Douglas Street Mysteries...

So, no more stories of heroism.  Someone actually responded to my last entry and ask about the Douglas Street mysteries. 

It was a contest we ran several times at KEYN and it was pretty fun.  I'm trying to remember if we gave away the Porsche during that contest.  Anyway, the Douglas Street mysteries were a series of whodunits and listeners had to identify how the crime was solved and they won a prize.  It was taught for me because we had to determine while on the air with the listener if they were close enough to be the winner.  I wanted everyone to win.  Part of my OCD I suppose.

We did lots of contests in Wichita.  We gave away trips and cars and cash and all kinds of stuff.  My favorite contest was the Great Moped giveaway with Pizza Hut.  This contest was designed by a guy with an incredible sense of humor and lack of respect for the safety of the disc jockies, Lin Harris. 

The jocks would ride one of these death traps to a designated Pizza Hut and do a remote broadcast inviting listeners to come by and sign up.  I only rode them once and refused after that.  Cars where honking at me, and not in the friendly "Hi Tim" way.  It was more like, "move your fat ass off the road before I make a DJ pancake out of you" honk.

The last giveaway I did at KEYN before being asked to leave was the Rolls Royce giveaway.  I knew it would be my last as the new program director had the afternoon guy host the giveaway.  The listeners won the chance on the air to get a chance to win the Rolls.  They won a night on the town chauffeured in the Rolls, which frequently broke down and once had to be driven in reverse all the way back to the station.  All the qualifiers gathered at the pre-determined location and selected a bottle of champagne and pour it out into a big glass thing on the stage.  The first one to pour pink champagne won the Rolls.  Her name was Miniskirt Sue and when she won she got very excited and reached up to hug someone on the stage revealing her complete lack of underwear.  It really cracked me up!

Jim Long believed that radio should be entertaining,  from the commercials to the contests to the music and jocks.  KEYN was all that.  KEYN was so big and popular that we actually caused the phone company to change all request lines in the city to their own prefix, 436-XXXX.  KEYN was giving away Styx concert tickets and completely blew out the circuit.  They said it takes 22,000 simultaneous attempts to do that.  Radio was so fun back then, especially when your listeners don't wear underwear!

 

He Flies Through the Air....

This will be hard to believe for many of you, but there is yet another death defying act I selflessly performed for my employer.

It was the Friday before Christmas 1991, which happens to be one of those days that a radio station is making alot of money for the Christmas shopping season.  It wasn't too cold of a day considering it was late December on the fruited plain.  It was in the mid thirties and it was cloudy and misty.  It was mid morning and the radio station went off the air.  Usually when this happens you just go turn the transmitter back on.  However, the transmitter is 35 miles away.

Dan Holiday and I jump in the station van and head south to check the transmitter in Winfield.  It of course, is in the middle of a farm field.  So we drive through the field and reach the base of the tower.  Strangely, there are big chunks of ice laying around and cattle carcasses everywhere.  Then we hear it.  It sounded like an ICBM missle coming in during a blitzkrieg.  The whistle right before impact.  BOOOOOOM!  HOLY S**T we exclaiimed to each other as we both realized at the same instant that huge chunks of ice are falling from the top of the 1250 foot tower and falling on us like bombs!  The ground temperature was above freezing but the low hanging clouds full of moisture and the freezing temperatures at 1200 feet up were causing ice to form on the tower.  When the icebergs get too heavy, they fall to the ground like bombs.  It's like the Titanic only at a 90 degree angle.  I jammed the van into reverse to ge t it out of the way of the falling tower debris and Dan and I pondered our next move.

There was a sheet of plywood lying next to us so we grabbed it and held it above our heads and ran to the transmitter building door.  Inside, everything seemed normal.  The transmitter was operating normally and nothing seemed out of place.   BOOOOOM!  Another chunk lands on top of the building.  Nothing we could do but go back and wait for the engineer.

You would think that would the end of the story, but alas, the danger is just begining.  About 5 o'clock that evening I get a call from the engineer who tells me he is at the transmitter site with a pair of binoculars.  He says he can see up the tower and it appears that the coaxial cable is unplugged from the back of the STL antenna.  This is the antenna that receives our signal from the downtown studios and rebroadcasts it.  I ask him how long before he fixes it and he says he's not climbing the tower in his good clothes.  Sooooo, who's gonna climb the tower I asked.

I got back to the tower site about an hour later.  All I had to do was climb the tower and plug it back in.  I started the climb.  No safety gear, and strangely enough, no tools or anything to make a repair in case there is damage.  An hour later I reach the STL antenna and plugged it back in.  Voila!  We're back on the air.  I make the descent in about 10 minutes.  We estimated that I had just climbed about 200 feet.  15 years later I will learn from an engineer that works on that tower now that the STL antenna is at 600 feet up, about halfway up the tower.  Two football fields in the air.  It took me several yeas to get the word "Dumbass" off my forehead. 

Now, the happy ending.  Two weeks later, I was fired.  No bonus this time. 

That is all...Peters out!