CHAPTER 1 THE HISTORY OF RADIO RANDY : THE BEATLES ARE IN MY RADIO

 

 

                                                                         How is started for me. 

 

 

Before TV, radio had everything. Dramas, Comedies, Game shows, Suspense, Mystery, Soap operas. We have all seen old photos of families gathered around looking at their radio during a broadcast. Radio fueled my imagination as a young child. I was only about 6 years old when I started listening to WKBW in Buffalo. Each night my mom would let me set the timer on my bedside radio for 15 minutes as I went to bed. Once she left the room, I would reset it to 60 minutes. Even at that age I was fascinated with what was going on behind the scenes at the radio station. I thought the groups were playing live. That they shuffled them in and out of the study to perform on cue. I imagined the Beatles finishing up so the Four Seasons could play next and so on. Hey, I was only 6.

 

I grew up on a small family dairy farm in western NY. My dad always had a radio playing in the barn and it was usually set to WKBW which was playing the top 40 hits. My dad’s allegiance to KB began years before when he was a trucker. He often made trips to NYC and could listen to KB all the way to NY city due to nighttime skip.

 

 We spent a great deal of time in the barn doing chores and so most of my listening took place there. In addition to my nightly sessions after going to bed. This continued all the way thru the 60's, until we sold the farm in 1969. By then I was a pre-teen and once we moved into our new house, I started gathering equipment to create my own "radio studio". I had two turntables, a cassette record, a microphone and headphones and I started recording tapes of my own radio show. Of course, I had to have a cool "air name" so I became Catfish Cooper, host of the Curly Catty Disc Show. My radio station call letters: ASOL, yeah, I stole that from a Cheech and Chong bit. I recorded endless tapes with homemade comedy bits, records and commentary and found a reluctant audience in some of my friends. We often listened to the tapes on camping trips. My friends seemed intrigued and eventually vied for a chance to be a guest on the show occasionally.

 

As I continued my radio adventure, I evolved my station to the FM dial and shortened my name to Cat Cooper. Much cooler and more "FM" friendly don't you think? I used the made up call letters WJLK and became the afternoon drive jock on the station playing top 40 music. I even created a virtual air staff in the other dayparts so I could cross promote them during my show. This is a dead giveaway to those in radio that I was destined to be a PD. It is true I was equally fascinated with being on the air and the behind the scenes stuff. How did the music get picked? Who decided what the DJ's could talk about? How often could they play their "favorite" songs.

 

My tapes became more like a real radio show. I taped commercials off the radio to insert into my radio shows to make it seem like I was really on the radio, and I clipped Public service announcements out of the newspaper to include as well. My radio studio was in an upstairs bedroom, which was really, just one big room in the unfinished second story. It had a slopped roof; you could only stand upright in the very center of the large room. There were no electrical outlets. I powered my studio with an extension cord, that was plugged into an outlet at the bottom of the stars. I had cords running all over the place to connect the record players and the other equipment.

 

I really got into it when recording tapes and the music was up loud (because I was recording the music into a microphone). Often you could hear in the background of a show my mom screaming "RANDY" "TIME FOR DINNER". She finally learned that she could bring things to a stop by unplugging my electric at the bottom of the stairs to get my attention. Quite a few tapes featured the tell-tale sound of the music slowing down and then speeding back up.

 

Despite the lack of studio isolation, I soldered on creating hundreds of shows, usually both sides of a 90-minute cassette tape. My search for realism even inspired me to drive to a nearby city, with a reluctant friend, where I hit the street, pretending to be a Teen Reporter for WKBW in Buffalo. I interviewed people on the street as If I were doing a live remote. Then I took the tapes back to my bedroom studio and added music and turned it into 2 hours show as if I was on WKBW. Yup I had it bad. All that theater of the mind stuff really meant something to me, and I began to think that being in radio was the only thing I wanted to do with my life.