospect because they had also been able to work their way through college.
But there was a sudden change in command. The owner decided he didn't want to be the General Manager any more and hired someone to come in and take over. I was asked to come in and meet him. He seemed pretty optimistic about the prospects at the station. It didn't look like the transition was going to be such a bad thing.
As usual, I was wrong. About a week later, he called me to come see him. He told me that the guy I replaced wanted to come back to work at the station and he was going to have to let me go. I was flabbergasted. (I'll note that right before the new General Manager came in, there was this jerk Theatre student I knew who had managed to muscle his way into a job at the station. He's not worth writing an article on, but I have to mention him here. When the General Manager said he had to let me go because I was the last one hired, it never occurred to me to bring up the fact that the jerk was hired on after me. But the jerk managed to become the General Manager's buddy first, so I doubt that bringing up that information would have done any good.)
About six months later, I heard that the General Manager who laid me off left the station to run KBCQ in Roswell and he took the morning guy with him. He then found out that the morning guy was illiterate. I was shocked by that. I have no idea how he was able to read sponsor cards on the air. I guess he had someone read them to him first and he just memorized on the spot or something like that. That morning guy had to come back to Portales and get his old job back. I, however, had no interest in working there again. I actually saw that morning guy at the station in the summer of 1985 when I needed to go there to get some circus sound effects for our production of "Carnival!" Even though he watched me choose some materials, I never spoke to him. That was the last time I set foot inside the station.
This experience introduced me to the all-too-real world of radio. As radio personality Rollye James once said, "All radio stations are toilets. Some of them just flush differently." I found this to be true at every radio station I ever worked at. They will all be the subjects of future blog posts.
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