CHAPTER 6THE HISTORY OF RADIO RANDY : CORN FIELD BOUND.

 

WIVQ Lasalle-Peru Illinois 

The voice on the phone said, how would you like to be our program director? Uh, you do know that I have never been a PD before, right? I was talking with Ben Granger, the General Manager of WIVQ in Peru Illinois. He said, that is not a problem, we really liked your air-check tape and the commercials you included. Plus, we like your Air Force Service and think you will be right for the job, when can you start?

Right away I said, how much does it pay? 110 dollars a week, Ben said. OK I said I will be there in a few days.

I hung up, told my folks I had my first full time job in radio and that I was moving to Peru Illinois. I loaded everything I owned into my Ford Torino and headed west. It would be the first of many moves in my radio career, but the only one I made by myself. Vicky and I had been dating for several years and had gotten engaged while I was in the Air Force. The plan was for me to go to Illinois, get settled and then get married sometime soon.

WIVQ was a 3 thousand-watt FM radio station in Peru. The station was on the second floor of a building in downtown Peru. The first floor was a drug store and the space the station had had once been a dentist office. I did not care. Ben met me and showed me to my office. My office. I had an office! I shared the space with the station’s sports director Gene Delisio. One of the most unique individuals I ever met and one of the most talented as well. Gene did all our play by play for High School sports and did sports reports throughout the day including a 15-minute local sports wrap up each day at 515. Using abbreviations, he would only use a half page of AP wire paper for his 15-minute sports cast it was unbelievable. Gene was also an incredible play by play announcer for our High School Basketball and Football efforts. He was a one man show. He did his own engineering, did his own stats while calling the game and did both play by play and color commentary. Gene and I shared a great friendship as well as on office almost immediately. He helped me with brainstorming and ideas for the station as I learned the ropes of being a first-time program director

WIVQ was a typical small-town radio station. We played mostly adult contemporary music and had news and sports and public service announcements and some features like a daily swap shop show called “tradio” which aired at noon right after the local news and was hosted by one of the stations office workers.

One of the other notable special shows was our Saturday morning Polka Party with Cousin Ed Nowatarski. Cousin Eddie came in each Saturday morning at 9am to play polkas, ready news for the polish community and take requests. I had to engineer the show for Eddie every other Saturday morning. Our morning announcer Mark Kohring and I switched off so we could at least have every other weekend off.

So, every other Saturday morning I came in to sign on the station at 6am and do three hours of normal programming. Then at 9 it was time for Cousin Eddie. He would show up with a stack of K-tel Polka Albums and a few pages of notebook paper with his copy for the live commercials (which he read in Polish) and a list of the songs he wanted to play. Problem was, the K-tel albums had like 20 cuts per side and the songs were short, which made it tough to count the cuts and set the needle down on the right polka, almost impossible. Mark and I both figured out, that since Eddie never wore headphones and he did not want the monitor turned up with the music was playing, he had no idea which song was playing. So, we would typically just put the needle on the first cut and then just track the whole side in order. Eddie never knew. They all sounded the same. No one ever complained. It was just one small thing that made that 6-hour shift on Saturday morning a little bit more bearable.

I started work at WIVQ in September of 1978, the following January Vicky and I got married on a very cold and snowy day in Rushford NY. We did not really have a honeymoon, I only had a couple of days off, so we got married on Saturday and Sunday morning started driving back to Peru. Once again, the Torino was loaded down, this time with Everything Vicky owned. We settled into a nice little furnished apartment in Oglesbee, not too far from Peru. Vicky soon found a job at a nursing home, so both of use were gainfully employed. She made 90 dollars a week, so added to my whopping $110 per week, we were making bank!! We lived very comfortably on that for the two years we stayed in Peru.

 

As a first time PD I encountered all the pitfalls one can face, but I began to develop methods to manager people, always keeping in mind what Mr. Desing taught, mostly by example, about how to treat people.

In June of that first year we had a lightning strike that destroyed the station antenna and other critical equipment. We were off the air. Luckily, the company kept everyone on salary as we waited out the repairs. Rather than keep the new antenna on the roof of our building on a small free-standing tower, they negotiated a deal with some folks who had a 1000-foot tower just south of town.

Turns out it was going to take two months for all the repairs, and we would be off the air unless we wanted to broadcast from the actual tower site. So, we rented a small construction office trailer and set up at the base of the tower, in the middle of a corn field (of course, it was Illinois).

During some of the downtime I had convinced Ben and the station owner that we needed to change the format of the station. I pitched a sort of Hybrid Rock approach, that would also continue to offer local news and sports and other important elements. Tradio and Cousin Eddie did not make the cut though, and we changed the Name to Q-101. We hit the air “live” from the cornfield until the downtown studio’s were given a make over and we moved back.

Peru was too small to have any kind of ratings information, but the general feedback from the community about the changes were very favorable and I had my first format change under my belt. The first of many.

One of the things I’m most proud of there at IVQ, was a show I produced called “The Best of The Decade” It was a 10 hour review of the 70’s set to air on New Years eve 1979. Gene Delisio and I wrote the script and did the research. It wasn’t a countdown, but more of a review of the important tracks and artists from the 70’s rock scene. We did not have stereo production room, so I had the use the main control room to record each hour. That meant I had to come in after sign off each night at midnight to work on the show. I did all ten hours that way, one hour each night with the show being done “live” to reel to reel tape. Our production director JC, then went to work with a razor blade and did a masterful job of editing the show together.

Vicky and I listened to the show on New Years eve at the apartment and I just could not believe how good it was, at least to my way of thinking. The project taught me a valuable lesson about how to involve the show team in projects.

Nothing like two years of on the job training as a program director and on-air talent, working for a company that let me experiment with their station. Since then I have looked at each radio station as sort of a chemistry set, with my job being to mix the chemicals together to see if we can get an explosion. Uh, explosion is the best sense of the word of course.

I worked with some great folks at WIVQ including Ben Granger, Gene Delisio, Carol Malone, Bob Grove, Mark Kohring, Sue Mengerson and J.C. Hall. There were others, but my feeble memory is failing me.