Dangerous Radio Part 2...

I started in radio in October of 1976 and by February of 1977 I had been stabbed twice saving the radio station and awarded a fat $15 bonus, and by March, I was still in radio.  What was I thinking? 

Fast forward to February 1982 or 3 I think.  I'm sure someone reading this will remember what year it was.  I was working mornings for KEYN in Wichita Kansas and had finally reached number one as had the station.  I was awakened in the middle of the night, about 2 am by the engineer/evening guy Jay Walker who told me it was snowing to beat hell and we were off the air.  You see, I had just aquired a new four wheel drive Jeep CJ-7 and it apparently was the only four wheel drive on staff.

I was going to get up in a couple of hours anyway, so I got dressed in my warmest clothing, went and picked Jay up and took him to the transmitter site, outside of town in Maize (but we call it corn).  This was the snowstorm of the decade and we were receiving several inches every hour.  Jay got us back on the air and I went in and did the show.  No one could get into work so I promoted myself to taxi guy and shuttled employees back and forth to the station for three days.

It was on day one of operation snow drift that I was again summoned to go to the transmitter site, this time in the daylight to retrieve Jay.  I asked my newsguy Mark "Elliot" Woolsey to accompany me.  Mark, by the way, is now a meteorologist at The Weather Channel.  He agreed to go and off into the whiteness we went.

The transmitter was in a building shared with other radio stations and a TV station.  It was in the middle of a farm field.  On a blinding blizzard day, the instructions were to turn off the road onto the path and drive directly towards the front doors about 100 yards in the field.  Mark and I turned onto the path and aligned ourselves with the front door of the building, or so we thought.  About 50 yards in, the Jeep slipped into the ditch that ran along side the path.  I was stuck.

Mark and I looked the situation over and I asked Mark to jump out his side and see how deep we were in.  He opened the door, swung his legs out and jumped out....and disappeared.  The next thing I see is Mark's snow covered hands and head rising from somewhere below the Jeep.  His comment was that he believed that the snow filled ditch was pretty deep.  Now maybe you can understand why he's such an astute meteorologist.

A farmer came by a few minutes later and pulled us out with his John Deere.  Mark and I laughed about it and I said, "Someday Mark, there will be a thing called the internet that a fella named Al Gore will invent and I will write about this and we will all look back on it and blog." 

Now you know why I deliver medicine to nursing homes instead of working in radio.  It might not have been all that dangerous, but we could have at least caught a cold.

That is all...Peters out!!!