an old radio friend

I just friended a guy on Facebook who was a friend back in the mid 1980’s when I went back to college to finish my degree. It is amazing who I have met on Facebook.

We had a morning radio program called the Morning Zoo with the Brothers John. We played top 40 hits. John, Jr, was 18 and I was 35 so we bracketed our demographic.

He was a handsome fellow, unlike myself. He was also somewhat callow, a love them and leave them kind of guy. So all of the girls looked at him with a jaundiced eye. They would have liked for him to be more – normal? but he wasn’t.

Now he wasn’t bad, mind you. Most guys that age are not in for the long haul in life yet. They want to play the field and have a good time. It would be a weird guy indeed who would be a committed caring kind of guy. 18 year olds are like that.

But I liked him and we had a good time. We were both named John so I was Brother John, Sr and he got to be – lucky him – Brother John, Jr. we had a madcap kind of show in which we did everything we wanted to do within a Christian atmosphere. This was the radio arm of the college so we had to keep ourselves under control.

I will have to admit that it would have been easy to get out of control, such is the problem of live radio, but we did all right.

I was the old head, the old guy. I had done radio before so it was just a fun time for me. The others were doing it for a grade and experience. I had been around radio long enough that it was just easy.

There were a lot of people who hung around the station and watched us do our show. Kind of like groupies. We had several characters who came on and if one came on, if they were not a character, we would usually find a way to make them such.

There was a fellow named Dave Jennen (who also is a Facebook friend) who was a veteran and wanted to be on. He played a burned out Vietnam kind of helicopter pilot who did the traffic report over the little town of Henderson, TN, where we were. Since Henderson had only 2000 people, it wasn’t that hard. But every week, I would stop the record of sound effects and he would crash.

There was Roy Neal Grissom (another FB friend) who came on to try his level best to tell stories. His stories were usually arcane and hard to understand. Roy Neal was a brilliant person with a rather bizarre sense of humor, but I liked him.

There was a girl –her name escapes me, Bobbie Sue? – who came on to read the weather one day. I introduced her as the reigning Miss Tennessee and told her she looked good in her bikini. Of course, she was fully clothed, but as it will always do, she got tremendously embarrassed.

We had others on. One was the communications department head who desperately wanted to come on and tell a joke. So I let him and then ridiculed his joke. Nobody can tell a joke worse than a communications professor.

We started undressing the guy who was the news announcer one day while he was on the air. The rule of radio is that, like the theater, the show must go on. We got his shirt off and his sox and shoes, but we ran out of time. He did well.

We had a good time. Since we were non-profit, we didn’t have to worry about commercials so we did fake Public Service Announcements (PSA’a). we did them on everything. I usually would hear one on the regular radio stations and then Monty Pythonize it. They were good enough that occasionally someone would ask if they were for real.

Brother John, Jr and I mocked a lot of stuff, but we always did it in a way that was fun and not mean.

I always poured three cups of coffee on the air as well as other things. I even had theme music for the coffee. One day, the music on the sound effects record kept going. The record, in addition to sound effects, also had theme music for whatever you wanted them to do.

When the new theme music came on, we were caught by surprise, so I made hopping noises on the console and the weather bunny was born. He came out two times or so each day and gave the weather.

Just a bunch of junk really, but fun junk. And we always had people around. It is hard to do radio sometimes with an audience, especially when you are pretending to be a bunny. But, as I said, it was fun.

We found out that a lot of people around the Jackson, TN, are listened to us. We didn’t register on the ratings sheet because we were on-profit, but we began to hear a lot of my funny PSA spots surfacing on other stations as commercials. We never got credited, of course. Radio can be a rather cut throat and duplicitous business.

For our last show – I was graduating – we invited several people on, one of which was the president of the college, E Claude Gardner. I promised him we wouldn’t make fun and we didn’t. it was a good show.

I liked John a lot and am glad to find out that he has gone on to great and wonderful things. He was and is a very talented individual who had a lot of potential. I am grateful that he is living up to it.

May God bless him and his family.